Dear Colleagues,

We’re sad to share that Stuart H. Q. Quan, MD, who was an Attending Surgeon in the Colorectal Service at MSK for more than 50 years and Professor of Clinical Surgery at Cornell Medical College, passed away on July 4, which was also his 98th birthday.

It’s fitting that Dr. Quan entered and left the world on Independence Day as his was a uniquely American success story: The son of Chinese immigrants, he excelled in school, eventually earning degrees from Stanford University and Harvard Medical School. He then completed a Pathology Internship at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a Surgical Internship at the Children’s Hospital Boston, now known as Boston Children’s Hospital, before coming to MSK for his Surgical Oncology training. After arriving at MSK, he never left...

One universal truth about cancer is that the later it’s detected, the harder it is to treat. Pancreatic cancer is one form of the disease that is almost always found when it’s advanced, making it an exceptional challenge. Because it’s rarely caught early in its development, this also means that researchers know less about what drives its formation and spread than they do with many other kinds of tumors.

Understanding how a cancer develops and grows, however, has important implications. It allows researchers to create better targeted therapies and develop better detection and screening methods. Now a study led by Memorial Sloan Kettering physician-scientist Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue is shedding new light on a phenomenon that sometimes leads to pancreatic cancer. The results were published September 3, 2018, in Nature.

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