Episode 33. Masonic Cancer Center (ft. Dr. Douglas Yee)

Fascinating discussion with Dr. Yee and the impact of Masonic philanthropy at the University of Minnesota

Transcript

0:37

Hi again, welcome back my name is Reid Endersby, I'm the Director of Membership Engagement for the Grand Lodge of Minnesota, joined by my esteemed colleague Esteemed, how about that? It doesn't happen very often. John Schweitz, I am the CEO of Minnesota Masonic Charities. We are very pleased today to be joined by Dr. Douglas Yee, who is the Director of the Masonic Cancer Center. Dr. Yee has several professional associations. He's been the Director of the Cancer Center since 2007. He's also a John H. Kersey Chair in Cancer Research and also part of the Komen for the Cure Scientific Advisory Council in 2010. Dr. Yee named a top doctor by Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine a few years back. I could go on and on with the list, the resume, the accolades. Welcome, Dr. Yee. Oh, thanks so much for that very kind introduction. before we get started, you are the John Kersey chair. Yes. I had the pleasure of knowing John Kersey. Can you just tell us a little bit about John Cause he, uh, He played a real significant role in the relationship with Minnesota Masonic Charities in its very early days. Yes, I was very lucky to be recruited by Dr. Kersey. Oh boy. Sometime last century. And, uh, In the 1900s. Dr. Kersey was a product of Minnesota. You may know he went to Washburn High School and he received training in Minnesota, except for a very brief period of time where he went to Dartmouth. He is a true Minnesotan. Oh, good for him. Dartmouth. Excellent. He was the model. is a model of a physician scientist. So he took care of patients. He is a pediatrician, took care of hematologic malignancies. And just like all of us, he wondered, why can't we do better than we're doing? So he was very successful in his own personal career of performing the first allogeneic bone marrow transplant for a child with lymphoma. And as far as I know, that child is now an adult and is doing well. Uh, and at the same time, he recognized the University of Minnesota. had substantial strengths that could be used to really tackle the problem of cancer. So I give all full credit to Dr. Kersey for organizing the Cancer Center and successfully applying for our first comprehensive status in 1998. And to add to that, my personal experience with, uh, with Dr. Kersey was he was just such a warm gentleman, just always such a nice person, and always great to deal with. And that is one of the things that we've been very fortunate. Uh, with Minnesota Masonic Charities and our relationship to the Cancer Center, the Masonic Cancer Center, is just the people that we've had the pleasure of getting to work with, you know, beyond the fact that you're all brilliant scientists and physicians and all that stuff. You're just good, good people. And uh, I'm grateful for having known you for about 20 years now. Tell us about how you became a, part of the University of Minnesota. I decided to, uh, establish my career in taking care of breast cancer patients. Uh, and a lot of that was because during my training, I worked in a laboratory that was focused on breast cancer and I took care of patients at the same time and I thought that, well, you know, the things we're doing in the laboratory are not very closely related to the things we're doing for patients. So I said, there must be a better way to treat people. Uh, and that's really was the foundation of my career. I came to help establish the, uh, breast cancer program. And when Dr. Kersey made the decision to step down, uh, I was not in the first round. I actually did not put my name in the B Director, but it was in the second round. Uh, and I said, this is a great center, and I work with great people. And the idea of, we will do better. If we bring science to the bedside is really what the Masonic Cancer Center is all about and certainly is what my career has been about. So take us back even further. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? So I grew up in Detroit. Uh, my parents actually came from China to go to college. Okay. Um, and when they came, it was pre World War II. And that was actually a very interesting time when they didn't think they were going to stay at the time. There was still a Chinese exclusion laws for me coming citizens. Really? So they were thought they were coming to come and they were going to go back. Then the world war two happened. Uh, they got, I don't want to say caught here, uh, but they ended up staying and there was a time when they could apply for naturalization as it became us citizens. And they were in Detroit largely because Detroit in the fifties and sixties was a real boom town. So there are lots of jobs there. My mother was a physician, my father was an engineer. Oh wow. So I grew up in Detroit, went to the University of Michigan for undergraduate, uh, which I probably shouldn't say to the Gopher fans. No, that's fine. You know, it's Big Ten. We're happy that you're part of the Big Ten. And then, you know, a lot of one's career is intern. I went to medical school at Chicago, internal medicine in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Oh really? And then my, uh, fellowship training at the NCI in DC. Incidentally, all three of those schools that you just mentioned were schools that my daughter was interested in and she ended up, she's at Wisconsin of all places. Come on, going to Madison, I guess. And you know what, the tuition's a lot better there than it is at those other places. Yeah, good point, good point. So how old were you when you? felt an interest to pull into medicine or was this something with the influence of your parents or when did you discover that? That's a very good question. So my mother was a physician. She was a radiologist and radiology is a very, well, it's a diagnostic part of medicine. So I got to see a little bit what she did. Um, I think though, when I really came to think about medical, So I was more seriously in college. So the idea that I like science, I was pretty good at science, I also like people, I like to hear people's stories so one of the best things to bring those two interests together is within medicine because I think the idea that um, you need to use science to be able to come up with the best approach to any patient problem. At the same time you have to meet the patient where they are, You have to understand what's valuable to them. And that to me is one of the greatest things about being an oncologist. I know a lot of people think, well, cancer medicine is tough because not everything goes the way you want it to. But at the same time, you end up with very deep relationships. You really have a very good understanding of what patients need or want or important to them in their lives. And that's very rewarding. And we're very privileged to be able to do that. So when you, I'm going to fast forward somewhat to the present or a little more recent when you wanted to bring science to the bedside. How was that received at the time? Was that, did you have colleagues? Was your industry saying one of the, Whoa, you can't do it that way or you shouldn't do it that way. How did that translate? Yeah, that's a very good question and an interesting problem because we understand that some discoveries, uh, uh, are hard to translate. So some of the very fundamental early discoveries on cancer causation are hard to translate. They're just, if you identify a protein, you identify its function, how can you develop an inhibitor of that? On the other hand, some are much easier to translate. And to me, that's been one of the bigger successes of at least breast cancer therapy. We understood very early. that some genes are amplified, and the one gene in particular, you know, we all have two copies of a gene, some tumors have 20 copies of a gene. Everybody said, well, you know, they must be doing that for a reason. There must be some reason they want to have 20 copies of the HER2 gene. And that kicked off the discovery that, that this is a target. So, getting back around your question, that observation was made in basic science laboratories and at universities. The translation of that came really from companies that said, okay, let's, let's, um, think about developing a therapy to block this particular protein. And I would say that in this country, the partnership between academic centers and industry is really what fuels new discoveries and new therapy breakthroughs. Looking at the hierarchy of all the different people that play a role in the cancer process, you know, you've got people, I would assume, and again, I, I was a biology major for about six weeks and that just didn't work out very well. We'll talk about that some other time. but you know, you've got people that are specialists in cancer detection and specialists in cancer prevention and cancer treatment and cancer survivorship. Um, On that spectrum, where do you see yourself, what rings your bell the most? Yeah, so that's a really great question, too. We're full of great questions today, Reed. Wow. And I think my thinking has evolved quite a bit, and some of it is being cancer science director and seeing all the great things going on. So I start out, early in my career was about improving cancer therapies. And improving cancer therapies, I'm positive, well I know, has led to some of the statistical analysis that. Um, and there was at least a relatively recent paper in breast cancer that looked at what all the causes of decreased breast cancer mortality was. And the number one cause was reducing cancer deaths becomes a better therapies. But my evolution. It's going to make you feel good. Yeah, no, but my evolution has been, we haven't done a lot to cancer incidents. People are still getting the disease and our therapies and surgeries, everything is better But, I'd rather not, I've said this lots of times, I'd rather not have a job, I'd rather see that no one has cancer so they don't need an