New CEO of the OSUCCC – James: Moving the needle on cancer in a big way

In addition, she’ll further her focus on raising awareness of early-onset cancer and ensuring access to high-quality cancer care for all — taking research-based care to underserved rural and urban areas.

“This needs to be done in an ecosystem or laboratory, and our laboratory is Ohio,” she explains. “Here, we have rural America, we have Appalachia, we have urban centers, we have immigrant communities. We have everything, and I want to be in the thick of it.”

Early influences shape future cancer physician and researcher

A native of Nebraska, Dr. Rathmell attributes her passion for hard work and helping others to her upbringing in the small town of Sheffield, Iowa, where she spent her formative years.

Her dad was a middle school science teacher (and later a principal and superintendent), and her mom was a middle school industrial arts (shop) teacher who also assisted people with kitchen remodeling and designed a few homes.

“My parents were very passionate middle school teachers, both focused on that transitional age range,” she says, noting that, as a female shop teacher, her mom was a rarity. “The thing she was most proud of was helping boys in her class who were on a rough track get onto a right path.

“So that’s the kind of family I was raised in, seeing the importance of education and how the school was the centerpiece of the community that anchors children and families,” she says, adding that her life was also influenced by two major turns during high school:

• Working at a skilled nursing facility, first in the kitchen and then as a certified nursing assistant;
• Helping teach science to her high school classmates when their teacher became homebound with an illness.

“At the nursing facility, I enjoyed working with the residents and thinking about their health needs and their lives there,” she recalls. “At our high school, we had only one science teacher, so when she became ill and there were no substitutes, they asked a couple of us who were good in science to learn the lessons in advance and teach them to our class. I learned science very well and liked it. And when you do well in science, people often say, ‘You should become a doctor.’”

Intent on doing just that, she earned degrees in biology and chemistry at the University of Northern Iowa. While there, she met a young man who also was pursuing science. They married as undergrads and went together to Stanford University, where she entered medical school. (Her husband, Jeffrey Rathmell, PhD, is also a cancer scientist and will assume leadership roles at the University of Chicago starting July 1.)

Her growing interest in science led her to take a leave from medical school and earn a PhD in biophysics before returning to get her medical degree. From there, the couple went to the University of Chicago, she as a medical intern and he as a scientist whom she followed when his lab was later recruited to the University of Pennsylvania. It was a move that would shape her career. There, she got involved with research while also working in a clinic that treated patients with prostate, bladder, testicular and kidney cancers.

“At that time, the kidney cancer patients uniformly went to hospice,” Dr. Rathmell says. “It was on our list of cancers for which we had nothing meaningful to offer.”

When she later landed her first faculty position, at the University of North Carolina (UNC), she wanted to help change that scenario.

“I’d been involved with exciting research involving mutations in hypoxia (insufficient oxygen) signaling, and we’d learned that these mutations drove kidney cancers, so I wanted to pursue that,” she says. “They let me work with all their kidney cancer patients, and that was my golden ticket. I got to be involved with early clinical trials when the first drugs came along that were built on that science.”

She well remembers the first of those trials, which involved the drug sorafenib.

“I had four patients enroll on the same day, and when they came back for their scans two months later, all on the same day, all of their tumors had shrunk,” Dr. Rathmell says. “I still get chills when I think about how those patients expressed shock that this was actually true.”

‘Called to duty’ as a national cancer leader

The seeds of Dr. Rathmell’s leadership and mentoring skills were also planted at UNC, where she became interested in how physician-scientists were developed while she was leading the MD/PhD program alongside a mentor and was engaged in the national dialogue about this process.

“That gave me a lot of visibility into how the administration of an academic medical center works.”

She believes that work helped lead to her recruitment to Vanderbilt to direct the hematology and oncology division. In January 2020, she was named interim chair of the Department of Medicine, skillfully navigated the department through the COVID-19 pandemic, and then she became the permanent department chair.

Opportunity knocked again in late 2023 when she got a surprise phone call asking her to direct the NCI, an offer that meant leaving her tenured position and accepting a role she knew almost nothing about.

“To me it was like being called to duty as a doctor,” she says. “It was my service to my country. I felt a lot of anxiety about doing it, but never any hesitation.”

She held that rigorous post for 14 months and loved it.

“I felt like we were serving the American people every day, and our mission was to end cancer. It was fun and thrilling, and worth every bit of it.”

Energized by the Columbus community

Dr. Rathmell thinks leading the OSUCCC – James will be equally enthralling, especially since the cancer program has such strong community support. This backing, she says, is evidenced by such events as Pelotonia — the annual community cycling event series that raises millions of dollars for cancer research at Ohio State — and by creation of the $10 million Jeri B. Block and Robert H. Schottenstein Distinguished Chair in Cancer, which she now holds. It’s the largest endowed chair ever established at Ohio State.

“It means a lot that people in the community put that level of support behind a position like this,” Dr. Rathmell says.

She adds that she'll use it to support the OSUCCC – James’ mission and the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center broadly. “It’s a substantial enough gift that it can become pilot or seed money for projects that take us in new and exciting directions.”

An avid cyclist, Dr. Rathmell looks forward to riding in Pelotonia 2025 and to riding her bike to work, as she did at Vanderbilt and NCI. She and her husband have two adult children — Peter, a lawyer, and Dori, an environmental scientist.

“We are a sporting family. We love basketball and football, as well as hiking and other outdoor activities.”

Dr. Rathmell considers the communities served by the OSUCCC – James to be a fourth leg on the traditional three-legged tripartite mission of patient care, research and education — calling it a “quadripartite” mission.

“The community is another leg on that stool because it elevates what we do in the clinical space, it informs what we do in research and it allows people who are training here to know where they’re going. I think that’s a secret sauce that we can really capitalize on.”

Is a cancer-free world possible?

Dr. Rathmell says it’s a great question, “because the very straight answer could be that there will always be new cases of cancer to treat.” But she artfully qualifies that thought.

“To me,” she says, “a cancer-free world will be that we can prevent as much cancer as possible, that people will know and own their cancer risk and can effectively manage it, that we will have good ways of detecting it early so it can be managed without the hardship we usually associate with cancer and that when cancer is detected in later stages, we will have good tools for treating it.

“Ultimately, it will be a world where people don’t fear cancer the way we do today.”

She hopes to use her experience and knowledge to guide the cancer program in that direction.

“I like to think big, to be a little bit ‘head in the clouds,’” she says, “but I also like to work on the ground, assisting colleagues on projects and ideas that are pragmatic but will move the needle in a big way.”