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Pulling Back the Curtain: Richard E. Champlin, MD

May 26, 2022

June 2022

In this edition, Richard E. Champlin, MD, discusses his pioneering path in hematopoietic cell transplantation and what inspired him along the way. 

Jill Sederstrom

Jill Sederstrom is a journalist based in Kansas City.

Richard E. Champlin, MDRichard E. Champlin, MD, professor of medicine in the Department of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapy at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Tell us a little bit about your upbringing and education.

I was born in Milwaukee, and I lived there until the third grade when our family moved to the Chicago suburbs. I went to Purdue University for college, where I first started in engineering science.

While I was in college, I got more interested in medicine and was initially interested in psychiatry. I went to the University of Chicago for medical school, and it was during that time that my interest gravitated toward hematology and cancer treatment. I was really inspired by the time I spent working on the leukemia service there and by the responses to treatment we were seeing in patients with life-threatening disease. So, I went into hematology as a specialty, did my fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and joined the faculty there in 1980.

What made you shift from engineering sciences to medicine?

I thought it was a chance to help people and to see my efforts turn into tangible benefits for others. I majored in engineering sciences in college and worked summer jobs in engineering departments but didn’t see myself really making any major impact. I found the personal nature of medicine appealing, being able to help people and trying to cure them of serious illness.

Once you got to UCLA, what was your career focus?

I got to UCLA at a time when hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) was just beginning to become a widespread therapy. I was part of a second generation of people focused on HCT development during my fellowship. It was a great opportunity for me both personally and professionally to make progress in advancing the standards of care for this new therapy option.

In those days, it was a very high-risk undertaking and considered a last-ditch effort for people who had failed every other form of treatment. Even then, one could cure perhaps 20% of those desperately ill patients. It was a challenging time because we didn’t have access to the modern advances in supportive care that are necessary to control infections and the major complications of the procedure. We had really primitive antibiotics available to us, virtually no proven immuno-suppressant therapies, and tissue typing was in its development phase and not very accurate; all of those things made HCTs a very high-risk treatment.

Through advances including better antibiotics, antiviral treatments, immunosuppressive therapies, and advancements in tissue typing, HCT has become much safer and more effective.

What were some of the things you focused on in the early days to improve HCT?

We worked to define the role of hemopoietic transplants versus other forms of treatment and which treatment individual patients should receive.

Generally, people with low-risk hematologic malignancies can be treated with standard forms of therapy, while people with higher risk disease do better with HCTs. We often give patients initial chemotherapy to try to achieve a minimal disease state and then do the transplant with the goal of curing them. We put a lot of effort into improving the effectiveness of transplant treatment itself to eradicate malignancies and prevent treatment-related morbidity and mortality.

We made a lot of improvements in the preparative regimen given to patients before an HCT, trying to optimize the drugs that can effectively kill the malignant cells without causing excessive toxicity to the patients. We’ve also realized the transplant mediates a beneficial immune effect, called graft versus leukemia (GVL), where the donor’s immune cells can fight the patient’s leukemia better than the patient’s own cells can, and this GVL effect is probably what actually leads to cure.

In the beginning, we would only do transplants in patients under 40 or 50 years old because the high-dose chemotherapy was too toxic for older patients. Hematologic malignancies are most common in older patients, so it was important to develop a transplant strategy to address this unmet need. We and others developed nonmyeloablative, or reduced-intensity conditioning, using lower doses of drugs or radiation, which would suppress the patient’s immune system enough to prevent graft rejection and allow the GVL effect to occur. We showed that these reduced-intensity transplants could be successful, and this approach allowed us to treat older patients, up to about 75 years of age.

We’ve also tried to optimize the composition of the transplant by removing T cells, the immune cells that cause graft-versus-host disease, and we continue research to optimize the composition of the HCT graft.


Dr. Champlin served as the first
president of the National Marrow
Donor Program’s Donor, Collection,
and Transplant Centers.

Was all this work completed at UCLA?

