Dr. Anthony Tolcher has spent nearly 40 years looking after patients, and today his compassion and drive to care for patients remains as strong as the day he graduated from medical school.
With a targeted interest in the development of new anticancer agents and a focus in molecular genetic targets for cancer therapy, Dr. Tolcher founded NEXT Oncology with a vision to grow the program’s infrastructure worldwide.
“Cancer has no geographic boundaries,” Dr. Tolcher said. “One of the continuing challenges has been that cancer research has been conducted in silos. Our goal has always been to break down those barriers and bring potentially life-saving therapies to cancer patients, regardless of where they live.”
Dr. Tolcher’s goal is to collaborate with the best and brightest researchers and physicians across the globe to bring the newest agents and therapies to cancer patients through clinical trials. He is optimistic about what the future holds for cancer patients, and has said, “we are going to make cancer treatable or curable in my lifetime.”
In fact, NEXT researchers have had direct involvement with the development of more than two dozen anticancer drugs in the past two decades that have obtained Federal Drug Administration approval for patients with advanced cancer and are in present use today.
The recent expansions into the state of Virginia and the opening of two clinics in Spain are steps in a series of planned collaborations worldwide to bring NEXT Oncology’s proprietary model of Phase I clinical trials to cities all over the U.S. as well as other parts of the world.
Dr. Tolcher is grateful he has found himself in a career that he truly loves and enjoys. His greatest pleasure is seeing patients respond to therapy and share in their joy and triumphs – and why he became a doctor.
He is a graduate of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He performed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Toronto and his fellowship in oncology at the University of British Columbia. He followed this with a research fellowship at the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland. Before founding NEXT Oncology, he served as the Director of Clinical Research at START for 10 years. Dr. Tolcher was the Director of Clinical Research at the Cancer Therapy and Research Center (CTRC) in San Antonio from 2003 until April, 2007, and prior to that served as the Associate Director at the CTRC’s Institute for Drug Development from 1999 to 2003. He was a fellow at the National Cancer Institute.