Simeone Named Director of UCSD Moores Cancer Center: “It’s an Opportunity of a Lifetime”

https://nyulangone.org/doctors/1215038138/diane-m-simeone

Diane M. Simeone, MD, has been appointed director of the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Health Moores Cancer Center. Her new position will go into effect April 1, 2024.¹

In an interview with CancerNetwork®, Simeone described her excitement for this new path in her career. As an expert in pancreatic surgery as well as surgical oncology, her ambitions within this position include expanding the center’s clinical trial goals and increasing early detection of pancreatic cancer.

“It was clear that everybody is aligned with this mission and understands the importance of how we care for patients with cancer and do research at the cancer center,” Simeone said during the interview. “That was compelling to me. I'm very thrilled to be part of that leadership team, and we want to be very ambitious in what we can accomplish on behalf of patients.”

Prior to her start at UCSD, Simeone has been the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Surgery, director of the Pancreatic Cancer Center, and the associate director of translational research at Perlmutter Cancer Center at New York University Langone Health. Previous positions she has held include the chair of the scientific and medical advisory board of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network and a member of the scientific advisory board for the Let’s Win Pancreatic Cancer online community.

CancerNetwork: Congratulations on your new role! What went through your mind when you were notified that you got this new position?

Simeone: When I was asked to look at the position, I was interested because I knew of the incredible reputation of UCSD as an epicenter of scientific inquiry. I also have many colleagues that I’ve interacted with there over the years. It’s an amazing environment. I’ve had the honor of speaking and giving academic talks at UCSD several times in the past, so I thought [this position] was a great opportunity.

I went through an interview process, which was quite rigorous, and had a chance to meet with about 100 people in different areas throughout UCSD, and it really solidified my thinking that this position was an extremely unique opportunity to leverage the incredible scientific strength and the whole campus there.

UCSD is really thriving. There are a lot of clinical experts and a big focus on cancer there. [UCSD also has] a very strong biotech sector surrounding the community. The potential to put all those pieces together to try to drive the continuum from basic science and discovery to the development of new drugs, diagnostics, and modes of prevention for patients with cancer was unparalleled. Of course, when I heard that I got the position, I could not have been more thrilled. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.

What are your short- and long-term goals in this new role?

There are some immediate action items as I come in to be the director of the Moores Cancer Center. First and foremost, there's a [Cancer Center Support Grant] that will need to be submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in a year from May. That grant requires a lot of effort. It tackles not only demonstrating to the NIH how the Cancer Center helps support research but also how we serve our community and how do we best do that. It makes sure that we provide state-of-the-art cancer care for all the patients in our community. [It also includes] the education of our trainees, a description of the current state of all these practices and pieces, and what our next 5-year goals are. These all need to be put together into a comprehensive grant. That's one thing we'll be putting a lot of attention on in the first year.

The second thing is going to be focusing on the growth of clinical trials—how we change care for patients and how we show the efficacy of new therapies is through testing [treatments] in clinical trials. There's a clear identification of the opportunity to expand the clinical trial effort at UCSD. There's already a lot of investment that's happened in that space over the years and in the last year. It's the last phase of driving that science home to help patients. Those are going to be 2 more immediate areas of focus.

Based on the strength of the science and the faculty, I expect that UCSD will continue to grow and have visibility on the national and international scene as an institution that is driving the new ways we're going to treat, diagnose, and prevent cancer in the next decade and beyond. My job is to try to help provide cohesion and collaboration, see where we may need to make some investments, help bring people together, leverage the talent that's there, and hopefully elevate the Moores Cancer Center as a whole.

Do you have any new ideas or offerings you would love to bring to the center?

We have to start off with the points I made about tackling the core grant and clinical trials. Obviously, there are a lot of new scientific fronts that are going to be very important in the vaccine space and in tumor immunology, for example, how we apply AI to drug design and the analysis of large sets of data. There are other high-level schools at UCSD—for example, the School of Engineering. Can we develop partnerships in which we can extend applications of engineering technologies into the cancer space? How do we make lives for patients with cancer better? Can we figure out methods of innovation to allow more cancer care at home? How do we make it easier for patients to get on clinical trials? How do we make sure that all our patients are having state-of-the-art testing and screening for the early diagnosis of cancer? These are some of the things we'll be focusing on.

