Spotlight on Nancy Davidson
Bridging Cancer Research and Care
Nancy Davidson, Executive Vice President, Clinical Affairs, Senior Vice President, Clinical Research Division, Raisbeck Endowed Chair for Collaborative Research
Dr. Nancy E. Davidson is the executive vice president and executive director for clinical affairs and director of the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutch. She holds the Raisbeck Endowed Chair for Collaborative Research. She also heads the Division of Medical Oncology at the University of Washington School of Medicine and served as president. In these roles in the Fred Hutch/University of Washington Cancer Consortium, Davidson serves as a bridge builder across Consortium members' cancer treatment, clinical, translational, basic sciences and public health research programs.
The oncologist and researcher has a reputation as a top opinion leader in the field of breast cancer biology and treatment and has authored editorials, commentaries and reviews to provide perspective for key research papers as well as critical areas in field. Her research has teased out the role of hormones in breast cancer growth and she has had a major impact on the development of new standards of care that exploit the Achilles’ heels of breast cancer cells.
Davidson’s team was the first to describe how the activity of one of the estrogen receptor genes is regulated by epigenetic factors that affect how the DNA code is read and eventually translated into proteins. She also has contributed foundational research to our understanding of how estrogen deprivation and other therapies trigger breast cancer cells to kill themselves through apoptosis, or programmed cell death.
Her lab studies paved the way for new clinical trials of drugs that exploit these pathways to kill breast cancer. She has also led several critical clinical trials that have advanced the care of breast cancer patients, for example, establishing a combination chemotherapy and hormone therapy regimen for premenopausal women with the disease.
As a clinician, Davidson provides care to men and women with breast cancer. For Davidson, having served as both a researcher and a clinician is a powerful way to ensure that her research is solving real patient concerns, and to bring science to bear to improve the care of her patients.
Before coming to the Cancer Consortium in 2016, Davidson was the director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, a position she held since 2009. Prior to joining the Pitt faculty, she served as the Breast Cancer Research Professor of Oncology and founding director of the Breast Cancer Program at Johns Hopkins. She is a member of the scientific advisory boards for many foundations and cancer centers. A member of the National Academy of Medicine, she is a past president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and of the American Association for Cancer Research.
Her many awards, honors and appointments include: receiving the seventh Rosalind E. Franklin Award for Women in Science from the National Cancer Institute (2008), election to the National Academy of Medicine (2011) and Association of American Physicians (2010) and being listed among Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers (2014-2015).
— Last updated April 21, 2022
RELATED RESOURCES
