Thomas Lynch has spent 23 years at the renowned Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center pushing the boundaries of personalized treatments for lung cancer, the largest cause of cancer deaths. When he becomes director of the Yale Cancer Center in April, he plans to instil the culture that yielded such success at MGH. See CV

Yale is where Lynch received his undergraduate degree in biology, and later his MD. His proclivity for finding life-saving treatments had come from watching his father, a haematologist, struggle to treat haematologic malignancy in patients. At Yale Cancer Center, he forged an interest in translational research, including using animal models to study the mechanisms of toxicity of the cancer drug bleomycin. “I wanted to do something important in medicine, and I don't think any event is more profound than receiving a diagnosis of a dreaded disease like cancer,” says Lynch.

As an oncology fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 1989, Lynch pursued drug treatments for lung cancer, as few treatments of value existed at the time. He helped pioneer personalized medicine, using molecular testing for genetic mutations to target lung-cancer therapies.

Happy at MGH, he had never answered enquiries from recruiters until the Yale position emerged last autumn. “Yale is one of the nation's great science cultures, yet its cancer centre is currently ranked 29th,” says Lynch. But Yale administrators convinced him that the centre could foster a first-class clinical-research programme. Not only will the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven Hospital open this October, but Lynch will also oversee a new institute for cancer biology at Yale's west campus.

Bruce Chabner, clinical director at MGH, is getting used to his colleagues leaving MGH to help build other centres. Lynch is the second to leave in the past year. “We've become a model for how new centres can effectively organize on a disease-specific basis across multiple departments,” Chabner says. He predicts that Lynch will easily coordinate Yale's efforts.

To facilitate research in the face of an increasingly expensive regulatory environment, Lynch plans to streamline tumour-sample collection and novel tumour therapies. He says the hallmark of the Yale Cancer Center will be rapid genotyping of patients to guide therapies — the key, he says, to providing the best care possible.

“This is about recognizing the value of keeping patients at the centre of research,” says Lynch.