Evan Ya-Wen Yu, MD
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If Dr. Evan Ya-Wen Yu brings even half his enthusiasm for oncology to his beloved game of racquetball, stay off the courts. Yu, a medical oncologist, treats prostate, bladder and testicular cancer at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, and he’s passionate about searching for the next wave of cancer treatments—targeted agents with greater cancer specificity and fewer side effects.
His respect and compassion for people undergoing cancer treatment were already in place but deepened when his father developed the disease. Now he’s dedicated to strengthening the links between clinical care and laboratory research so the prognosis for patients gets better and better.
“I always wanted to be a physician,” says Yu, a Washington native who completed medical school at the University of Washington in 1998 after earning his undergraduate degree there four years earlier. During the summer after his first year of medical school, Yu worked with a urologist and met men being treated for prostate cancer. The patients, grappling with their diagnosis and considering their options, inspired him to specialize in oncology.
“The patients were figuring out the really important things in life at that point,” he explains, re-evaluating their priorities in light of their disease and treatment. “Even though there was so much trauma going on in their life, they had so much calmness and tranquility,” he recalls.
“Everybody’s a little bit different; everyone handles his or her diagnosis differently,” he says. “But in general [people with cancer] tend to take a step back and look at their life with perspective.”
After medical school at UW, Yu spent about seven years in the Boston area doing both clinical and research work. In October 2004, Yu returned to Seattle to join the SCCA and be closer to his and his fiancée Nancy’s families. SCCA gave him a unique opportunity to take part in innovative cancer research because it’s a relatively young institution that is building a strong solid tumor program to complement its world-renowned bone marrow transplant program, he says.
“I love the fact that it’s not between 0 and 10 degrees when I go out to my car in the morning!” says Yu, who endured some record-breaking New England winters. He loves the proximity to nature, too.
“I think the quality of life is better out here. You can enjoy the natural wonders more. This is a combination of city and wilderness. You don’t have to go very far to get forest, to get trees, to get mountains,” he says.
For now much of his free time is spent with his fiancée, who is living in Los Angeles until their July 2005 wedding, and working on the house he bought in March in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. “I make Home Depot runs almost every week,” he says with a smile.
Before resettling in Seattle, Yu made several trips back here to visit his father, who was diagnosed with bladder cancer. In 2003, his father died of the disease. The experience taught Yu how to be a better son and better family member, he says.
Before his father’s illness, Yu was very much a molecular scientist, he says. But having someone close to him get cancer made him think about the disease more holistically, rather than only as a ball of abnormal cells or a sample in a tissue culture dish. Scientific understanding and science-based treatments are important, of course, says Yu, who still has a strong scientific bent. But there’s so much more to treating cancer than that.
“At the end of the day,” he says, “it’s really about the patient as a whole.”
Even before his experience with his own father’s disease, Yu recognized the importance of a patient’s circle of loved ones.
“It wasn’t just the patients themselves that I connected with but the families too,” he says.
Oncology gives doctors a rare opportunity to connect deeply with families—from the outset of treatment, through the course of the disease, sometimes over several years. He values the chance to get to know people and work intensively with them over time. Even after the death of a patient, Yu still keeps in touch with some families, he says.
Yu links his grasp of the human experience of cancer with his appreciation for research in hopes of finding more effective treatments. His approach is what’s called “translational research”—scientific inquiry that springs from patients’ real-life treatment experiences and in turn produces innovations that can directly improve treatment in the future.
For some researchers, translational research means laboring in a laboratory, sometimes for years, investigating the mechanisms of cancer growth or developing a particular drug that shows promise. For Yu, it means planting himself directly on the line between the laboratory and the clinic and engaging both sides in the search.
“Science is actually very different from medicine,” explains Yu, who conducted basic laboratory research during his years in Boston. “I’m trying to really meld the biology and the clinical care.”
The field needs more people with good clinical skills and a good laboratory background, he says, people who are trained in both, who have done both and can think both ways. Such doctors are uniquely positioned, he says, to ask the kind of research questions that can truly revolutionize cancer treatment and then to bring those new treatments to the bedside.
