STAT innovation award goes to researcher behind Gleevec & Xtandi

For the inaugural year of the STAT Biomedical Innovation Award, we’ve chosen cancer researcher Dr. Charles Sawyers — whose accomplishments over a 34-year career include development of the blockbuster drug Gleevec. Sawyers, who is chair of the human oncology and pathogenesis program at Memorial Sloan Kettering, also helped invent the prostate cancer drug Xtandi. He’ll be accepting the award today at the STAT Summit in Cambridge, Mass.

Sawyers chatted with STAT’s Shraddha Chakradhar about his vision for the future of cancer care, the current political and financial challenges of biomedicine, and the things that he finds “unbelievably cool” about the field.