oncologist. So the idea that we can prevent cancer, or we can intercept cancer, or we can understand the causes of cancer to try to make it such that no one needs to see an oncologist. Would be the ideal situation and the university's been great at that. You know, we spent a lot of time and this is obvious now to everybody around tobacco control and the cause that the idea that if you inhale carcinogens into your Airstream the bad things will happen. Yeah, that's become very apparent. And so now the big group of our investigators are really focusing on that. Well, one of the environmental exposures are there, you know, is radon a problem or is PFAS a problem as glyphosate a problem? Are there other things that we or exposed to on a daily basis that we should be dealing with. And I think to me, that is an exciting part of where cancer ought to go is try to come up with causes and then try to come up with individual screening. So we talk about different cancer therapies in your time, doing the work that you do. Most of us are familiar with the term chemotherapy, but there's immunotherapy. Tell us about the evolution. of those and, where we've been and where we're going. So I think there are very exciting aspects on a kind of chemotherapy. So let me start there before I get to immunotherapy. So what is chemotherapy? So chemo, chemotherapy in the broadest sense is taking a substance drug designed to block a particular biology of a cancer cell. Okay. So for the first part of, well, you know, Going way, way back when, when was chemotherapy discovered? Uh, it was actually discovered during World War I with mustard gas. Mustard gas would knock out people's white counts. Really? Yeah, so it was discovered that this compound, nitrogen mustard, actually blocked DNA replication. So, getting cells to divide and make new DNA has always been a key requirement of cancer. So that's where most of our therapies were. Huh. So chemotherapy was either blocked. Uh, directed at blocking DNA synthesis or cell replication. So, I think an exciting advance that has come in the past maybe 10 or 15 years is the idea that you can chemically link chemotherapy drugs to antibodies. So, I mentioned the HER2 protein. It was discovered in breast cancer cells. There are antibodies directed against HER2. A variety of very smart medicinal chemists, uh, link those antibodies to chemotherapy. We now call them antibody drug conjugates. So the idea that this is a magic bullet, the antibody sticks to the tumor cell, the chemotherapy is released in the environment of the tumor cell, it doesn't affect other parts of the body is a big advance. And I think we'll see more and more drugs approved in that setting. The work being done here at the University of Minnesota, Masonic Cancer Center. Can you tell us a bit about the innovations or the discoveries? How did you share this with other institutions? Are you working with, I'm asking this from a complete layman's perspective. Are you collaborating with Clearly, clearly a layman's perspective. Yeah, very much so. With a poli sci major and yeah, not a, anyway. Are you collaborating with Mayo or with other institutions? Other places around the country, around the world for, for someone that drives by the Masonic Cancer Center in Minneapolis, I don't know that there's enough of an awareness from the just rank and file person that lives here of just, of the amazing things happening right here locally that are impacting the world. Sure. So I'll start out within the broad scheme. If you're going to pursue science, a very big part of science is reporting it. So sometimes people have the idea that, well, we sit in our ivory tower, we make these discoveries, and the discovery has no impact unless we, uh, report it. Uh, and reporting can come in as a paper or as a presentation at a national meeting, uh, and that is what we do. We have been, as Masonic Cancer Center, been very productive in publishing and reporting our results. Uh, at the same time, when you report something interesting, you automatically Uh, attract collaborators. When you ask the question about the Mayo Clinic, we collaborate pretty closely with the Mayo Clinic. We just submitted, we, uh, my colleague Dr. Anton Arrakis and Dr. Wong just submitted a prostate cancer specialized program of research excellence, or SPOR, in conjunction with the Mayo Clinic. Uh, the SPOR mechanism is designed that every project, and I believe there are four projects within this grant. will result in a new clinical trial to test a new therapy. Um, and that was a collaboration with our colleagues at Mayo. And I think, fingers crossed, it just went in. It's gonna be reviewed, but hopefully that will be funded in the future. Uh, so I do think collaboration is extraordinarily important. And, you know, one of the things I'll, I'll just give you my personal example of we, we, my laboratory has studied a particular protein, a growth factor receptor, for a long time. And when companies decided that Maybe what I wrote and as well as others was a good idea. They started to make drugs for it. And then you get to have collaborations with our colleagues throughout the world, with companies that are making the drug. We're still working on a clinical trial testing a drug that has basis of attacking the protein that we study. And so I think that that's how things get known. I think When advances are made, companies are smart. They look at what people are publishing. They're saying, well, how do we exploit this? And I mean, exploit this in a good way, uh, for patients. And, uh, when you look at the blockbuster drugs, and when everybody's reporting anything in any disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, uh, Pulmonary disease, heart disease, uh, almost all of those come from a basis in academic laboratories, university laboratories. Very few drugs are discovered completely by biopharma companies. Can I go back to, uh, you were talking about chemotherapy. There's this immunotherapy. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is and how that works? So we understand that we as humans are attacked daily, hourly, every second. by things that could kill us. So we have, and we have developed a very elaborate immune system to be able to try to make sure that doesn't happen. Um, and so the idea that, you know, if you look, look back at the leading cause of death a hundred years ago, it was infectious diseases. So we've gotten better with antibiotics, but it helps out our immune system. Our immune system can handle many of the things we get a lot of the viral diseases that we get, including COVID. need to be handled by our immune system. So our colleagues in the University of Minnesota has been a very strong immunology group. There's a center for immunology that has been studying for decades the fundamental mechanisms of how the immune system works. So once you understand that, you can kind of repurpose the immune system. To say well, why can't we get the immune system to think about cancer as an infectious agent or a particle or protein that shouldn't be there. We know we can do that if you think about the opposite spectrum of rheumatologic diseases like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus, that's the immune system attacking normal cells. So why don't we then go ahead and get the immune system to attack cancer cells. So a variety of strategies have been identified. The many common ones that you will see. Even advertised on TV or things we call the immune checkpoint inhibitors. They break down a barrier to, uh, the immune system not recognizing a particular protein. Um, I, my analogy for the immune system, it's kind of a nerdy analogy, but Bring it on. If you think about Star Wars Episode IV, the first Star Wars. Yep, that's our favorite, yep. The scene where Uh Obi wan, the two droids and Luke are going to town and they come across the stormtroopers. Absolutely. Okay. These aren't the droids you're looking for. Yes, that's okay. So let's pretend. Yeah. That, that scene. Yup. Uh, let's pretend that that speedster is the cancer cell. Okay. And uh, uh, R2D2 and C3PO are two antigens that the stormtroopers, and the stormtroopers in my analogy of the immune system, are looking for. So Obi Wan does a Jedi mind trick and says, these are not the droids you're looking for. So cancer cells and the surrounding environment has the ability to tell the immune system Don't look for these things and those are what we call the immune checkpoints. So going back to my Analogy What the immune checkpoint inhibitors is sort of negate the Jedi mind trick I forget which movie says, you know, your, somebody's character says your Jedi mind tricks won't work on me, but at any rate, that's the idea. The immune checkpoint inhibitors allow the immune system to recognize the two antigens, the two droids, as something they're looking for. Can I just say That had Star Wars analogies been used in my first biology class, I might beat Dr. Schweitz right now. That, I understand. That's fantastic. So, at any rate, that coupled with the idea that you have to expose the antigen, so chemotherapy comes into play. So many of the immune therapies are in combination with chemotherapy. At our cancer meetings three weeks ago, beginning of June, two weeks ago, we presented one of the first presentations of them using, using one of the antibody drug conjugates. with an immune checkpoint inhibitor and breast cancer and it was very successful. So, we'll see more of this. So, something that was recently published in one of our Pillars magazines was the work that's being done, I think by Dr. Miller in HIV. