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Read more about Fred Hutch achievements and accolades.
Nancy E. Davidson, MD, executive vice president and chief academic officer at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, is the recipient of the David Karnofsky Science of Oncology Award from the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO). Davidson, a medical oncologist and holder of the Raisbeck Endowed Chair for Collaborative Research, was honored during the 2026 ASCO annual meeting last Saturday in Chicago.
In her introduction to Davidson’s 2026 David Karnofsky Science of Oncology Award Lecture, Lynn Schuchter, MD, FASCO, an ASCO past president and chair of the Joint Special Awards Selection Committee, described Davidson’s decades of work unraveling the mysteries of hormone-positive breast cancer in premenopausal women.
“This award recognizes the pioneers of our field, those whose life work has fundamentally shifted how we understand and treat cancer,” Schuchter said. “[Davidson] has shaped the modern treatment strategies for breast cancer patients around the world.”
Davidson's leadership in designing and leading clinical trials has led to major strides in the treatment of estrogen receptor (ER) positive breast cancer in premenopausal women. Among her discoveries was establishing the effectiveness of ovarian function suppression and tamoxifen, a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM) that works by blocking estrogen from binding to its receptors on cancer cells, in addition to chemotherapy for this population.
Davidson shared these and other critical research findings on hormone-positive breast cancer treatment in her lecture, titled “Lessons from the Puzzle of Endocrine Therapy for Early-Stage Hormone-Responsive Breast Cancer in Premenopausal Women,” which she delivered from the main stage at ASCO.
“Estrogen or progesterone receptor positive breast cancer accounts for about two-thirds of premenopausal breast cancer, and it remains a substantial challenge,” Davidson told the audience of cancer researchers, clinicians, patient advocates and other oncology professionals.
She described how, as a young faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, she initially questioned the then-accepted belief that hormone therapy (also referred to as endocrine therapy) for hormone-positive breast cancer was not useful.
Funded in part by a 1986 ASCO Young Investigator Award, Davidson modeled estrogen deprivation in a model organism, demonstrating that estrogen withdrawal led to a rapid decline in cancer cell growth and an increase in cell death among existing cancer cells in a hormone-positive breast cancer tumor. The work led to clinical trials demonstrating that treatments targeting estrogen receptor activity in pre-menopausal women with hormone positive breast cancer could indeed have a significant positive effect.
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In particular, the innovation of adding tamoxifen and ovarian function suppression to treatment plans for premenopausal women represented a major change from the “all-chemotherapy, all the time” previous standard of care, Davidson said.
“And I think we established an unequivocal role for mechanism-based targeted endocrine therapies in these young women.”
In her lecture, Davidson described how decades of basic science research have led to groundbreaking changes in how cancer is treated.
“Better understanding of tumor biology led to the advent of novel therapeutics like targeted therapies, antibody drug conjugates, and immunotherapy that could potentially be combined with endocrine therapy,” she said. “Understanding endocrine resistance has allowed us to adopt agents like CDK4/6 inhibitors across the early and metastatic breast cancer continuum. Translational research enabled us to improve patient selection [for specific therapies], and the emergence of new technologies has amplified our ability to interrogate tumors and their byproducts in more sophisticated ways over time to track tumor evolution.”
Davidson highlighted ongoing clinical trials, as well as the emerging use of AI in cancer research, as examples of current innovations pushing the boundaries of cancer care and improving lives, one new discovery at a time.
“These advances reflect our unwavering focus on how we can tailor therapy for the individual patient with a unique tumor, over time to maximize benefit and to minimize toxicity," she said.
