Azra Raza

Professor of Medicine, Director of MDS Center; Columbia University, New York

Dr. Azra Raza is the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and Director of the MDS Center at Columbia University. A practicing oncologist seeing 30-40 cancer patients weekly, she also directs a basic cancer research lab with hundreds of original publications in high profile journals. She met with President Clinton designing Breakthrough Developments in Science and Technology and with VP Joe Biden for the Cancer Moonshot initiative. Her latest book, THE FIRST CELL And the human costs of pursuing cancer to the last was published in October 2019. Her life is devoted to early detection and prevention of cancer.

Dr. Azra Raza is the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and Director of the MDS Center at Columbia University in New York. Previously, she was the Chief of Hematology Oncology and the Gladys Smith Martin Professor of Oncology at the University of Massachusetts. She is considered an international authority on pre-leukemia (MDS) and acute leukemia and is one of those rare physician-scientists who divide their time equally between caring for patients and supervising a state-of- the-art basic research lab which is well-funded by multiple large grants. Dr. Raza started collecting blood and marrow samples on her patients in 1984 and now her Tissue Bank, the largest and oldest in the country with >60,000 samples, is considered a unique national treasure.

Dr. Raza has published her original clinical and basic research comprising over 300 peer reviewed manuscripts in high profile journals like Nature, NEJM, Cell, Molecular Cell, Cancer Research, Blood, Leukemia. She has published >1000 abstracts, dozens of book chapters and edited a book devoted to MDS.
She is a sought after speaker in scientific circles and the recipient of numerous awards including The Hope Award in Cancer Research 2012 (shared with the Nobel Laureate Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn). She was named as one of the 100 Women Who Matter by Newsweek Pakistan. Dr. Raza is a member of the Founder Group designing Breakthrough Developments in Science and Technology with President Bill Clinton and met with Vice President Joe Biden to discuss the Cancer Moonshot initiative at his residence at the Naval Observatory in 2015.
She is the author of The First Cell: And the human costs of pursuing cancer to the last published by Basic Books, October 2019.
In addition to her scientific accomplishments, Dr. Raza is a dedicated reader of Urdu literature, the co-author of GHALIB: Epistemologies of Elegance. Dr. Raza believes that the best way to “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world” is by promoting and publicizing the achievements of humanity in science, art, and literature. She was married to the late Harvey D. Preisler, Director, Rush University Cancer Center in Chicago and has a daughter Sheherzad Raza Preisler who also lives in New York.

Quote

"Treating cancer as one disease is like treating Africa as one country. Even in the same patient, it is not the same disease at two sites or at two different points in time. Vicious and self-obsessed, it learns to grow faster and become stronger, smarter, and more dangerous with each successive division. It is a perfect example of intelligence at a molecular level, able to perceive its environment and take actions that maximize its chances of survival. A feedback loop, using past performance to improve its efficiency, forms the basis of its seemingly purposeful behavior. It learns to divide more vigorously with time, invading new spaces, mutating to turn the expression of pertinent genes off and on, enhancing its fitness to the landscape, optimizing seed-soil cooperation. We see this metamorphosis in front of our eyes when treatment causes regression of the tumor in one area just as fresh lesions crop up in another, bearing a novel genotype, selected precisely because of the refractoriness to the administered therapy"

(…The First Cell (page 10))

The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last

In The First Cell, Azra Raza offers a searing account of how both medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer, how we can do better, and why we must. A lyrical journey from hope to despair and back again, The First Cellexplores cancer from every angle: medical, scientific, cultural, and personal. Indeed, Raza describes how she bore the terrible burden of being her own husband’s oncologist as he succumbed to leukemia. Like When Breath Becomes Air, The First Cell is no ordinary book of medicine, but a book of wisdom and grace by an author who has devoted her life to making the unbearable easier to bear.
Myelodysplastic Syndromes & Secondary Acute Myelogenous Leukemia: Directions for the New Millennium

Myelodysplastic syndromes are to the bone marrow what pneumonia is to the lungs; the response of an organ to a variety of etiologic insults like aging, toxic exposure, infections and auto-immunity. Among infectious causes alone, pneumonia could be the result of a variety of possible pathogens including bacterial, viral, tuberculous or fungal agents. Similarly, MDS cannot be treated as a single disease. Attempts to harness the inherent complexity of MDS by devising `classifications’ which group the various syndromes as one disease is as misguided as saying that a pneumonia is not infectious because it did not respond to antibiotics. Progress in the field will occur faster when we re-analyze this premise. Therefore, until a clearer picture of the disease emerges it is best to treat each of the MDS syndromes as a separate entity. Having no classification is better than a misleading one.

Cancer research has been notable for its periodic cycles of promise and hope, followed by defeat and disappointments. It is not that there is no solution, but that the problem has not been identified precisely. This book is our attempt to define the most crucial questions related to MDS that need to be addressed immediately through logic, analysis and rigorous experimentation. If the emerging problems appear daunting, then instead of being overwhelmed by them, we should follow the advice of the great 20th century thinker Antonio Gramsci, `pessimism of the intellect must be faced with the optimism of will’.
Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance

Blurb from the back cover:

“Few poets in translation can express the sorrowful beauty of human nostalgia so powerfully as Ghalib. In this inspired commentary upon the great poet’s way of knowing, there is a continuous sense of deep love for the text and a kind of ecstasy of apprehension. A reader, who like myself lacks Urdu, cannot do better than to possess the work of Azra Raza and Sara Suleri Goodyear.”

Harold Bloom

Azra Raza

Professor of Medicine, Director of MDS Center; Columbia University, New York

Quote

Books

The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last

Myelodysplastic Syndromes & Secondary Acute Myelogenous Leukemia: Directions for the New Millennium

Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance

Publications

Complete list of publications

Websites