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came to be? So, the immune checkpoint inhibitors, uh, Require your own cells to do the work, but we have known in our transplant colleagues, including Dr. Miller, have known for many, many years that cells from another person. actually do a really good job because the cells from another person, Dr. Miller works on natural killer cells, uh, which is a form of what we call innate immunity, allows you to identify and kill things you've never seen before, um, can be manipulated to kill and attack cancer cells. The biggest challenge is, uh, for the natural killer cells as well. Do you identify isolating from the patient? Do you isolate him from a donor? Uh, Dr. Miller has been working on A process where you can use what we call off the shelf natural killer cells. These killer cells are made in a laboratory. They have certain characteristics. They come in a bottle, and you can infuse them. And the other project that we're working on, that Dr. Miller and the others are working on, are can you put little molecules in that are glue? So you stick it to the tumor cell, the natural killer cells, this is a signal that I should be activated by and kill this thing I'm stuck to. Uh, and we call them tri specific killer engager cells or trikes. Uh, so that's a very exciting form of therapy too. Other cells can be genetically modified. We've heard a lot of the T cell products that can be modified. They come from a, the T cell products come from yourself. taken to a laboratory, genetically modified it, put back in. Little clunky, but I think there are ways to come to this kind of off the shelf immunotherapy. And that started as a cancer project and you've seen it translate into HIV treatment? Yes, right. So the same idea is you want to eliminate the cells that are still harboring HIV. So you can actually then develop natural killer cells that can try to do that too. You know, it's funny, I have a real interest in the history, for whatever reason, of HIV. Like, going back to the early 80s and, the physicians that were involved with that. Dr. Fauci himself was, uh, was one of the main guys in that. To think that some of these things are coming from cancer research. to me it just tells you how important cancer research has really proven itself to be. Yeah, I don't know, it's funny you should bring up the HIV analogy because I was a fellow at the National Cancer Institute uh, in the mid 80s. Oh really? Okay. HIV was an epidemic. Uh, and many of the drug trials we were doing in the National Cancer Institute. So I took care of lots of patients. So was Dr. Gallo there at the time you were there? Dr. Gallo was there. Really? Yeah, he was, you know, in the midst of discovering the causative agent, uh, we were Stealing things from France and all that stuff? Yeah, that's a, that's a complicated story. Uh, but anyway, I mean, I, I always tell my colleagues and I'm really, uh, envious of of, of the process, the progress, uh, our HIV colleagues have made. So, in the eighties, you know, having HIV was way worse than having cancer. Oh gosh, yes. I mean it was a death sentence. And I think understanding the biology of the virus, identifying the virus and understanding the biology, it's not perfect yet. You know, we haven't completely vaccinated. We haven't completely eliminated the virus from the population. But certainly, you know, magic Johnson type stories. Yes, absolutely. So, it's been clear that you can control the disease for a long period of time. You We're speaking with Dr. Douglas Yee today, who is the director of the Masonic Cancer Center. You had mentioned earlier Dr. Arrakis. He spoke at one of our annual communications a couple of years ago. He specializes in prostate health and research. Fascinating. And earlier this year at our Masonic Cancer Center dinner, I know Dr. Toler spoke, and to hear some of the amazing breakthroughs happening via research and collaboration is amazing. It's amazing, it's inspiring, I struggle to find words to accurately describe that. It's especially meaningful for Minnesota Freemasons and our brothers across the world for that matter to know that One of the things we strive to do in our organization is to be providing relief, to be providing resources to those in need. And to be a part of something of what you're describing is Oh, it's great. I don't have the words for it. No, I always say, one of the, the byproducts of, of helping University of Minnesota at the Masonic Cancer Center do the work that you do is we get to attach our brand to yours and yours is a really good brand. And we're very proud of that. Along those lines, the pledges that we make depend on the gifts that we get from, from members of our fraternity. Can you explain to our listeners, um, I've heard this talk about the multiplier effect. When we made the 65 million dollar pledge, that actually translated into significantly more than a 65 million dollar gift because of the grants. Can you explain how that all works? Yeah, I do wanna, before I do that, I do wanna express my gratitude for the charities supporting the Masonic Cancer Center for the entire time that I've been the director. I mean, I think we We would not be as in the position we are now without that gift. And a lot of that is due to the accelerator effect. So, when we look at the charity's gift, we want to program that in the way that, um, you do get a return on investment, if you will. So