Professor from Loyola joins isle cancer center

June 25, 2006

Dr. Michele Carbone, lead investigator for two National Cancer Institute grants totaling $3.5 million, has joined the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii.

Carbone is coming here from Loyola University Medical Center's Cardinal Bernadin Cancer Center in Chicago, where he was a professor in the Department of Pathology, Thoracic Oncology Program.

He will be associate director of basic sciences at the Hawaii Cancer Research Center and head a newly created Thoracic Oncology Program.

"I'm excited that a scientist of Dr. Carbone's caliber has joined the Cancer Research Center," said director Dr. Carl-Wilhelm Vogel. "He will significantly strengthen our research efforts in the understanding of the pathogenesis of lung cancer, particularly mesothelioma."

Carbone has spent much of his career studying thoracic cancer, with emphasis in malignant mesothelioma, a relatively rare cancer of the lining of the chest and abdomen caused by asbestos.

Findings of his research team on malignant mesothelioma were published June 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. and in the online and print editions of the June 23 Nature Reviews Cancer.

Besides the NCI grants to investigate the relationship of asbestos to mesothelioma, Carbone has received substantial grants from the American Cancer Society and National Institutes of Health.

Carbone is from a family of physicians in Italy, where he received his medical degree from the Medical School of Rome La Sapienza.

He earned a doctorate degree in human pathology through a combined program of the Medical School of Rome and National Institutes of Health in the United States.

He has a medical license as an anatomic pathologist. His research lab will be in the new Biomedical Research Building in the John A. Burns School of Medicine's Kakaako complex.

Source: Hawaii - Star Bulletin