- [Narrator] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(ambient music) - If you think the pace of life is moving faster and faster, you're right.

Take medical science.

In 1980, the National Institute of Health estimated that medical knowledge doubled every seven years.

By 2010, with technological advances, the pace quickened to three and a half years.

Now, the NIH estimates that medical knowledge doubles every 10 weeks.

Medical breakthroughs are giving hope to people whose illnesses were considered incurable just a few years ago.

You're about to meet the CEO of one of the nation's leading comprehensive cancer centers located in Tampa Bay, that's moving the needle in research and patient care.

Next, on the Suncoast Business Forum.

- [Narrator] Suncoast Business Forum brought to you by the financial services firm of Raymond James, offering personalized wealth management advice and banking and capital markets expertise, all with a commitment to putting clients' financial wellbeing first.

More information is available at raymondjames.com.

(whimsical music) (upbeat music) - Cancer is a second leading cause of death in the US, claiming nearly 600,000 lives each year.

Believe it or not, there's hope in that number, because it's nearly 30% lower than it was 20 years ago.

Medical researchers are working hard to reduce that number another 15% by 2030.

At the forefront of cancer research and patient care in the Tampa Bay area is Moffitt Cancer Center.

With more than 8,000 employees, it's building upon decades of expertise in the fight against cancer.

Dr. Patrick Hwu is president and CEO of Moffitt Cancer Center.

Dr. Hwu, welcome to the Suncoast Business Forum.

- Thanks for having me, Geoff.

- It's great to have you.

Now, a 30% reduction in cancer deaths in the United States in 20 years is remarkable.

Is it sustainable?

- I think it's more than sustainable.

And that is because the science is so good right now.

We are learning so much science every day.

And we are understanding how the immune system is attacking cancer, really all the mechanisms and molecules involved in that.

And we're also understanding how to block the circuitry of a cancer cell with pills.

So with those two emerging areas of science, the death rate is now starting to decrease, at 600,000, it's leveling off at 600,000 deaths in this country every year.

And I think it's gonna continue to go down as we apply this great science to people.

- You mentioned two breakthroughs.

What are some of the other major breakthroughs that have occurred in recent years?

- I think they're mostly based on stimulating the body's immune system.

You can either stimulate the body's immune system internally, where you can take immune cells called T cells out of the body, putting them, and then growing the T cells to large numbers, and then reinfusing them to kill the cancer.

You can put genes into these T cells.

You can take genes out of the T cells.

Really, the technology is incredible right now.

What can be done?

- You came to Moffitt Cancer Center in November, 2020, and you said it was one of the best kept secrets among cancer hospitals and cancer care in the United States.

Why did you feel that way?

- Well, I knew about Moffitt Cancer Center because I was a science advisor.

I was on their science board for eight years prior.

So for eight years, I was coming to Tampa, and I knew this was an amazing place.

And a lot of cancer aficionados out there really know about Moffitt Cancer Center, but is not a known name brand in the lay public, like MB Anderson and Sloan Kettering.

And so, that's why, I think it's the best kept secret, it's one that has incredible science, Tampa Bay should be very proud of Moffitt Cancer Center or what was it built.

And only 35 years to one of the top cancer centers in the nation.

- Moffitt is the only comprehensive cancer center in the state of Florida.

Now, there are other cancer hospitals, but what is the significance of that?

- Well, the comprehensive cancer center, a status is designated by the National Cancer Institute, the nation's cancer institute.

And it really means that Moffitt Cancer Center has all of the research as well as the clinical care to work on both the prevention and treatment of cancer, and to move those treatments to better treatments tomorrow through clinical trials.

And oftentimes, the best treatment for cancer patient is a clinical trial.

You can get tomorrow's medicines today through a clinical trial.

The science is so good that a lot of the trial medicines go on to become FDA approved, but years later, because the approval process is long.

We gotta shrink that, but the approval process process is long.

And so that's often the best care for a patient is a clinical trial agent.

And the patients that I have known now for over a decade, the ones that have survived are the ones that I put on cutting edge clinical trials 10 years ago.

- There are a number of prominent cancer treatment centers, cancer research centers around the United States.

Moffitt is one of them.

Is there competition between cancer treatment centers and research centers, or is there collaboration?

How does that work?

- The only competitor is the cancer.

There are 600,000 lives that will be lost this year.

And so, we work together a lot to collaborate.

We just got back from a conference in Chicago with 30,000 people descending on the city of Chicago just to share information and knowledge, while we're very excited about the progress.

None of us can't be happy about the 600,000 lives that will be lost this year in this country alone, 10 million globally.

There's urgency, we have to work together to try to cut that death rate.

And with science being so outstanding, we can cut this death rate.