the idea that we fund a couple things, one of them is through Dr. Anton Arrakis and his idea that we need to translate some, things faster, and we can put some money there that will then end up with things like the Mayo, uh, Mayo Minnesota Prostate Cancer Support. If that's funded, that's a substantial return on investment, and fingers crossed it will be funded. Uh, we solicit for pilot projects, we support individuals. I think maybe one of the most direct things I can tell you about is when you, we had the accelerated gift a couple of years ago. Uh, we were asked what we could do that could be transformational, uh, and what could we do that would then also seed important discoveries. So one of the things we did was create a large statewide registry, uh, and we, the idea was we're going to use this new cohort. To identify multiple generations of Minnesotans. This is the 10, 000 Families Project? Yes, sorry, the 10, 000 Families Project that was, uh, we would collect biospecimens, we'd collect family histories, we'd stay in contact over the years. The ideal world would be, have three generations, uh, all collected. And they would, could use that to follow what were cancer causes and what would happen. Um, very shortly after we started that, uh, the National Cancer Institute came out with an announcement that said, Hey, we would like to study environmental exposure. So we're going to give you a two part grant. The first part grant is tell us what you're going to do and plan for it. The second part is if you're successful in the first part, we will fund you at a much higher level to do the actual work. So when our colleagues, uh, put this together. Uh, Dr. Poynter, Dr. Nelson, uh, Dr. Peterson, they said, we already have this. We're already doing this. And that, absolutely, we would not have been successful. I read the comments that we get back from any grant, said, you know, this is already up and running. We should fund it. So, fine. Two years, they funded that. And then we came back at the end of two years and said, look at all the progress we've made and we'll give you money for the next four years, a substantially increased value. I'm blocking on the numbers, multiple millions of dollars. That are funding this. And I honestly, this is the absolute truth. That would not have been successfully funded without the charities. So, all of you listening, you are making a meaningful difference in the University of Minnesota's ability to help us. A lot of our members are contributors, but we have listeners who are not Masons or maybe haven't contributed before. Where is that going to go? How is that going to have an impact in helping you? May I answer that from a Masonic Charities perspective? Sometimes people ask us why should we give the gift to you as opposed to just giving it directly to the University of Minnesota? And that's a great question. And our response to that is, we have had the benefit several times a year basis, having a connection with Dr. Yi and some of the, the people that he works with and it gives us the opportunity to make certain that Masonic values and, the way that we think as Masons is part of the process. The process that you guys go through, so I think that the leverage that comes with making that gift to Masonic Charities, and we have always said to the University of Minnesota, our gift is basically unrestricted, we try not to do too much capital, the fact that, You have proven time and time again that the decisions that you've made have made a meaningful impact. What I don't want to do is confuse the prospective donor to start writing checks directly to the U because we could use their money to pay our pledge. So just making that clear. Yeah, yeah, I know. I appreciate that, uh, discussion. And I do want to comment, John, just to come back on how important is the unrestricted part of your gift is. Um, I have been fortunate, we have been fortunate with your trusting us, uh, and putting your support to what we think is going to be most beneficial and lead to the highest impact. So I'll give you, and the thing about the University of Minnesota and your gift to the Minnesota Cancer Center, not a lot of people think about this, but I certainly do because we're lucky in that we live in a small state. And the University of Minnesota has everybody here. And what I mean by everybody here is one, we don't have like, well, obviously there's not the medical school within the state, the Mayo Clinic, but they're not a university based medical school. Uh, all of our important collaborators are here. We've got a veterinary school here. We've got a College of Science and Engineering. And I'm going to use that example, the College of Science and Engineering, as something the Masonic Cancer Center can do for you. Uh, that really moves things forward. So I think maybe five, six, seven years ago, our colleagues in engineering, biomedical engineering came and said, you know, we don't really have a very good understanding of the mechanism, the physics that cancer