Before joining SCCA, Yu was a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School and an intern, resident and clinical fellow at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He was also a hematology-oncology fellow at the Dana-Farber/Partners CancerCare and a postdoctoral basic science research fellow at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He now is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Oncology, at the University of Washington.
Targeted molecular therapies are Yu’s passion. Traditionally we’ve treated cancer with non-specific chemotherapy—drugs that destroy not only cancer cells but any rapidly growing cells. This accounts for much of the toxicity and many of the side effects that patients currently face. Targeted therapies hone in on cancer cells in particular.
“We’re trying to test new agents that target a specific genetic defect that’s important for cancer to survive, divide, spread, and a flurry of other specific cancer-related mechanisms. It’s all about specificity,” explains Yu. “Before it was always about empiricism. Now it’s all about methods to become more and more specific, to hit the right targets, the things that are going wrong that make [a growth] a cancer.”
“We’ve made strides in recent years, but we have a long way to go,” says Yu, who predicts targeted therapies will shake up the world of cancer treatment in coming years. “We have already made many bold moves in this area, and I anticipate it will only continue to revolutionize the way we treat cancer.”
This requires research and technology to look not only at whether a certain targeted agent shrinks tumors or lowers tumor markers but whether it works at earlier stages of the disease. (Experimental treatments usually are tested first in people with advanced disease that no longer responds to standard treatment.) If an agent doesn’t work, we must also look at why. For instance, is the agent actually affecting the target, and, if it is, does the target behave as we expected?
For instance, when this article was published, Yu was designing a study for patients with localized prostate cancer who will undergo surgery but are at high risk for recurrence. The patients will receive one or more novel targeted agents before surgery to help prevent their cancer from returning. Then tissue removed during surgery will be examined in the lab to see whether the agents worked as researchers hypothesized.
This type of innovative research along with well-honed clinical skills and genuine compassion for people make Yu and doctors like him treasured members of the SCCA community. They are ushering in the future of cancer treatment for our patients today.
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Evan Ya-Wen Yu, MD
If Dr. Evan Ya-Wen Yu brings even half his enthusiasm for oncology to his beloved game of racquetball, stay off the courts. Yu, a medical oncologist, treats prostate, bladder and testicular cancer at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, and he’s passionate about searching for the next wave of cancer treatments—targeted agents with greater cancer specificity and fewer side effects.
His respect and compassion for people undergoing cancer treatment were already in place but deepened when his father developed the disease. Now he’s dedicated to strengthening the links between clinical care and laboratory research so the prognosis for patients gets better and better.
Early Inspiration
“I always wanted to be a physician,” says Yu, a Washington native who completed medical school at the University of Washington in 1998 after earning his undergraduate degree there four years earlier. During the summer after his first year of medical school, Yu worked with a urologist and met men being treated for prostate cancer. The patients, grappling with their diagnosis and considering their options, inspired him to specialize in oncology.
“The patients were figuring out the really important things in life at that point,” he explains, re-evaluating their priorities in light of their disease and treatment. “Even though there was so much trauma going on in their life, they had so much calmness and tranquility,” he recalls.
“Everybody’s a little bit different; everyone handles his or her diagnosis differently,” he says. “But in general [people with cancer] tend to take a step back and look at their life with perspective.”
Closer to Home
After medical school at UW, Yu spent about seven years in the Boston area doing both clinical and research work. In October 2004, Yu returned to Seattle to join the SCCA and be closer to his and his fiancée Nancy’s families. SCCA gave him a unique opportunity to take part in innovative cancer research because it’s a relatively young institution that is building a strong solid tumor program to complement its world-renowned bone marrow transplant program, he says.
“I love the fact that it’s not between 0 and 10 degrees when I go out to my car in the morning!” says Yu, who endured some record-breaking New England winters. He loves the proximity to nature, too.
“I think the quality of life is better out here. You can enjoy the natural wonders more. This is a combination of city and wilderness. You don’t have to go very far to get forest, to get trees, to get mountains,” he says.
For now much of his free time is spent with his fiancée, who is living in Los Angeles until their July 2005 wedding, and working on the house he bought in March in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. “I make Home Depot runs almost every week,” he says with a smile.
