WILLIAM J.M. HRUSHESKY

Senior Clinician Investigator Medical Oncology

Senior Consulting Oncologist

Senior Internal Medicine Attending Physician

Adjunct Professor, School of Public Health, USC

email: william.hrushesky@med.va.gov

WILLIAM J.M. HRUSHESKY is a senior clinician investigator at the WJB Dorn Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, an associate director of the South Carolina Cancer, a professor in the University of South Carolina’s School of Medicine’s Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and Anatomy, and an adjunct professor in the Norman J Arnold School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in Columbia, South Carolina.  Dr. Hrushesky received a B.A. with high honors in philosophy from Syracuse University Honors College in 1969, where his thesis was entitled "Man and Happiness" and an M.D. from the University of Buffalo Medical School in 1973, where he did experimental cancer research at Roswell Park Cancer Institute. He has trained at Johns Hopkins University, the National Cancer Institute and the University of Minnesota, where he was a tenured faculty member in the Departments of Medicine, Laboratory Medicine and Pathology and the Pathobiology and Biomedical Engineering graduate programs.  He has previously been DVA Network Two and Stratton Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center Senior Clinician Investigator and Professor of Medicine at Albany Medical College, a faculty member in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Chemical Engineering and the Albany College of Pharmacy's Department of Pharmaceutics. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of many scientific societies; he is a reviewer for many scientific and medical journals; on the editorial boards of several scientific journals; and consultant to a variety of drug delivery, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, venture capital firms and financial houses. He has given more than 200 invited lectures, many international; published more than 500 scientific articles, chapters or abstracts, holds several patents; is the founder of two corporations; is editor of several books and monographs. He is or has been consultant to the FDA, National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and The President's Cancer Panel in the areas of biological rhythms, women's health and women and drug development. He is or has been the recipient of basic research grants from the Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cancer Institute, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute as well as various medical device and pharmaceutical firms. Dr. Hrushesky is a founder of Medical Chronotherapeutics (timing medical treatments relative to endogenous human time structure). Dr. Hrushesky is a member of the Cosmos Club and his biography has been included in several editions of Who's Who. His research interests include the study of several important biological rhythms and especially of how these rhythms interact; drug delivery systems and particularly their temporal control; and solid tumor oncology.

Some of his discoveries and ongoing projects include:  the invention, development and reduction to practice of a quick non-invasive urinary test to predict kidney transplant rejection; characterization of the sole useful murine kidney cancer model (RENCA); development of the only reproducibly effective chemotherapy program for widespread kidney cancer; discovery that the toxicities, pharmacokinetics, maximum safely achievable dose intensities, and efficacy of several cancer therapies are meaningfully different depending upon when in the circadian cycle of cancer patients they are administered; completion of the first and pivotal trial of implantable programmable drug delivery technology for cancer therapy; improving the understanding of the biological consequences of physical changes induced in bioactive proteins when they contact biomedical device surfaces; a method and diagnostic device for non-invasively and precisely measuring aerobic cardiopulmonary performance and risk, through the compartmentalization of heart rate variability; discovering that the optimal menstrual cycle timing of breast cancer resection confers substantial potential survival advantage to each of the 65,000 U.S. and 240,000 premenopausal women worldwide who develop this disease every year; that the timing of cytotoxic chemotherapy within the mammalian fertility cycle determines the likelihood of subsequent fertility maintenance as well as the amount of bone marrow damage resultant from that therapy; that uterine cervical epithelial abnormalities discovered by pap smear occur and resolve rhythmically throughout the year; and that the host-cancer-treatment balance is meaningfully modulated throughout each year.