Facility Spotlight
Dr. Kelvin Lee, MD
Director, Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center
Cancer researchers like Kelvin Lee, MD, don’t casually toss around the word “cure.” While cures are universally sought, they aren’t easily found. Unexpected twists and turns are part of the pursuit.
“Nobody says cure in the cancer field because it’s like, ‘We don’t want to touch that. That’s maybe too ambitious and maybe too fraught with disappointment,’” Lee said.
Yet, it was Indiana University School of Medicine’s willingness to use this word that played into Lee’s decision to become Director of the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center.
In announcing its Precision Health Initiative, Indiana University set goals to cure three forms of cancer—one of them triple negative breast cancer. That boldness spoke to him.
“For IU to come out and publicly say our objective is to cure this cancer,” he said, “that struck me as the mindset and the mentality at IU—to swing for the fences.”
Lee arrived at Indiana University, in February of 2021, from the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, where he’d served as a physician scientist since 2006. Among his achievements: developing a niche in multiple myeloma, building up the center’s research arm, and establishing a groundbreaking collaboration to test a lung cancer vaccine in the U.S. with researchers in Cuba.
Lee’s personal journey is a fascinating one.
He is the child of parents who fled the communist revolution in China. His parents, David and the late Lilly Lee, met in Chicago, where his father was working on a doctorate in microbiology and his mother studied to be a lab technician. As a teen in Rockville, Maryland, Lee dreamed of being a marine biologist but a summer job in a cancer immunology lab at the Naval Research Medical Institute changed his mind. “This medicine stuff is kind of cool,” he thought, and decided to pursue a medical degree.
When he applied to a University of Michigan program that enabled students to earn both undergraduate and medical degrees in six years the response was confusing. The letter read: “Dear ________, we would like to interview you on________,” and it wasn’t signed.
Lee’s mother phoned the school, and the flustered receptionist gave Lee an interview date. Obviously impressed, the admissions team granted him one-of-10 coveted spots for out-of-state students.
At graduation, school officials cleared up the mystery of the blank admissions letter: They had intended to reject him. Someone botched the mailing. Lee finished second in his University of Michigan medical school class, after this “false” start. “The fact that I am a physician,” Lee said, “is a complete accident.”
That Lee tells this story—and he says he shares it with students—fits his personality, according to Larry Boise, PhD, a longtime friend and frequent research collaborator at the Emory School of Medicine. “It is a great story of how everyone who is judging you might not be right,” Boise said.
Lee credits a patient for leading him to a cancer career. While doing an oncology fellowship in Michigan, he encountered a woman with lymphoma whose disease was discovered only when she underwent a Caesarian section. Within four years, the woman died from the cancer leaving a beautiful daughter behind. He was struck by the inadequacy of her chemotherapy. “I wondered why we can’t do better than this,” he said.
Lee continues his search for a better way— conducting research and treating patients with multiple myeloma. He is now also directing research and treatment for all cancers at a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. “You have to lead from the front,” he said.
He also leads with empathy. Boise describes Lee as “one of the kindest, most generous people I’ve honestly ever known.”