My own melanoma clinic used to turn over every six to 12 months, because I had patients with melanoma start on the skin, went throughout the body, and I couldn't do anything about it.

The drugs we had weren't that good.

Over the last 10 years, the treatments are so good that over half of them are living long lives, essentially cured, and I've become really good friends with them and their families.

And it's been just a wonderful turnaround, but it shows us that it can be done, that we can even get to these hard-to-treat cancers.

I'm confident we'll be able to do it in years ahead.

- With all the other major cancer centers that are out in the United States, how does Moffitt differ from some of the other prominent centers in the US?

- Well, we are the only one in Florida.

And so, that is important, because Florida has 45,000 cancer deaths every year.

And so, it is a huge need in the state of Florida.

And it's the second most in the whole country of cancer deaths.

So we really need to cover Florida and make sure that people can get outstanding care today and even better care tomorrow through our research.

The other ways we differ is that we're really, every cancer center has their specialties, and ours, if you wanna look at one place where we really have a reputation and lead the field, and it's immunotherapy, it's stimulating the body's immune system against cancer.

It's my own personal field that I've studied for over 30 years.

And specifically, it's T-cell therapy.

What is T-cell therapy?

Well, we have these incredible cells in our body, some of which fight viruses like COVID, they're called T cells, but when these T cells can touch a cancer cell, does what I call the kiss of death.

It secretes enzymes and kills that cancer cell.

Then the T cell can go to the next cancer cell, kill that cancer cell.

At Moffitt Cancer Center, we've learned to take these T cells out of the body, put genes in to help them recognize the cancer, take genes out through CRISPR technology, that we're doing in the lab, to try to make them even better soldiers, and then put them back in.

And this is what we do.

One of the technology is called CAR T therapy, where we take chimeric antigen receptors, put those into the T cells to help them recognize the cancer.

We treated over 600 patients at Moffitt Cancer Center with CAR T therapy.

Almost no other center in the world has done that many patients.

That means not only are we on the cutting edge of the research, but we also can deal with the toxicities.

Everyone on the team is so tuned in to all the multiple toxicities that can happen.

So we can really make it a much safer treatment as well.

So that's one of the areas, and it gives me a lot of pleasure, because we worked on that technology at the NIH in the early 90s.

And so now, to see it over 30 years later (giggling) is very fulfilling for me.

- Tell us about your formative years.

Tell us about your family, your parents, and growing up.

- Well, my parents are from China, my mother's from the Northern part of China.

My father's from the Southern part of China.

They came over to the United States so that they could study, and they met in Cincinnati, Ohio, in college.

They got married, and then they moved to West Virginia, where I was born.

There was a nice engineering job that my dad had.

He was a chemical engineer, and he is an immigrant.

They didn't really understand that I was going into an environment where I was the only Asian kid in the whole state, not quite the only Asian kid in the whole state, (chuckling) but I felt like that.

But it was an incredible place to grow up, very safe, very warm people, but it was interesting being standing out as one of the only Asians.

I think it helped me understand how outsiders feel, even though they're very kind, I always felt like an outsider.

And, and that helps me, I think, in other situations, understanding how outsiders might feel.

- You developed an interest in cancer research at a very, very young age, what led you to that?

- Well, people in my life were getting cancer.

I didn't even know what it was.

Then my third grade teacher got cancer.

My middle school locker mate got cancer, and they had to go somewhere else, because there wasn't a cancer treatment center in West Virginia to take care of them.

So they had to go far away to get their cancer treated.

So that was my first inkling that there was an issue here with cancer.

And then to see people succumb to cancer, told me there really needed to be better treatments.

And so, I really felt like I wanted to dedicate myself to something really meaningful.

And that would be something that could help the planet.

- You developed a love of music at a very early age.

Tell us about how you became interested in music and the role music has played in your life.

- I really love music.

I always kid though, as an Asian kid, you have a choice, you either take piano lessons or violin lessons.

(chuckling) And so, I took piano lessons.

It was a ton of fun, and I always wanted to be in a band.

And so, when I was an intern at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, I bought myself a keyboard and formed my first band.

It was a lot of fun.

They have the Peabody School of Music in Baltimore, and I decided I didn't want to live with doctors.

So I went to the Peabody School of Music, went to their bulletin board, and looked for roommates, people who were wanting roommates.

And so, I called a bunch of them.

And that was our first band, was a bunch of roommates from the Peabody School of Music, these were awesome musicians too.

(chuckling) So it was a lot of fun.

So everywhere I've been, we've had bands, where I was at Johns Hopkins, then I went to the National Cancer Institute, we had a band called "Protocol Violation," one of these rebellious names that rock band have to have.

When I was at MD Anderson, I had a band.

And now at Moffitt Cancer Center, we have "The ReMissions," which is a ton of fun.

