Breast Cancer Profile of Dr. Gary Clark

When ISI Essential Science Indicators Special Topics analyzed the citations of breast cancer researchers of the 1990s, Dr. Gary Clark, Associate Director of the Breast Center at Baylor College of Medicine, ranked at #6, with 74 papers cited a total of 2,307 times. In the Essential Science Indicators web product, it is shown that Dr. Clark has contributed to 185 papers that have been cited a total of 4,203 times to date in the field of Clinical Medicine. Below, read a profile of Dr. Clark and his work.

Gary M. Clark, Ph.D. is a biostatistician who has made major contributions in evaluating prognostic markers in breast cancer. He received his Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of Washington in 1975. After five years in the Department of Biometry at the University of Kansas Medical Center, he joined the late Dr. William L. McGuire in the Division of Medical Oncology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in 1980.

His first assignment was to create a surveillance system to collect information about demographic and tumor characteristics, and long-term follow-up for disease recurrence and death for patients whose tumor specimens were sent to Dr. McGuire’s laboratory for steroid receptor assays. This tumor bank and database permitted Dr. Clark to focus his initial research efforts on the prognostic significance of the progesterone receptor and other first-generation biomarkers^1-5. This resource also led to a collaboration with Dr. Dennis Slamon at the University of California at Los Angeles that established the first published correlation between HER-2/neu amplification and disease outcome⁶, and subsequent evaluation of the prognostic significance of this important biomarker for breast cancer^7-12.

In the mid-1980s Drs. McGuire and Clark established a collaboration with Nichols Institute, a large reference laboratory in San Juan Capistrano, California. This collaboration led to the evaluation of DNA ploidy and S-phase fraction, determined by flow cytometry, as prognostic markers of cell proliferation^13-19. This collaboration also led to the creation of another tumor bank that later formed the basis for the San Antonio Breast Cancer SPORE (Specialized Programs of Research Excellence) funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This national tissue resource now resides in the Breast Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas under the direction of Dr. Clark, and it contains more than 100,000 tumor specimens from women with breast cancer.

In 1990, Dr. Clark created the Biostatistics, Data Processing and Data Management Shared Resource for the San Antonio Cancer Institute as part of its initial, successful application to become an NCI-designated cancer center. This team of biostatisticians, computer programmers, and data managers developed a system for tracking all patients enrolled in clinical trials at the Cancer Institute, and provided biostatistics and informatics services to all members of the Cancer Institute. It also evaluated a variety of techniques for integrating information provided by prognostic factors, including multivariate Cox models, neural networks, recursive partitioning, and correspondence analysis^20-32.

Dr. Clark co-organized a Workshop on Methods in Clinical Cancer Research that is sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society for Clinical Oncology, and the National Cancer Institute. This week-long workshop has been held annually since 1996, and more than 500 young investigators have been trained in the basics of clinical investigation and translational research.

In 1999, the San Antonio Breast Cancer Team moved to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas to establish a new Breast Center. Dr. Clark was named Associate Director of the Breast Center and Director of the Center’s Informatics Section. He continues to supervise the two tumor banks that were moved from San Antonio to Houston, and has established numerous collaborations throughout the world to evaluate new prognostic and predictive biomarkers for patients with primary breast cancer. He is the leader of a project titled "Prognostic and Predictive Biomarkers for Human Breast Cancer" that is part of a program-project grant that has been funded by the NCI since 1981. Recent results from this project include evaluation of telomerase³³ and mitosin^34-35, as well as studies of elderly women³⁶ and patients with special histologic types of tumors³⁷.

Dr. Clark has published more than 270 papers and book chapters and nearly 300 abstracts. He was recently honored by Celebrating Survival—a Century of Advances in Early Breast Cancer as one of the 100 investigators published most frequently in the 20^th century for studies advancing breast cancer treatment. He serves on numerous committees for the NCI and professional societies involved in cancer research.

