Dr. Dan Gustafson

I went to graduate school in 1988, in biochemistry. It just happened that I was working on the biochemistry of drugs used to treat cancer. It was really that serendipitous. The kind of chemistry I was interested in focused on the development of chemotherapeutic agents. I studied them from a purely biochemistry side, with no thought whatsoever of them going into people or animals. And when I started, nobody in my family had been diagnosed, treated, or died of cancer. That’s changed dramatically. With four aunts, an uncle, and my mother having been diagnosed since then, the family history became very personal very quickly.

There’s so much push to keep saying that we’ve made huge advances, while some of the step-wise advances we’ve made are overlooked. But actually, those small steps are what lead to better control and treatment of disease.  When you look at what we’ve done in the last thirty years, you’ll see we’ve learned to use standard drugs better. People were miserable and dying of therapy in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  I always tell people that it took us thirty years not to kill people with chemotherapy, and now we don’t, and it’s still very effective against cancer. We’ve learned to combine the tools we have in ways that patients have better outcomes and are less sick.

I’m a numbers guy. My expertise is in computational medicine, doing calculations to best test whether a drug will be efficacious against cancers. I dissect data numerically and make it relevant to humans and pets, so we can treat our patients better, and provide better information that may springboard into better human treatment. I can do biochemistry, some electro-biology and I’m a pretty good analytical chemist. Those things are important aspects to getting scientific experiments done, and getting data that’s useful for clinical practice and clinical application.

Everybody likes to hit a home run and nobody likes to hit singles. But those small steps actually excite me a lot. As we add information, we put better tools in the toolboxes of our clinicians. And those singles that nobody wants to hit, add up. As we take small steps, we generate lots of information. People have the idea that we’re developing new treatments all the time, and yes, we are constantly adding tools. But then it takes time to learn how to use the new tools, and how to use them right. We now cure 80% of kids with cancer, and that’s amazing to me. It makes me proud of what people do in the field.

At the Animal Cancer Center, all of us share the same fairly small footprint, which allows me, as a basic sciences researcher, to catch things. I’m always learning stuff that I didn’t really know I needed to know. I don’t have to go seek out my colleagues, we run into each other at the drinking fountain. I overhear things, and learn things through serendipity. It makes me think about things that I need to think about, to make me a better researcher. I get to be in an academic setting and feed off the enthusiasm of young vibrant people excited about learning. There are no people more passionate and friendly, trying to make lives better, both for animals and for people. That’s really cool.

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