I was at UCLA from 1980 to 1990. In 1990 I came to MD Anderson to lead the Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapy Department, and I’ve been here ever since. Most of the work I mentioned previously was done in collaboration with my colleagues at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

One of the special things I did while at UCLA was serving as part of a team that was sent to Moscow to help care for victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986. The people were severely affected from radiation exposure and had thermal burns on their skin. The bone marrow is the most sensitive tissue to radiation, and some people can be rescued from lethal radiation exposure by bone marrow transplants. We did bone marrow transplants for 13 patients, and two of them recovered. The others, sadly, had extensive injuries to other tissues and died.

This was a memorable event, and we were able to contribute to the care of the victims there and work with the Russian doctors, who did a heroic job in the most challenging circumstances.

You’ve been an active mentor throughout your career. Why do you think mentorship is so important?

Mentorship is everything. As a young person, you need a role model and to have someone provide guidance and take interest in your professional development. We all benefit from mentorship, where we can talk to someone about new ideas and flesh out the best approach for clinical problems, research projects, and career development.

I had wonderful mentors that helped me. Robert Gale, MD, was the transplant program director that really got me into the field; David Golde, MD, was my department chairman at UCLA and encouraged my career development; and I have worked with many people at MD Anderson who inspired me and helped support my efforts.

One of my personal goals is to advance the careers of up-and-coming physicians and to get them interested in the fields of HCT and cell therapy.

At MD Anderson, we have our own transplant and cell therapy fellowship program that is independent from our institutional hematology/oncology program. We recruit physicians to come for one or two years to receive specialized training in HCT and cellular therapy. It’s been a great success. Eight of our fellows and faculty now lead HCT programs around the country.

Have you been active in advancing the profession in other ways?

I’ve done a lot of different things to help the HCT field. When the National Marrow Donor Program started, I served as the first president of the council for Donor, Collection, and Transplant Centers. Most people don’t have a matched donor in their family, and the international system of unrelated volunteer donors has allowed most patients in need to receive a transplant.

I also served as president of the International Society for Bone Marrow Transplant Research, which is now known as the Center for International Blood & Marrow Transplant Research.

I was the founding president for the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation, the main professional society for our field, which is now the American Society for Transplantation and Cell Therapy. It’s been an honor to be a leader in the development of these organizations that represent our field.

What motivates you on the job?

I take tremendous satisfaction in direct patient care, so the part of my job I like the most is seeing patients in the clinic and working with our clinical team to successfully get them through the transplant and then home to return to a normal life.

What does your work life look like today?

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve stepped away from my administrative responsibilities, and I’m focusing on my own clinic, teaching, and my clinical research to continue to improve the use of HCTs.

We’re trying to optimize the composition of the transplant to have it cure cancer but also avoid major complications like graft-versus-host disease, and we’re looking to incorporate cellular immune therapy to augment the graft-versus-malignancy effect to help better fight leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma.

I’m still very busy. I’m happy to come to work every day and am optimistic that our field continues to improve to become safer and more effective for our patients.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not at work?

When I was younger and a fellow, I was a runner, and my mentors and I often ran laps around the perimeter of the UCLA campus. In those days, it was a great chance to talk about career development while also getting some exercise and working off the day’s frustrations.

In more recent years, I’ve turned to golf. It’s another outdoor sport where you can relieve your tensions and take your mind off business with friends and other physicians. We talk about science, patient care, and the development of medicine between shots.

What can you tell us about your family life?

I am married and have two children. One is home with us here in Houston and the other is in Los Angeles with our grandchild.

I spend time with them as best as I can, but the COVID pandemic has interfered with our ability to travel safely. I haven’t seen as much of my family in California as I’d like, but hopefully we’ll be able to fix that soon.

What goals do you have for your future both personally and professionally?

As long as I am in good health and am still able to work effectively, I am planning to continue as a physician and faculty member at MD Anderson. At some point, I’ll retire, but I’m hoping to hang in there for another few years.

Have you enjoyed your career?

It’s been a tremendous privilege to be a physician and a leader in academic medicine. It’s a great life when you go home every day with a feeling that you’ve helped people, made a difference, and advanced the field. I’ve been very lucky to have tremendous support and great colleagues throughout my career and be able to work at great institutions where I could fulfill my dreams.


This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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