Gary M. Clark, Ph.D.
Associate Director
Breast Center at Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, TX, USA

References:

1. Clark GM, McGuire WL. Progesterone receptors and human breast cancer. Breast Cancer Res Treat 3:157-163, 1983.

2. Clark GM, McGuire WL. Prognostic factors in primary breast cancer. Breast Cancer Res Treat 3:569-572, 1983.

3. Clark GM, McGuire WL, Hubay CA, Pearson OH, Marshall JS. Progesterone receptor as a prognostic factor in Stage II breast cancer. N Eng J Med 309:1343-1347, 1983.

4. McGuire WL, Clark GM. The prognostic role of progesterone receptors in human breast cancer. Semin Oncol 10:2-6, 1983.

5. Clark GM, Osborne CK, McGuire WL. Correlations between estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, and patient characteristics in human breast cancer. J Clin Oncol 2:1102-1109, 1984.

6. Slamon DJ, Clark GM, Wong SG, Levin WJ, Ullrich A, McGuire WL. Human breast cancer: Correlation of relapse and survival with amplification of the HER-2/neu oncogene. Science 235:177-182, 1987.

7. Slamon DJ, Clark GM. Response to technical comment. Science 240:2796-2798, 1988.

8. Tandon AK, Clark GM, Chamness GC, Ullrich A, McGuire WL. HER-2/neu oncogene protein and prognosis in breast cancer. J Clin Oncol 7:1120-1128, 1989.

9. Borg A, Tandon AK, Sigurdsson H, Clark GM, Ferno M, Fuqua SAW, Killander D, McGuire WL. HER-2/neu amplification predicts poor survival in node-positive breast cancer. Cancer Res 50:4332-4337, 1990.

10. Clark GM, McGuire WL. Followup study of HER-2/neu amplification in primary breast cancer. Cancer Res 51:944-948, 1991.

11. Allred DC, Clark GM, Tandon AK, Molina R, Tormey DC, Osborne CK, Gilchrist KW, Mansour EG, Abeloff M, Eudey L, McGuire WL. HER-2/neu in node-negative breast cancer: prognostic significance of overexpression influenced by the presence of in situ carcinoma. J Clin Oncol 10:599-605, 1992.

12. Clark GM. Should selection of adjuvant chemotherapy for patients with breast cancer be based on erbB-2 status? J Natl Cancer Inst 90:1320-1321 (editorial), 1998.

13. Dressler LG, Seamer L, Owens MA, Clark GM, McGuire WL. Evaluation of a modeling system for S-phase estimation in breast cancer by flow cytometry. Cancer Res 47:5294-5302, 1987.

14. Dressler LG, Seamer LC, Owens MA, Clark GM, McGuire WL. DNA flow cytometry and prognostic factors in 1331 frozen breast cancer specimens. Cancer 61:420-427, 1988.

15. Clark GM, Dressler LG, Owens MA, Pounds G, Oldaker T, McGuire WL. Prediction of relapse or survival in patients with node-negative breast cancer by DNA flow cytometry. N Engl J Med 320:627-633, 1989.

16. Clark GM, Mathieu M-C, Owens MA, Dressler LG, Eudey L, Tormey DC, Osborne CK, Gilchrist KW, Mansour EG, Abeloff MD, McGuire WL. Prognostic significance of S-phase fraction in good risk node-negative breast cancer patients. J Clin Oncol 10:428-432, 1992.

17. Wenger CR, Beardslee S, Owens MA, Pounds G, Oldaker T, Vendely P, Pandian MR, Harrington D, Clark GM, McGuire WL. DNA ploidy, S-phase and steroid receptors in more than 127,000 breast cancer patients. Breast Cancer Res Treat 28:9-20, 1993.

18. Hedley DW, Clark GM, Cornelisse CJ, Killander D, Kute T, Merkel D. Consensus review of the clinical utility of DNA cytometry in carcinoma of the breast. Cytometry 14:482-485, 1993.

19. Wenger CR, Clark GM. S-phase fraction and breast cancer - a decade of experience. Breast Cancer Res Treat 52:255-265, 1998.

