Learning from successes, failures topic of Nov. 30 Scientia

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF REPORTS

The Nov. 30 Scientia lecture will continue the fall series’ examination of “failure” with “Failing to Learn from Our Successes and Failures: Overcoming Hurdles to Delivering on Personalized Cancer Therapy” by Gordon B. Mills, chairman of the Department of Molecular Therapeutics and professor of medicine at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

	GORDON B. MILLS

The talk will be at 4 p.m. in Duncan Hall’s McMurtry Auditorium and is free and open to the public.

A number of early spectacular successes in implementing targeted therapy for cancer led to a remarkable optimism that personalized approaches would rapidly change the face of cancer therapy, Mills said in his lecture abstract. However, most new approaches to personalized medicine have turned out to be effective in only a subpopulation of patients and demonstrate only transient activity. In looking ahead to a rapidly emerging toolbox of targeted therapeutics and advances in understanding the role of the host genome in predicting efficacy and toxicity of therapies, success will depend on the way failure is approached. “Unfortunately, academia and funding agencies have become incredibly risk- and failure-averse,” he wrote. “But if we are going to change the outcome for cancer patients, we need to convert our present incremental approach to a culture where we accept failure as a possible consequence of implementing high-risk, high-yield approaches.”

Scientia’s colloquium series this year is dedicated to an examination of failure and its impact not just on what humans know but how they work, think and live. Scientia is an institute of Rice University faculty founded in 1981 by the mathematician and historian of science Salomon Bochner. The lecture series provides an opportunity for scholarly discussion across disciplinary boundaries; its members and fellows come from a wide range of academic disciplines. For more on Scientia, visit http://scientia.rice.edu.