100 Questions & Answers About Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumor (GIST)

Ronald P. DeMatteo, MD, serves as Vice Chair of the Depart-ment of Surgery, Chief of the Division of General Surgical Oncology, and Director of the General Surgical Oncology Fellowship Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Cornell Medical School. He did his general surgery training at the University of Pennsylvania and a surgical oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He maintains a busy clinical practice and has performed several hundred major resections for cancer in the past five years. He has been the principal author or a co-author on numerous clinical research projects and chapters relating to hepatobiliary disease. He has lectured and has taught several postgraduate courses in this country and in Europe. Dr. DeMatteo is recognized as an international expert in gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST). He is the principal investigator of two multicenter trials. He has lectured in this country and in Europe on the treatment of patients with GIST. He has been a member of the consensus panels here and in Europe to establish treatment guidelines in GIST.Marina Symcox, PhD is a cancer survivor and cofounder of the patient support group GIST Support International (www.gistsupport.org). She received her doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Oklahoma, where she also studied mutant protein kinases in her post-graduate research. In 1997, she was diagnosed with advanced terminal Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumor. After spending months in hospice during 2000 and coming close to death, she became one of the first GIST patients to be treated in a clinical trial with the investigational drug “STI-571,” now known as the breakthrough drug Gleevec. Having a remarkable recovery on Gleevec, Marina lives near Tulsa, Oklahoma with her husband and children, and works as a part-time laboratory instructor at the University of Tulsa.George D. Demetri, MD, works at the Sarcoma Center Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA.