The American Italian Cancer Foundation continues to sponsor the work of Italian scientists through its Post-doc Research Fellowship program. Since 1983, the New York-based organization has supported hundreds of scientists in the field of cancer biology and treatment.
This year, one of the 13 fellows in the AICF program is Remo Alessandris, MD, who is conducting research in liver cancer treatments. According to the AICF’s website, Alessandris’ work focuses on “elucidating the prevalence and significance of ecDNA-mediated oncogene amplifications in cholangiocarcinoma using cutting-edge techniques.” In layman’s terms? “My project is focused on translating results from the lab to the clinical situation regarding the patient,” he tells La Voce.
AICF Fellows are scattered across top medical centers in and around New York, from Memorial Sloan Kettering, where Dr. Alessandris works, to Weill Cornell Medical Center and Yale School of Medicine. Coming off of a residency in General Surgery at University of Padua in Italy, Alessandris is honing his skills here on hepatic arterial infusion, a cutting-edge treatment which he says is not yet being done in Italy and is available in only a couple of cancer treatment centers in the European Union overall. The process involves inserting a catheter and pump in the stomach area, with a line feeding chemotherapy drugs directly to the parts of the liver affected by cancer.
“It brings medicine right to the liver, which allows us to both increase the dose of medicine and reduce systemic collateral effects,” he explains. One of the biggest drawbacks of traditional chemotherapy treatments are these “systemic” effects, as its introduction via an IV line spreads the drugs throughout the body, negatively affecting otherwise healthy parts that don’t need it, and possibly leaving lasting damage. Alessandris says that the hepatic arterial infusion technique has prolonged the life expectancy patients with liver cancer by five years.
Alessandris did not have any family members in the medical field or mentors growing up who might have inspired him, but rather, saw medicine as a chance to self-actualize early on and ran with it. “I started thinking about the field of medicine late in high school, I took it as a challenge,” he explains. “Then, gradually, through my studies I became passionate about it, especially surgery.” He found that the work appealed to the tinkerer in him, as “someone who likes fixing things, putting them in their right place.” He describes applying that hands-on intuition to cancer treatment as its own reward. “There’s a great satisfaction, as far as helping the patient, in bringing them into the operating room, and then speaking to them afterwards to say ‘we got rid of it.’”