Certainly, we want to get input from everybody. We want to leverage all the brain trust at UCSD and of our colleagues in the San Diego community, which include La Jolla Institute of Immunology and San Diego State University, which we are tightly aligned with, along with other institutes in the area. It's a unique community. It’s a highly collaborative community, and to tackle recalcitrant problems like cancer, collaboration is key.

Do you have any planned research to conduct during your time at the center?

I have been working on pancreatic cancer trying to understand its biologic underpinnings, the development of novel therapeutics, and new technologies for early detection for most of my career. I do plan to bring my research program to UCSD. There already is a strong pancreatic cancer research community at UCSD. In fact, there's a UC Pancreatic Cancer (UCPCC) Consortium working together.²

Some of the projects we’re working on have national and international impact. One project, which is called Precision Promise, is an adaptive clinical trial for novel therapeutics for pancreatic cancer is a study we developed that involves 30 centers across the United States. That's focused on developing clinical trials with promising new therapeutics for metastatic pancreatic cancer.

Then, I also lead the Pancreatic Cancer Early Detection (PRECEDE) Consortium, which is an international consortium focused on the early detection of pancreas cancer.³ We have about 60 centers worldwide, so it will be exciting for UCSD to be an intellectual hub for these activities, and UCSD can certainly leverage the scientists and clinicians working in that domain already and hopefully create projects for young clinicians and researchers to leverage those platforms.

You have held a number of other positions during your career, including chair of the scientific and medical advisory board of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, among others. How will you use your experience to shape your time here?

During the course of one's career, the goal is to try to get smarter as you go along. How do you try to leverage the position you have to bring people together so they can be more effective at doing what they're doing? Through the course of my career, I've been a division chief; I've been a center director. I've led national and international collaborations of some scale. For me, one of the key things is to respect the contribution that different people can make; none of us know everything.

Having a diversity of input when trying to solve a problem, and having a mathematician, engineer, or a medical oncologist look at it [is important]. Sometimes people have breakthrough ideas of how to tackle a problem that my colleagues or I might not have otherwise had. I like the idea of having an environment in which ideas can be free-flowing and where there's room for people to think and be creative. We have difficult challenges ahead in trying to move the next most effective therapies forward and figuring out how to take care of the all the patients that are depending on us to make advances.

I have found that the most effective way to do that is to really value the contributions of people and to incentivize people working together. Things always come out with a better solution and more advancements by collaboration.

Specific to pancreatic cancer, how have you seen surgical approaches for this kind of cancer evolve in your career?

I've been a pancreatic surgeon for many decades, so what I see as the future of pancreatic surgery is partnered with early detection. What's clear to me is that the way we improve survival for pancreatic cancer is to detect pancreatic cancer early. As a surgeon, I know if I remove a pancreas cancer that's under 2 cm, that patient’s chance of cure is infinitely higher than if I'm removing a big bulky tumor with lots of positive lymph nodes where the risk of recurrence is high.

That's why we have the large effort on the UCPCC consortium to try to push early detection, figure out who should be getting testing and screening, and try to be operating on people with very small tumors where the chance of cure can be quite high. In fact, if we can pick up stage IA pancreatic cancers and resect them, then the cure rate is over 80%. In contrast, the current survival rate for pancreas cancer is 13%. As always, multidisciplinary approaches to tackling a disease are going to be much more effective than focusing on one discipline. We as surgeons partnering with epidemiologists, diagnosticians, genetics, experts, is how we move the field forward.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

One of the reasons I took this job was that I was so impressed with the visionary leadership at UCSD starting at the top with the chancellor and then with the vice chancellor and CEO. There seems to be a clear commonality of thinking on their vision of being at the forefront of advancing science and, most importantly, how we apply to take care of patients. Patients are always the driving force. That's always the center of what we need to be thinking about.

References

1. World-renowned surgeon named new director of Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health. News release. University of California San Diego. January 8, 2024. Accessed January 25, 2024. http://tinyurl.com/4986f4cb
2. UC Pancreatic Cancer Consortium. University of California Health. Accessed January 25, 2024. http://tinyurl.com/3szdvyxv
3. PanCAN’s Precision Promise adaptive clinical trial platform –. Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. Published April 27, 2016. Accessed January 25, 2024. http://tinyurl.com/fpax5hhd