cells use to move through their environment. So the idea that, you know, glioblastoma is a horrible, horrible disease. Um, it tends not to spread outside the brain. But why and what causes it to move through the brain the way it does? So he said, you know, we're going to use engineering principles to try to understand that. Um, we seeded that project. Uh, they ended up getting a larger grant called Physical Sciences Oncology Center, which they spun off into multiple grants in collaboration with the team. Dave's I call them. Dave Wood, Dave Largespot, uh, uh, David Odey, uh, and really have, um, put us on the map of understanding how physics and engineering can help solve the problem of cancer. And that again, because we had some ability to have some unrestricted fundings was made that really possible. They came back to us relatively recently and said, you know, I'd like, we within mathematics would really like to develop some more computational models to try to figure out how drugs work because we in mathematics have been studying complex multidimensional problems for a long time. And some of the principles that we study might be able to address that. That's why you guys, me, uh, can't pick the right chemotherapy for any given patient. So we help support that effort too, and again, completely because we had some unrestricted funding. When I look at philanthropy and the philanthropy that we're involved in, I think what you described is a perfect example of a conversation that I often have with people is it requires smart people to work with other smart people to come up with these solutions. And for those of us that. didn't get the high ACT score. This is an opportunity for us to contribute to that whole ecosystem. It's sort of like investing. You know, a lot of people invest in companies and ideas that are going to make them a lot of money. I always look at philanthropy as investing in ideas that are, in this case, going to save lives. In this case, this is an investment. That's not going to serve your bottom line personally, but it's going to serve your soul. It's going to serve everything that really should be what's most important about the way that we live, especially as Masons. it's an investment in goodness. It's an investment in care. It's an investment in the relief that we talk about. An investment in brotherly love. If I haven't made my point. I'll move on. One last thing that I have, and then Reid if you have a final question, I just want to acknowledge the fact that we have had just the great privilege of having a number of people that work at the Masonic Cancer Center, uh, specifically Sandy Majerus, who has helped a number of our Masons and members of Eastern Star navigate Their introduction to the need for cancer care. You know, we always hear about the fact that when you hear the word cancer, it really kind of changes your life at that moment, and it's a very scary time. And I just got to tell you that, that the Sandy Majeris's of the world, and the people that she connects our people with, It's extraordinary the response that we get. every single person that we, uh, turn over to Sandy has nothing but wonderful things to say about her as well as the people that she's connected with. So I'm just very grateful for that relationship. And, people will say. Why is it that, that you can get an appointment sooner than I can get an appointment most recently I can give you 65 million reasons and not just to be crass about this, but truthfully, our philanthropy has the university's attention and I'm hoping that the commitment that we make to the Masonic Cancer Center continues to be one that, uh, that is mutually beneficial. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think, um, again, behalf of everybody who's ever worked at Masonic Cancer Center, we are extraordinarily grateful for your generosity over the years. Like I said, we would not be where we are without your help. And, uh, it is teamwork. You know, I think the idea that, especially with patients and patient advocates, they're an important part of the team. I think many more of our initiatives are really formed by what they do. patients want or patients need. You bet. Yeah. Uh, and I think that that's been a change a little bit in our direction, not in our direction, but in our thinking is we need to hear from people. We, again, we are here to serve the state of Minnesota, so we need to hear from Minnesotans about what's important to them and what we should be focusing on. And that's an important part of what we do. My initial connection with, uh, with masonry, other than the fact that my grandpa was a Mason, was I was hired by the Masonic Cancer Center Fund. to help raise money for this Partners for Life campaign. And as this is Minnesota Masonic Histories and Mysteries, there are a couple of people from that Masonic Cancer Center, fund board the likes of Bruce and George Ann Johnson and Roger McNeer, but three legends, I would say, Chuck Dietz, Don Severson, and Roger Letting, who are