Nationally respected cancer researcher Dr. Anthony Tolcher has established a start-up in San Antonio which will attempt to accelerate the already robust efforts to discover treatments and cures for cancer, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
Dr. Tolcher, who was a principal at San Antonio's START Center for Cancer Care, and before that was associated with the Cancer Therapy and Research Center, says Next Oncology will work in conjunction with Texas Oncology to work to get needed treatments to cancer patients in San Antonio and around the world.
"We are really trying to see if we can accelerate research by bringing these studies to doctors who are in the community," Dr. Tolcher said. "That way we can really shift the whole momentum, we have made so much in the way of headway in the past few years, and I think we can really build upon that."
Next Oncology hopes to be headquartered in the Medical Center, with operations in Dallas and Austin, and eventually around the state and around the world.
"San Antonio will be the headquarters for Next," he said. "Even after we expand to Dallas and Austin and other parts of the world, this will be the headquarters."
At the START Center, Dr. Tolcher pioneered offices globally, including in Shanghai and Madrid, to work on development of cancer treatments.
He says this is a very promising period for cancer research, as results are being seen in the long effort to fight back against what has been called the 'emperor of all maladies.'
"I've been in this for about 25 years, and we have seen diseases like kidney cancer that went from no treatment to many treatments, and now we don't even quote to people what their prognosis is when they have kidney cancer, because we have so many other agents," he said. "We are now curing people with melanoma, who have advanced disease with immunotherapy. And if you look at lung cancer, we have chemotherapy, we have immuniotherapy, we have targeted therapy, so we can really make a difference in people's lives. And so, it is just a matter of time and hard work, before many of the other cancers become either very treatable or curable, and that is going to happen in my lifetime."
IMAGE COURTESY: DR. ANTHONY TOLCHER