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- GWAS: Toward a Comprehensive Understanding of Cancer Causation
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- Profile of William Anderson
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William Anderson Unites Clinical Perspective With Cancer Research
William F. Anderson, M.D., M.P.H., Biostatistics Branch (BB), has a perspective borne of 20 years as a community-based hematologist/medical oncologist in Monroe, Louisiana, where his experience and passion for uncovering the causes of cancer steered him toward a career in population-based research with DCEG. Dr. Anderson says his path was not "well calculated," yet a certain logic and inevitability seem apparent when you speak with him.
William Anderson
Dr. Anderson is board-certified in internal medicine, hematology, and medical oncology. After receiving his training at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, he planned to spend approximately six months in the medically underserved northeast part of Louisiana before proceeding with a postgraduate leukemia research fellowship in Seattle. Six months became 16 years, but it was here that he developed his interests in cancer etiology, preventive oncology, cancer surveillance research, and public health.
He subsequently arrived at NCI in 1998 as a Cancer Prevention Fellow. As part of the fellowship, he obtained an M.P.H. degree in epidemiology at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. "I naively thought I was extending my private practice experience," he says, "but instead had to learn many new skills." He then began to work with NCI's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, often in collaboration with DCEG investigators, including Nilanjan Chatterjee, Ph.D., Chief of BB; Louise A. Brinton, Ph.D., Chief of the Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch (HREB); Mark E. Sherman, M.D. (HREB); and Susan S. Devesa, Ph.D. (BB).
When a tenure-track investigator position opened in BB in 2005, Dr. Anderson saw an opportunity for his descriptive epidemiology work to become more quantitative. He was impressed with the Division's dedication to high-quality research. Emphatically he says, "The quantitative mentoring and the collaboration that I have found within DCEG have been integral to my research."
Figure 1. Age distributions at diagnosis by race (black versus white) and time period (1975–1979, 1980–1984, 1985–1989, 1990–1994, 1995–1999, and 2000–2004) in NCI's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) 9 Registries database. (Anderson WF, et al. 2008)
Working with BB senior investigators, such as Dr. Chatterjee, Mitchell H. Gail, M.D., Ph.D., Ruth M. Pfeiffer, Ph.D., and Philip S. Rosenberg, Ph.D., Dr. Anderson has been able to apply a rigorous biomathematical approach and a clinical perspective to cancer surveillance research and descriptive epidemiology. In all his endeavors, he is committed to looking at his data "agnostically," not wedded to any a priori hypotheses. According to Dr. Anderson, good descriptive studies should be thoughtful and provocative; they test old ideas and generate new hypotheses.
In addition to analyzing SEER's public-use database, Dr. Anderson also is exploring SEER's "value-added" Residual Tissue Repository (RTR) by conducting studies that merge molecular biology with population-based concepts and analytical techniques. In 2007, he received funding through the NCI Director's Intramural Innovation Award to use the RTR to examine population-based incidence rates for molecular subtypes of breast cancer. In 2009, he received an NIH Merit Award for providing new insights into cancer etiology through descriptive studies of cancer heterogeneity and racial disparities.
Dr. Anderson was recently chosen to be the founding senior editor of a new manuscript section, "Cancer Surveillance Research," in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. He is enthusiastic about this undertaking, believing that surveillance studies are a valuable resource for cancer research." Evaluation of cancer rates can provide clues to cancer etiology, which can then generate hypotheses to be tested in clinical trials or through analytic studies," explained Dr. Anderson. "Once a hypothesis has been proven valid, it should then be assessed to determine if it is effective in the general population." It is through this method that researchers can determine whether clinically validated preventive or therapeutic measures are practical in application.
When asked if he misses working with patients, Dr. Anderson admits that he loved his patients and fully expected to return to private practice. He has since realized, however, that he can still affect patient care through independent research, collaborations, and mentoring. Ultimately, he hopes that "this type of work will help to bring all the pieces together and make a coherent story to inform cancer treatment and prevention."
—Rebecca Razavi