20. McGuire WL, Tandon AK, Allred DC, Chamness GC, Clark GM. How to use prognostic factors in axillary node-negative breast cancer patients. J Natl Cancer Inst 82:1006-1015, 1990.

21. McGuire WL, Tandon AK, Allred DC, Chamness GC, Ravdin PM, Clark GM. Treatment decisions in axillary node-negative breast cancer patients. J Natl Cancer Inst Monogr 11:173-180, 1992.

22. McGuire WL, Clark GM. Prognostic factors and treatment decisions in axillary-node-negative breast cancer. N Engl J Med 326:1756-1761, 1992.

23. Ravdin PM, Clark GM, Hilsenbeck SG, Owens MA, Vendely P, Pandian MR, McGuire WL. A demonstration that breast cancer recurrence can be predicted by neural network analysis. Breast Cancer Res Treat 21:47-53, 1992.

24. Clark GM. Integrating prognostic factors. Breast Cancer Res Treat 22:187-191, 1992.

25. Hilsenbeck SG, Clark GM, McGuire WL. Why do so many prognostic factors fail to pan out? Breast Cancer Res Treat 22:197-206, 1992.

26. Knorr KL, Hilsenbeck SG, Wenger CR, Pounds G, Oldaker T, Vendely P, Pandian MR, Harrington D, Clark GM. Making the most of your prognostic factors: presenting a more accurate survival model for breast cancer patients. Breast Cancer Res Treat 22:251-262, 1992.

27. Ravdin PM, Clark GM. A practical application of neural network analysis for predicting outcome of individual breast cancer patients. Breast Cancer Res Treat 22:285-293, 1992.

28. Clark GM, Wenger CR, Beardslee S, Owens MA, Pounds G, Oldaker T, Vendely P, Pandian MR, Harrington D, McGuire WL. How to integrate steroid hormone receptor, flow cytometric, and other prognostic information in regard to primary breast cancer. Cancer 71:2157-2162, 1993.

29. Clark GM. Do we really need prognostic factors for breast cancer? Breast Cancer Res Treat 30:117-126, 1994.

30. Clark GM, Hilsenbeck SG, Ravdin PM, De Laurentiis M, Osborne CK. Prognostic factors: rationale and methods of analysis and integration. Breast Cancer Res Treat 32:105-112, 1994.

31. Hilsenbeck SG, Clark GM: Practical p-value adjustment for optimally selected cutpoints. Stat Med 15:103-112, 1996.

32. Hilsenbeck SG, Ravdin PM, de Moor CA, Chamness GC, Osborne CK, Clark GM. Time-dependence of hazard ratios for prognostic factors in primary breast cancer. Breast Cancer Res Treat 52:227-237, 1998.

33. Clark GM, Osborne CK, Levitt D, Wu F, Kim NW. Telomerase and survival of patients with node-positive breast cancer. J Natl Cancer Inst 89:1874-1881, 1997.

34. Clark GM, Allred DC, Hilsenbeck SG, Chamness GC, Osborne CK, Jones D, Lee W-H. Mitosin (a new proliferation marker) correlates with clinical outcome in node-negative breast cancer. Cancer Res 57:5505-5508, 1997.

35. Harvey JM, Allred DC, Chamness GC, Osborne CK, Clark GM. Validation of the prognostic significance of Mitosin in node-negative patients. Breast Cancer Res Treat 64:42 (abstract 127), 2000.

36. Diab S, Elledge R, Clark G. Tumor characteristics and clinical outcome of elderly women with breast cancer. J Natl Cancer Inst 92:550-556, 2000.

37. Diab SG, Clark GM, Osborne CK, Libby A, Allred DC, Elledge RM. Tumor characteristics and clinical outcome of tubular and mucinous breast carcinomas. J Clin Oncol 17:1442-1448, 1999.

ESI Special Topics, November 2001
Citing URL - http://www.esi-topics.com/breast-cancer/dr-gary-clark.html



	*This special topic of breast cancer has been updated on May 2005. Click here to view updated topic.*