{"doi":"10.1002/ags3.12882","title":"Interview with Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Drebin, President of the 2024 President Elect of the American Surgical Association","abstract":"Dr. Jeffrey A. Drebin is Chair of the Department of Surgery at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and holds the Murray F. Brennan Endowed Chair. He is also Professor of Surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College. He was previously the John Rhea Barton Professor and Chair of the Department of Surgery at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard, where his Ph.D. work involved the development of the first monoclonal antibodies targeting the HER2/neu oncogene. He subsequently performed his surgical training in General Surgery and a Fellowship in Surgical Oncology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Upon completing his clinical training, Dr. Drebin was recruited to Washington University School of Medicine in 1995, rising to Professor of Surgery and of Molecular Biology & Pharmacology in 2002. In 2004 he was recruited to the University of Pennsylvania as Chief of the GI Surgery Division and in 2009 he became department Chair. At Washington University and at the University of Pennsylvania he established himself as a busy clinical surgeon, focusing on pancreaticobiliary, upper gastrointestinal, and liver surgery. He also established a successful translational research lab, receiving research support from the NIH, the Department of Defense, and the Burroughs Welcome fund for this work. Multiple surgery residents who worked in Dr. Drebin's laboratory have themselves gone on to successful academic surgical careers. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, editorials, and reviews, and has served on the editorial boards of multiple journals. Today, we are honored to have Professor Jeff Drebin, M.D., Ph.D., from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the 2024 President Elect of the American Surgical Association, as our guest. We extend our sincere gratitude to Professor Drebin for taking time out of his busy schedule to join us at the 79th Annual Meeting of The Japanese Society of Gastroenterological Surgery. In addition, we deeply appreciate your participation and your contribution to the journal, Annals of Gastroenterological Surgery, an official journal of JSGS. Thank you very much, Professor Jeff. Recently, you published a paper in Nature about the mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer, and I wanted to ask you a few questions regarding this topic. It's a very hot topic (A brand new technology, mRNA vaccination for pancreatic cancer) and exciting paper, but I have several questions. The first one is about the personalized and rapid biosynthetic one, which boasts high efficiency with high immunogenicity neoantigens for the prevention of recurrence, particularly in the case of minimal residual disease (MRD) in pancreatic cancer. How do you determine the neoantigens? The mRNA vaccine work, I should give credit to my junior partner, Vinod Balachandran, who's a surgeon scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, who really has done a lot of the important laboratory work. Vinod not only has a very big and successful laboratory, he's also a pretty good surgeon. But Vinod's work had suggested that some patients who are long-term survivors have evidence of a T-cell response, and therefore raise the question of could we stimulate a T-cell response with a vaccine, and in this case an mRNA vaccine.1 There may be other approaches that would work well. The first patient to get a vaccine in our trial was in December of 2019. Although we all know of mRNA vaccines from COVID and COVID vaccines, the first patient in New York to get it was in 2019. It happened to be my patient. But all of us within the group had patients in the trial. In December of 2019, he got his first dose of a vaccine made by BioNTech specific to his tumor. The choice of mRNA had to do with the desire to be able to do this quickly, to have a broad antigenic representation from the tumor and some thoughts about safety. Although those were all things we evaluated in the phase one trial. 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