Heather Curtis
January 2014
WASHINGTON – In a small conference room in Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center a clean-cut 67-year-old-man in a perfectly pressed suit stands in front of a dry erase board with remnants of years of writing all over it. He quickly scribbles charts and equations on the board that are incomprehensible to the layperson but not to his two colleagues seated at the small table in front of him.
The man tells his colleagues something he always stresses.
“It’s the basic thing that if you ask nature a question and you get back the wrong answer, nature doesn’t lie. It’s the right answer, wrong question.”
This is Dr. V. Craig Jordan – maverick, pioneer and revolutionary whose research with the drug tamoxifen has helped save the lives of millions of women battling breast cancer.
Despite his passion for pharmacology and dozens of accolades for his tamoxifen research, Dr. Jordan’s life could have taken a very different turn as a career military man like his father and grandfather. Born in Texas but raised in England, Dr. Jordan’s American father met his English mother during World War II. Dr. Jordan’s father went to D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge with the Army Corps of Engineers. His grandfather served as an army officer in both World War I and World War II.
Not surprisingly, Dr. Jordan felt a duty to serve.He started out as a reserve officer in the British Army in 1969 and ending his service in the reserves when he was 50-years-old.
“My family gave me values of national service and aiding society,” ‘Dr. Jordan said.
Unlike his father and grandfather, Jordan didn’t spend his entire career in the service. He found another way to aide society by pursuing his life-long passion: pharmacology. When he was 11-years-old and living in England his father bought him a chemistry set. By the time he was 13, his mother allowed him to turn his room into a lab where he experimented with chemicals he bought from the local pharmacist, something he admits would never be allowed today.
“Things would get out of hand. I’d throw them out the window. The curtains would go on fire. I had chlorine poisoning,” Dr. Jordan said with a chuckle.
At 16-years-old he nearly got kicked out of school for not being a good student, but his mother interceded and said she would make sure he did better from then on.
“I think failure’s good at an early age because it really wakes you up. You’re about to be a coal miner and that’s not the plan,” Dr. Jordan said.
At 17-years-old Dr. Jordan was teaching chemistry in a school in England when the career’s master said he should consider going to university. He applied and was accepted into Leeds University.
“That changed my world,” he said adding that at that time going to university wasn’t a right but rather a privilege bestowed upon a chosen few.
In the 1960’s Dr. Jordan started working with anti-estrogens, which were originally studied as a form of contraceptive but failed at that purpose. Despite what others viewed as a setback, Dr. Jordan had a visionary idea – to turn this failed contraceptive into a drug for the treatment of breast cancer. By the 1970’s Dr. Jordan figured out long-term tamoxifen therapy was effective in treating breast cancer.
“Everybody said I was crazy. I’m known for being crazy,” Dr. Jordan said. Others even told him there was something wrong with him. But Dr. Jordan’s passion and work continued.
Today the standard of care is five years of Tamoxifen. Some breast cancer patients take the drug for ten years. But this long-term treatment presents a problem – patients given such treatment become resistant to the drug. In this unique form of drug resistance tumors grow because of the tamoxifen not in spite of it.
Tamoxifen Team member and Research Assistant Professor Dr. Ping Fan said the group has had several discoveries to understand Tamoxifen resistance and is working to publish papers discussing them.
If these resistant patients are given low doses of estrogen, about 30 percent of them see a drastic reduction in their tumors, according to Assistant Professor Surojeet Sengupta who works on Jordan’s Tamoxifen Team.
“What we’re doing is so enchanting that you don’t want to leave because you want to know the end of the story because every time we discover something we move a step forward in studying tamoxifen resistant cells,” said Philipp Maximum, M.D., Ph.D., who has been working on the Tamoxifen Team since 2006.
Ifeyinwa Obiorah has been on Jordan’s team for the last three years and said she wouldn’t work anywhere else.
“It makes me feel that I’m contributing, giving back to society because I like research in the sense that you can actually help in, contribute in something, especially in cancer research,” Obiorah said.
But this life-saving research is far from being simple and isn’t always as satisfying as the team would hope. Graduate student Elizabeth Sweeney said knowing the work will eventually save lives gives the team the motivation to keep going, despite difficulties and failed theories.
“It puts it in perspective when you are working really hard and you think ‘Why am I doing this?’ There’s an actual really good answer for why we’re doing it, so it’s motivating,” Sweeney said.
Standing in front of Dr. Maximov and Assistant Professor Sengupta, Dr. Jordan continues to scribble on the dry erase board, marker in one hand, stained paper coffee cup in the other. It’s about noon, and Dr. Jordan has been up since 4 a.m. and in the lab since 6. Dr. Maximov leans over the table and shares one of his recent discoveries. Dr. Jordan tells him what his next step should be and ends the meeting.
Dr. Jordan then goes back to his office. He flips through a large bound leather planner to remind himself of his travel schedule. It’s full of conferences around the country and overseas. Despite all of his speaking engagements and meetings, he reserves holidays to spend with his two daughters, four granddaughters and grandson in Salt Lake City and Minneapolis-St. Paul. He also faithfully visits his 92-year-old mother in England every two months.
His mother who always had faith in Dr. Jordan and his work wound up being saved by tamoxifen after she had breast cancer. Her persistence to make sure her son could do his science literally saved her life.
“This woman did everything she could because she had an unusual child. She had somebody she could put in a bedroom and he came out with chemistry,” Dr. Jordan said.
He later added, “My mother would have been long dead if she had breast cancer in 1970. She would not have survived five years.”
Despite having saved his mother’s life and the lives of millions of other women, the 67-year-old Dr. Jordan plans on continuing his fruitful career for another decade.
“My hope is I will be able to finish what I started in women’s health back in 1972 as a young independent investigator,” Dr. Jordan said adding he feels his best research ideas have yet to be realized.
© 2015 Heather M. Curtis ALL RIGHTS RESERVED