♪ Let it be let it be ♪ (band performing) ♪ Speaking words of wisdom ♪ ♪ Let it be ♪ - After you graduated high school, you went into a six-year accelerated college program combining undergraduate in medical school at the College of Medicine in Pennsylvania.

Tell us about that program.

- Well, I knew I wanted to be a cancer researcher, so I just felt like I wanted to put my head down and shoot through as fast as I could.

So it was a six-year program, where I did two years at Lehigh University, and four years at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

And that way, I could shave off a couple of years and get right to my goal of doing cancer research.

- After college, you were at Johns Hopkins studying internal medicine, I assume that was your residency at Johns Hopkins.

And you went on to a fellowship in oncology at the National Cancer Institute, tell us about that time.

- That was wonderful years.

Baltimore, Maryland is a great city, it's fun.

As I said, we had a band called "As Is," and we played down in Fell's Point there.

It was a lot of fun, I met my wife there.

She was a nurse when I was an intern at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

And it was a incredible place where we took care of patients from all over the city of Baltimore, didn't matter their station in life, they just came in and we gave them world-class care.

So it was busy, but I learned a lot, a tremendous amount.

After that, I went down the road to Washington DC to the National Cancer Institute, because there's someone there, Steven Rosenberg, who is my mentor there, he's still doing incredible work at the National Cancer Institute, who was onto a new concept.

And that was stimulating the body's immune system against cancer.

At that time, no one believed that that concept would work.

In fact, when I started working with them, we'd go present our work at conferences.

They would always give us the darkest, dankest little poster room.

I could never find where I was supposed to present our poster, because it was always in the basement, (chuckling) we were almost laughed at by the traditional cancer researchers of the day, but we were really onto something.

There's a band of us immunologists.

And we knew that that would be something important one day, and we hoped that.

And now, it's really one of the biggest areas of cancer research and cancer care is stimulating the body's immune system against cancer.

'Cause I spent 14 years at the National Cancer, I'm not wanting to really move around, I thought I would be there for my whole life.

Really, we called ourselves lifers, people who were there with the government.

We didn't have to worry about writing grants every day.

We just did our experiments, tried to really push the forefronts of stimulating the body's immune system against cancer, did the early work with the chimeric antigen receptor cells called CAR T cells there, that now is very much important part of oncology, there 14 years.

And then, one day I get a call out of the blue, my boss had actually given my name to Waun Ki Hong at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

He was looking for someone to run the melanoma department.

So I get a call out of the blue, asking me to come and look at this job in Houston, Texas, and I'd never been to Houston.

When I went there though, it was one of the largest cancer centers in the world, and it was a really exciting opportunity, so.

- Well, MD Anderson is considered one of the top cancer research and patient care hospitals in America, probably in the world.

- Yeah, it's a wonderful place.

And I learned a lot running.

I learned a lot about leadership too, because it was my first leadership role, where I was running a melanoma department.

It was a small department, but we grew it, grew it from 20 people to 200 people, and just really focused on melanoma, which, of course, is a disease that starts in the skin, goes throughout the body.

I learned a lot about leadership, about administration, about finance, the business of healthcare in that job.

- Let's talk about that further.

When you got to MD Anderson, you were a scientist and you were a physician, but you've now had important management responsibilities, started small, got very big.

Talk about your evolution, going from a physician scientist to a management leader.

- Yeah, I learned a lot, I had to learn a lot, and I learned a lot under fire too, really.

And MD Anderson was great because they started me off with, they had a leadership academy that all the young leaders went through.

And it was extremely helpful to understand how to talk about difficult situations and to manage medicine as well as the business side of medicine.

I feel like leadership really starts internally.

And that's what I've learned through the years, that really, the inside of a leader is much more important than the outside of a leader.

(chuckling) And if people really feel comfortable with themselves, confident with themselves, understand who they are, that's what makes a great leader.

And so, as I've mentored other leaders, I always start internally, with making sure they feel good about themselves, understand themselves the most.

I always say, you can only lead one person in the end, one person, and that's yourself.

And you really have to understand that person.

- [Mr. Geoff] At the Moffitt Cancer Center, you oversee a nearly $2 billion budget.

You have 8,000 employees.

Yet you also have laboratory, and you see patients, how do you manage to do all this?

- The most important component though, is to have an incredible team.

And I have an incredible team at Moffitt Cancer Center, both administratively, in our CEO office, in my lab, I have an incredible team.

In the clinic, I have an amazing team.

It's just having wonderful team members that you support and trust is critical to being able to do multiple things and to help the world in the way you can, the best way you can.

I don't feel like I have a job, I don't feel like I work.

I love what I'm doing.

I love the people at Moffitt Cancer Center.

