Doctor Profiles

Dr. Bruce Montgomery

Before he joined the SCCA prostate team a year ago, Dr. Bruce Montgomery was a laboratory scientist, doing basic research at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System.

Dr. Montgomery says he made the switch from laboratory research to patient care and clinical research, where he works with patients, primarily because he wanted to work with the prostate cancer team at UW Medicine and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.  He is now the head of the prostate cancer oncology clinic at the SCCA Prostate Center in the UW Surgery Pavilion.

“It was the opportunity to work with Dr. Pete Nelson, Dr. Paul Lange, Dr. Bob Vessella and Dr. Tia Higano, and the rest of the Program in Prostate Cancer Research, that first attracted me to doing research in prostate cancer and ultimately to doing clinical trials and treating patients,” says Dr. Montgomery. 

He says he likes being part of the team: “It’s a great group and a remarkable team experience. We all collaborate. The group is very cohesive; they’ve found a way to really work together.”

Dr. Paul Lange, the well-known prostate surgeon and urologist who sees patients at SCCA and is chairman of the Department of Urology at the University of Washington, talks about why he wanted Dr. Montgomery to join the team: “Bruce brings a wealth of experience not only in medical oncology but also in basic cancer research to our table.  Until we were able to lure him to UW/SCCA and our prostate pavilion clinic, he was very involved in basic research and in the treatment of GU—and other cancers—at the VA, where he was one of the major players in medical oncology.” 

Dr. Montgomery divides his time between seeing patients at the SCCA Prostate Center and research. He is a medical oncologist, an associate professor at UW Medicine, one of SCCA’s parent organizations, and an associate member of the Clinical Research Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, another SCCA parent organization.

“Bruce is a very compassionate, conscientious and skillful physician, a real intellectual when it comes to cancer knowledge, and an outstanding researcher who is now devoting a majority of his research time to clinical trials.”

Dr. Montgomery has not abandoned his previous research, studying epidermal growth factor receptor or EGFR, a protein found on the surface of many types of cancer cells, and in fact he is the principal investigator on a clinical trial that grew out of this earlier basic research into EGFR.

This clinical trial, which is open to men with metastatic prostate cancer that expresses a type of EGFR, as well as to people with several other types of cancer, is testing the effectiveness of a vaccine in targeting cancer cells that express this protein. Click here to read more about this research.

In addition to his research into EGFR, Dr. Montgomery and Dr. Nelson are researching new ways of making prostate cancer cells more sensitive to chemotherapy. This study is currently enrolling patients. Click here to read more about this study.

He is also researching the use of a new type of PET scan to stage and measure response in prostate cancer. Dr. Montgomery is working with Dr. Janet Early and Dr. David Mankoff on this research, which will soon be available to SCCA patients as a clinical trial.

What SCCA can offer

SCCA was formed, in part, to bring promising new research to patients faster. “The research being done here is cutting-edge,” Dr. Montgomery says. “We do very different kinds of research. You can get into a SWOG trial many places, but the research you get here is ahead of the curve. The cooperative group studies are very important, but it’s the early phase studies which give patients access to the newest and most exciting therapies.”

In addition, SCCA can offer its prostate cancer patients more treatment options than they will find elsewhere, Dr. Montgomery says: “We have a larger number of options than anywhere else, for both early- and late-stage prostate cancer—these include immunotherapy, chemotherapy, hormone therapy and vaccines.”

But the biggest attraction for patients, he says, is that they can be treated by the same doctors who are doing this pioneering research—“which is not the case in the broader world.”

Dr. Montgomery is a medical oncologist who generally sees men with advanced prostate cancer, which may be treated with chemotherapy or other options such as hormone or vaccine therapy.

Until recently, men with early-stage prostate cancer were treated only with surgery or radiation, but Dr. Montgomery says that this is starting to change.  “Oncologists are beginning to use chemotherapy and vaccines to treat men with earlier-state prostate cancer if their disease has certain high-risk features, such as a very high PSA or high Gleason scores. For these men, the chance of a recurrence is high, perhaps 50 percent or higher.”

These new treatments for high-risk prostate cancer are being evaluated in a number of clinical trials, and Dr. Montgomery often finds himself discussing the pros and cons of enrolling in clinical research with his patients.

He acknowledges that enrolling in a clinical trial can be a scary proposition, but says that he will ask a patient to join a study both because he is hoping to help that patient and because he is looking to the future, hoping to improve the treatments available for prostate cancer.

“We are going in with the hope that the trial will have benefit for you and also for the next man down the road,” he says. “I tell my patients, we wouldn’t have the standard of care we have now without other men who joined in this collaboration between patients and researchers.”

January 2005