Emil Frei III

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Emil Frei with a nurse and a little patient

Emil "Tom" Frei III [ fɹaɪ̯ ] (born February 21, 1924 in St. Louis ; † April 30, 2013 in Oak Park , Illinois ) was an American oncologist and pioneer of combination chemotherapy .

Life

Emil Frei was born in St. Louis in 1924. His grandfather of the same name, who immigrated to the USA from Bavaria , founded a church window company that still exists today (2016). Emil Frei III developed an interest in scientific work as a teenager, influenced by reading Rats, Lice and History , a book by the bacteriologist Hans Zinsser about typhus .

During the Second World War he was drafted into the military, but was able to study there in an academic education program at Colgate University up to a bachelor's degree. From 1944 he studied medicine at Yale University and graduated in 1948 as a doctor of medicine . After an internship at the University Hospital in St. Louis, he served from 1950 to 1952 as an officer in the US Navy Medical Corps in the Korean War .

In 1955, Gordon Zubrod employed Frei at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), where he worked with colleagues Emil Freireich and James F. Holland in the field of childhood leukemia research. Within a year Frei was appointed head of the leukemia department of the NCI and later medical director of the NCI.

In 1965 Frei moved to Houston to the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas , where he was Associate Scientific Director of Clinical Research and headed the Experimental Therapeutics division.

In 1972 he became medical director (physician-in-chief) of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute . After the death of the institute's founder Sidney Farber in 1973, Frei became director of the institute and professor at Harvard Medical School . He was head of the institute until 1980. In 1991 he retired.

Emil Frei was married twice and had five children. After a long period of Parkinson's disease , he passed away on April 30, 2013 at his home near Chicago.

Services

Together with his colleague Emil Freireich in Houston, Frei was able to show in the 1950s and 1960s that a combination of several chemotherapy agents could achieve permanent remission in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) . This was achieved by Frei and his colleagues in spite of initial setbacks and the resistance of parts of the professional world to the toxic agents. With the previously established treatment methods, ALL was always fatal, and treatment with a single agent did not result in sustained remission. The group led by Frei and Freireich also showed that the infusion of blood platelets helped against the bleeding caused by chemotherapy.

At the Dana Farber Institute, he worked with Arthur Skarin and George Canellos to develop a therapy for the treatment of adult patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma , one of the first chemotherapy protocols to achieve a significant cure rate for the disease. He also made significant contributions to the development and establishment of treatment methods for osteosarcomas and breast cancer .

As the head of the institute, he led it to global importance in the treatment and research of cancer in children and adults. At the end of his tenure, Dana-Farber had 900 members, six times more than when he took up the job.

Frei was known for his steadfastness and optimism in research; these properties were critical to their success. In the obituary of the Dana Farber Institute for Frei it says that the groundbreaking work of his team on combination chemotherapy was “by Dr. Frei's ability was driven to see the prospect of success where others only felt discouragement ”.

With James F. Holland he edited the standard work Cancer Medicine , which, edited by other authors, was published in 2008 in the 9th edition by Wiley.

His human qualities, especially in dealing with childhood patients, were also praised. At children's parties in the hospital, for example, he disguised himself as Bibo or Darth Vader .

honors and awards

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Margalit Fox: Emil Frei III, Who Put Cancer Cures in Reach, Dies at 89. In: The New York Times . May 4, 2013, accessed October 15, 2016 (English, obituary).
  2. ^ History. Emil Frei & Associates, accessed October 16, 2016 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Dana-Farber mourns the passing of Emil 'Tom' Frei III, MD, eternal optimist and father of combination chemotherapy. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute , May 1, 2013, accessed April 8, 2019 (obituary).
  4. ↑ a b c d Emil Frei III, MD. American Association for Cancer Research , accessed October 15, 2016 (obituary).
  5. ↑ a b c Geoff Watts: Obituary: Emil Frei III . In: The Lancet . tape 382 , no. 9889 , July 2013, p. 304 , doi : 10.1016 / S0140-6736 (13) 61627-X (English, obituary).
  6. ^ Presidents of the AACR. American Association for Cancer Research , accessed October 16, 2016 .
  7. ^ Four Physicians Honored for Their Historic Contributions to the Treatment of Pediatric Leukemia. In: nyp.org. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital , December 19, 2003; accessed October 15, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Free, Emil
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Free, Tom (nickname); Frei, Emil III
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American cancer doctor and one of the developers of combination chemotherapy
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Louis
DATE OF DEATH April 30, 2013
Place of death Oak Park , Illinois