all in their mid 90s. In fact, today I'm having lunch with them. with Roger Letting to celebrate his 95th birthday. They often speak about B. J. Kennedy. And there are stories of the, the role that B. J. Kennedy in helping put the Masonic Cancer Center on the map. I was very fortunate to work with B. J. Oh, you were? Yes, I was. Okay, tell us about B. J. So, B. J. Kennedy the father of medical oncology. And what that means is, prior to B. J.'s involvement, the treatment of patients with cancer was not specified as its own discipline. There were surgeons who took care of them, radiation oncologists, but B. J. recognized very early on the medical care was important. So he helped initiate the whole concept that we should be treating people medically too. Our society, one of the highest, uh, honors is to have a named lectureship and professorship after you. So there's a BJ Kennedy lectureship in geriatric oncology. He turned his attention, uh, in the second half of his career to understanding cancer and aging. So it's a great honor. And BJ is a pioneer in, in, um, Medical oncology, certainly a pioneer nationally and internationally, but for us locally. Wow. Uh, he, he, he was one of the first people to establish a relationship with the Minnesota Masonic Charities. Yeah, very cool. Thank you for sharing that. Reed, do you have any final questions? It's uh, it's appreciate the perspective and as we talked about briefly for anyone out there considering to making a gift, a donation through charities. on behalf of the Cancer Center of the Masonic Children's Hospital, the Institute for the Developing Brain. It is incredibly special for our brother Freemasons knowing that this is right here in our state and impacting in such a, such a wide reach that's, that's indescribable. The giving, it does make a difference. And so often when we have those conversations with just anyone in the general public of is, is my donation going to make a difference in. Um, as we, as we wrap up, what are you most excited about right now? And you're seeing in research, in the collaboration out there, what's, uh, what's the future look like? I think over the past several decades, we've been able to, uh, individualize therapies based on features of the tumor. So, again, in my world of breast cancer, and we've talked about this a little bit, some patients respond very well to immunotherapy. Some patients, it's a complete waste of time, all you're going to have is the toxicity. So we're beginning to understand what patients need specific things. At the same time, I think we're coming to that around screening recommendations as well. You know, what are individual risks for developing cancer? What should be the appropriate screening interval? So those two things hand in hand. Uh, getting from a large population, if I say, well, 10, 000 patients have this cancer and here's how they do when they get drug X versus drug Y, is not as good as to me saying you sitting in my clinic today really need drug X because your tumor is highly sensitive to the pathway drug X targets. I'd love to see that. So I'd love to see, again, going back to our HIV colleagues, uh, they can come up with cocktails that directly address what HIV is doing. The problem with cancer is there are many, many more genes involved in, in determining what the cancer is doing and we just are at the threshold of discovering what those things are. I understand that, uh, at some point in the relatively near future, you might be stepping away from your directorship now that you've finished. Was it your fourth? My fourth renewal. Renewal. Big grant process. Every five years. We're going to try and find someone that will be burdened with the next one. Yeah. Do you plan on staying around? I'm still going to be working in my lab. I have three more graduate students I want to get through. I'm going to stay in seeing patients in the clinic. I'm involved with a couple clinical trials I want to see move forward. And, uh, one thing we didn't talk about today, but again, this is, I think, a direct spinoff of Masonic Cancer Center, our Minnesota cancer clinical trials network that serves the state. I want to become a little more involved with making sure that That network serves everybody, uh, and the way it was initially proposed to do. most worshipful brother, Dave Olson, he and his son and his grandchildren, grandsons, are all involved in that 10, 000 families. Is that the clinical trial program that you're talking about? Yeah, but there's another one involving more, getting more clinical trials out, specifically designed into greater Minnesota. Oh, that's fantastic. Thank you. We're going to pay attention to the rural areas, not just where the tallest buildings are. How about that? Alright, any final things? Dr. Douglas Yee, Director of the Masonic Cancer Center, as John said, it's an honor having you in studio with us today. Thank you for the work you're doing. Well, I really appreciate the invitation. Thanks so much for having me. Alright, and off we go.