CANCER’S BIGGEST ENEMY
For nearly two decades, Richard Pazdur has been the country’s key figure in approving new cancer treatments. But when his own wife was diagnosed with the dreaded disease, his job took on a whole new meaning • BY KRISTEN HANNUM
Richard Pazdur (MD ’76) has been called the closest thing this country has to a “cancer czar.” As a leader in the Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of oncology treatments, Pazdur has wielded great power and influence in approving or denying new drug therapies for cancer. In 2015, his work at the FDA even landed him on Fortune magazine’s list of the 50 greatest world leaders. But for Pazdur, 2015 will be remembered for a much more significant event—the loss of his wife after a battle with ovarian cancer. The couple had met in 1979, the first day of his oncology fellowship on a cancer ward at Chicago’s
Rush Presbyterian Hospital. Mary Bagby (BSN ’74, MSN ’78) was an oncology nurse there. Though the two attended Loyola at the same time, they’d never met on campus. “I loved my time at Loyola,” says Pazdur, who recently spoke at the opening of the University’s new Center for Translational Research and Education in Maywood. “We had that common bond from the beginning.” The couple wed in 1982, and they forged a no-
table partnership in modern American medicine, with Mary taking a job working in oncology at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. “We knew the same people and would talk about
the same professional issues,” Pazdur says. “We shared the same friends.” While some nurses she worked with left the
emotionally grueling field, Mary stuck with oncol- ogy. Her husband says she stayed, at least in part, because she wanted to maintain their unity. He joined the FDA in 1999, first as director of
the Division of Oncology Drug Products. In 2005, he was named director of the newly formed Office of Hematology and Oncology Products (OHOP), which was created to consolidate the review of cancer treatments. Now Pazdur has again been tapped to lead a new effort—he was recently named the first acting director of the FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence, part of Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative to accelerate cancer research and make more treatments available to patients.
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