Howard I. Scher, MD, is an emeritus member of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). A board-certified medical oncologist, Dr. Scher is an expert in treating men with advanced prostate cancer. He served as Chief of the Genitourinary Oncology Service at the Sidney Kimmel Center for Urologic and Prostate Cancers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) for 25 years.
As service chief, Dr. Scher led a team dedicated to the treatment of prostate cancer, testicular cancer, bladder and upper-tract urothelial cancer, and kidney cancer. He encouraged collaboration between scientific research and clinical practice, so that promising scientific discoveries were used to develop new diagnostic tests and treatments for patients.
Dr. Scher’s own research focused on three critical areas: developing treatments that targeted specific signaling pathways that contribute to prostate cancer growth, developing non-invasive methods to determine whether these agents are working, and improving the way drugs are evaluated in the clinic.
As head of the Biomarker Development Program, Dr. Scher worked with a team to evaluate promising new technologies to capture and characterize circulating tumor cells from a routine blood draw. This helped determine a patient’s prognosis and whether a specific treatment was working.
As a member of the Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials Consortium, Dr. Scher led an international effort to standardize development of the design, conduct, and analysis of phase 2 clinical trials in prostate cancer. This helped to better evaluate new therapeutics and assess their effectiveness using novel imaging modalities.
These recommendations were incorporated and contributed to the successful development of the FDA-approved drugs, zytiga and enzalutamide. Both these agents target androgen receptor signaling and were shown to prolong the survival of men with castration-resistant disease.
Dr. Scher also developed the Clinical States Model of Prostate Cancer Progression. This model categorizes the clinical spectrum of prostate cancer from diagnosis to metastasis. It also provides a framework to access and reassess a patient’s prognosis as the disease evolves over time and guides management of the disease.
Dr. Scher was the principal investigator of the MSK Prostate Cancer SPORE (Specialized Program on Research Excellence) sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and Principal Investigator of the Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials Consortium, a 13-center research collaborative led by MSK and funded by the Department of Defense and the Prostate Cancer Foundation.
A big part of this effort was to design and conduct clinical trials of promising new approaches. Since 2006, the consortium facilitated more than 120 new early-phase studies related to prostate cancer. This ultimately led to the development of more effective treatments for prostate cancers of all stages and the discovery of ways to prevent prostate cancer.
Dr. Scher was the D. Wayne Calloway Chair in Urologic Oncology and a Professor of Medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College. He received many awards, including the Donald S. Coffey-Prostate Cancer Foundation Physician-Scientist Award, the Distinguished Alumnus Award, and the 2023 Giants of Cancer Care Award.
Serving on numerous editorial and scientific advisory boards, Dr. Scher has been reviewer for many journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Science and Translational Medicine, Lancet Oncology, and the Journal of Clinical Oncology. He has written extensively and published over 500 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals and coauthored the textbook Principals and Practice of Genitourinary Oncology.