Family Matters
Before resettling in Seattle, Yu made several trips back here to visit his father, who was diagnosed with bladder cancer. In 2003, his father died of the disease. The experience taught Yu how to be a better son and better family member, he says.
Before his father’s illness, Yu was very much a molecular scientist, he says. But having someone close to him get cancer made him think about the disease more holistically, rather than only as a ball of abnormal cells or a sample in a tissue culture dish. Scientific understanding and science-based treatments are important, of course, says Yu, who still has a strong scientific bent. But there’s so much more to treating cancer than that.
“At the end of the day,” he says, “it’s really about the patient as a whole.”
Even before his experience with his own father’s disease, Yu recognized the importance of a patient’s circle of loved ones.
“It wasn’t just the patients themselves that I connected with but the families too,” he says.
Oncology gives doctors a rare opportunity to connect deeply with families—from the outset of treatment, through the course of the disease, sometimes over several years. He values the chance to get to know people and work intensively with them over time. Even after the death of a patient, Yu still keeps in touch with some families, he says.
The Best of Both Worlds
Yu links his grasp of the human experience of cancer with his appreciation for research in hopes of finding more effective treatments. His approach is what’s called “translational research”—scientific inquiry that springs from patients’ real-life treatment experiences and in turn produces innovations that can directly improve treatment in the future.
For some researchers, translational research means laboring in a laboratory, sometimes for years, investigating the mechanisms of cancer growth or developing a particular drug that shows promise. For Yu, it means planting himself directly on the line between the laboratory and the clinic and engaging both sides in the search.
“Science is actually very different from medicine,” explains Yu, who conducted basic laboratory research during his years in Boston. “I’m trying to really meld the biology and the clinical care.”
The field needs more people with good clinical skills and a good laboratory background, he says, people who are trained in both, who have done both and can think both ways. Such doctors are uniquely positioned, he says, to ask the kind of research questions that can truly revolutionize cancer treatment and then to bring those new treatments to the bedside.
Before joining SCCA, Yu was a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School and an intern, resident and clinical fellow at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He was also a hematology-oncology fellow at the Dana-Farber/Partners CancerCare and a postdoctoral basic science research fellow at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He now is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Oncology, at the University of Washington.
Hitting the Target
Targeted molecular therapies are Yu’s passion. Traditionally we’ve treated cancer with non-specific chemotherapy—drugs that destroy not only cancer cells but any rapidly growing cells. This accounts for much of the toxicity and many of the side effects that patients currently face. Targeted therapies hone in on cancer cells in particular.
“We’re trying to test new agents that target a specific genetic defect that’s important for cancer to survive, divide, spread, and a flurry of other specific cancer-related mechanisms. It’s all about specificity,” explains Yu. “Before it was always about empiricism. Now it’s all about methods to become more and more specific, to hit the right targets, the things that are going wrong that make [a growth] a cancer.”
“We’ve made strides in recent years, but we have a long way to go,” says Yu, who predicts targeted therapies will shake up the world of cancer treatment in coming years. “We have already made many bold moves in this area, and I anticipate it will only continue to revolutionize the way we treat cancer.”
This requires research and technology to look not only at whether a certain targeted agent shrinks tumors or lowers tumor markers but whether it works at earlier stages of the disease. (Experimental treatments usually are tested first in people with advanced disease that no longer responds to standard treatment.) If an agent doesn’t work, we must also look at why. For instance, is the agent actually affecting the target, and, if it is, does the target behave as we expected?
For instance, when this article was published, Yu was designing a study for patients with localized prostate cancer who will undergo surgery but are at high risk for recurrence. The patients will receive one or more novel targeted agents before surgery to help prevent their cancer from returning. Then tissue removed during surgery will be examined in the lab to see whether the agents worked as researchers hypothesized.
Innovations in Caring
This type of innovative research along with well-honed clinical skills and genuine compassion for people make Yu and doctors like him treasured members of the SCCA community. They are ushering in the future of cancer treatment for our patients today.
Evan Ya-Wen Yu
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