I love the incredible people in the Tampa Bay community.

I love interacting with everybody.

I love going to Tallahassee.

I love what I do, and that's critical.

And part of that is understanding why you're doing it.

If you're here to help the world, to help people, it's not about getting awards, it's not about being called number one, it's not about any of that.

If you're here to save lives, if the meaning behind what you're doing is impactful, and what we're trying to do, as our mission statement says, is to prevent and cure cancer.

When that's part of your life, you're gonna love that and be passionate about that.

And that's what I see, also, in every team member at Moffitt Cancer Center.

- Moffitt Cancer Center's budget, as we said, is about $2 billion or close to $2 billion.

How much of that is spent on research?

How much of that goes towards patient care?

- Well, to say, I always tell people we're not-for-profit, so we're not trying to make money.

We're trying to accomplish our mission to prevent and cure cancer.

And so, the whole mission blends as one.

It's not a patient care operation and a research operation.

When we have a patient coming in, we're trying to give that patient the best care we can today, and oftentimes, that's a research trial, and we're trying to make the care better, even better tomorrow.

And so I think the missions come together in my mind, and I think the sweet spot is when we can take the patient care, the research, and the finances of our institution, and hit that intersection, that's what I call the sweet spot.

And we just continue to grow that sweet spot.

That's when the music really happens.

- Moffitt Cancer Center played a critical role in forming M2GEN.

Now, that's not a household word, M2GEN, but it's an important research collaborative.

Tell us about that.

- Well, we're a not-for-profit, but we do start for-profit entities, because in some ways, that's the best way to take studies from the lab into the clinic, and to really shorten that time, because there's still 600,000 deaths, we need to shorten that time.

And using biotechnology and entrepreneurship, that's really a way to shorten that time.

M2GEN was our first attempt at that.

It was when we realized, Bill Dalton realized, he was the CEO at the time, that medicine should be personalized, that we really needed to understand the genes that caused cancer.

And if you understood that, you could develop drugs.

And so that was what M2GEN was, and is still going on.

The other for-profits that we've started are CRO Research Organization to try to help everybody do trials in immunotherapy, it's called OncoBay.

So that's really helping a lot of entities, both companies and academic centers around the country now, do clinical trials and clinical research, and that's OncoBay.

We're gonna start others as well and work really closely and entrepreneurially with the community.

And we hope to build a biotech community right here in Tampa Bay, we've already started.

- Over the next 10 years, you anticipate 65% increase in the number of cancer patients that you'll be treating.

How was Moffitt growing to meet that need?

- It's critical that we get to as many people as possible, and we just can't do it on our current campus.

And so, we are developing a network of clinics around the area, we're going into St. Pete, we're going into South Hillsborough, to Pasco County, with clinics so that we can expand our footprint and treat more patients.

And the other thing that that does is it allows patients who are not feeling their best, they're undergoing cancer care, they might be nauseated, they might be tired.

We're trying to take the medicines closer to them, so they don't have to drive every day across the bridge and back to get their radiation.

Sometimes, they have to come every day, five days a week, for six weeks.

So we wanted to get this closer to their home.

So that's the goal, so we're building.

And that is, it's fun, it's exciting, it's also challenging.

- Moffitt also has a new hospital near in completion, am I right?

- Yes, it's on McKinley.

It's really an exciting new hospital.

We're gonna have 19 surgical suites there with robotic surgery.

We have MRI scanners that go between or rooms on our rail, so we can do intraoperative scanning, and really do state-of-the-art work.

We have beautiful bridge coming in from our outpatient building on McKinley to the new hospital.

It's gonna be open July 31st, 2023, and totally on schedule right now, but a lot of work.

And we're gonna help a lot of people though.

- Moffitt also has some pretty ambitious plans for Pasco County in the future.

- Yes, we have 750 acres north off the Veterans Expressway, where we really want to develop a cutting edge life sciences park.

We're very excited about this.

We're starting with a science building and a clinical outpatient building as our first campfire, as we say.

But it's gonna have companies, we're already signing up companies to come in.

It's gonna be a lot of blend of academia and biotechnology, and hopefully, we can really become a real leader in biotechnology, so when someone says the Bay area for biotechnology, they think of Tampa Bay.

- Dr. Hwu, I'd like to thank you so much for being our guest today.

If you'd like to see this interview again or any of the CEO profiles in our Suncoast Business Forum archive, you can find them on the web at wedu.org/sbf.

Thanks for joining us for the Suncoast Business Forum.

♪ Let it be let it be ♪ (band performing) ♪ Let it be let it be ♪ ♪ Speaking words of wisdom let it be ♪ ♪ Let it be let it be ♪ ♪ Let it be let it be ♪ ♪ Speaking words of wisdom let it be ♪ (ambient music)