The Failla Lectureship was established by the 29th RRS Council to honor Dr. Gioacchino Failla. The lecture was first given in 1963. The 102nd RRS Council (1987) reviewed the status of the Failla Lectureship with a goal of examining recent trends in the characteristics of the awardees and codifying the criteria for the selection. It was found that there was a slow change going from mid-career scientists to nearing the end of a distinguished career in radiation research. Whereas some earlier awardees were not members of the RRS, all of the recent awardees were members. Accordingly, the following criteria were established by the 102nd Council, which had the intent of allowing the Awards and Honors Committee maximum flexibility in choosing the awardees.

The Failla Lectureship may be considered as an award for a distinguished career in radiation research, or an award to an individual who is in mid-career, highly productive and working in an exciting and cutting-edge area of radiation research.

The recipient of the 2008 Failla Award and Lectureship is Mark Dewhirst.

Mark was born in Manhattan Kansas (the little Apple) in 1949, but his family moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1957 where his father joined the faculty of the College of Agriculture.  Mark attended public schools in Tucson where he gained an early interest in science. After graduating from Catalina High School, he attended the University of Arizona, where he received a BS in Chemistry in 1971.  He subsequently attended veterinary school at Colorado State University (DVM in 1975), but stayed on to complete a PhD in Radiation Biology in 1979.  He then returned to Tucson for five years as an Assistant Professor in the Radiation Oncology Department at the Arizona Health Sciences Center. The choice to go back to Arizona was fortuitous, because it provided him the opportunity to develop interests and skills that he has carried forward to today.  He was recruited there to establish a veterinary cancer treatment program, with the express purpose of running a phase III trial to test the value of hyperthermia as an adjuvant to radiation therapy. His papers reporting those trial results were the first to definitively show the value of this combination therapy.  He also had the fortune of meeting Joseph Gross, a chemical engineer, who introduced him to the skin-fold window chamber method to study tumor growth and physiology, non-invasively. 

Mark joined the faculty of Duke University in 1984 and was promoted to Full Professor in 1993. He received an endowed professorship in 2002, the Gustavo S. Montana Professor of Radiation Oncology.   He also holds appointments in the Departments of Pathology and Biomedical Engineering at Duke and in the Department of Anatomy Pathology and Radiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine at North Carolina State University.  In addition to directing a clinical program grant to study the use of hyperthermia in the treatment of cancer, Mark has research interests in tumor hypoxia, angiogenesis, and drug transport.  His work has focused primarily on translation of concepts in the laboratory to clinical testing.  Current work examining the potential role of hyperthermia to augment selective drug delivery to tumors is one example. 

Mark is the Director of the Radiation Oncology Program of the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

He has collaborated with faculty in the Engineering School to develop a novel temperature sensitive liposome that has been shown to increase drug delivery to heated sites by a factor of 30 compared with free drug. This drug has gone from a bench-top prototype to a phase III clinical trial.  In the laboratory, he has pioneered new methods for targeting tumor hypoxia and has worked with clinical faculty to test these concepts in patients, as means to improve radiation and chemotherapy response.  He has recently shown that radiation therapy initiates stabilization of HIF-1, a hypoxia inducible transcription factor, even in aerobic conditions.  HIF-1 stabilization leads to upregulation of angiogenesis, thereby protecting the tumor against radiation damage.  Targeting the HIF-1 response not only sensitizes tumor vasculature to radiation damage, it also selectively starves hypoxic cells by blocking their ability to utilize glucose anaerobically to produce ATP. 

A recipient of the 2001 Wayne Rundles Award from the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center, Mark has over 400 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters and reviews.  He gave the Bruce Cain Memorial Lecture to the New Zealand Society of Oncology in 2004, The AC Burton Lecture at the University of Western Ontario in 2005 and the Virginia Logan Lecture at Thomas Jefferson University in 2008.   He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of several journals and is Editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Hyperthermia.  He is the Director of the Radiation Oncology Program of the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

Mark has been an active member of the Radiation Research Society since 1980. He attended his first Radiation Research Society meeting in Minneapolis in 1981. He currently serves as the President of the Society.

Mark is deeply appreciative of the love and support given to him by his wife, Nancy. Amongst many things, her unflagging spirit has been an inspiration to strive toward excellence and balance in all aspects of life.

Mark will receive his award at the 2008 meeting of the Radiation Research Society in Boston. He will also deliver the Failla Lecture at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 21. We look forward to congratulating him in person on the receipt of this prestigious award!

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A podcast of an interview conducted by the SITs at Boston is available.