Martin S. Tallman, MD

Memorial Sloan Kettering has a very distinguished history in the development of cutting-edge effective therapies for a wide variety of leukemias. Physicians at Memorial Sloan Kettering were among the first to develop effective therapies for patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, acute myeloid leukemia, and acute promyelocytic leukemia.

My clinical expertise is in treating patients with acute myeloid leukemia and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, but I also see patients with the chronic leukemias and myelodysplastic syndromes. My patient-care philosophy is to always imagine every patient as a member of my own family. With this in mind, I know I am going to make the best decisions I can for each patient.

Not all acute and chronic leukemias are alike. As we learn more about these diseases, we are discovering that leukemia cells from different patients have many different genetic abnormalities. My research has been focused on developing novel treatments using drugs that target specific molecular genetic abnormalities in leukemia cells. I am particularly sensitive to the importance of developing new treatments for older adults with leukemia, treatments that are more specific to the leukemia cell and therefore will be less toxic to normal cells so that patients have fewer side effects.

The Leukemia Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is in an excellent position to take advantage of new findings about the genetic underpinnings of leukemias and to develop new and better treatments. We have many physicians focused on leukemia who have the clinical and laboratory expertise to carry out clinical trials evaluating the effectiveness of new so-called targeted therapies, and we have developed a large number of clinical trials to evaluate these agents.

Before joining Memorial Sloan Kettering, I was on the faculty of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center for more than 20 years. There I directed the Leukemia Program, was Co-Director of the Hematologic Malignancy Program at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, and was Associate Chief of the Division of Hematology-Oncology. I completed fellowship training at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and University of Washington at Seattle.

I am an Associate Editor for the journal Blood, the major periodical publishing new information regarding leukemias and other blood disorders. I am currently Chair of the Leukemia Committee of the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG), one of only three large cooperative oncology groups in the US responsible for coordinating large clinical trials of new therapies for patients with all of the acute and chronic leukemias, myelodysplastic syndromes, and myeloproliferative neoplasms. The ECOG, in collaboration with other cooperative oncology groups in the US and around the world, has carried out many important clinical trials which have set the standard of care for the most effective treatment of many of the leukemias and related disorders.