Bertagnolli named to lead cancer institute

Harvard Medical School oncologist Monica Bertagnolli has been chosen to lead the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), President Joe Biden announced Aug. 10. She is the 16th person and first woman to lead the NCI, which, with a $6.9 billion budget, is the largest part of the National Institutes of Health. Her selection comes at a time when Biden has vowed to cut the death rate from cancer in half in the next 50 years, an initiative called the Cancer Moonshot. The president’s son Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015. “Dr. Bertagnolli’s decades of cancer research expertise around patient-centered care and her work to create more inclusive clinical trials will be instrumental as we accelerate the rate of research and innovation to fight cancer,” Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, says in a statement. In addition to her role at Harvard, Bertagnolli is a surgeon specializing in gastrointestinal cancers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.