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Health Care Hero Physician: Dr. ROBERT STUART
By Holly Fisher
Special Projects Editor
When Dr. Robert K. Stuart started his medical career in the 1970s, cancer was a hidden disease.
People didn’t talk about cancer. And it was regarded as a disease to be treated with surgery—radiation and chemotherapy were used only as a last resort.
Medical times have changed. And Stuart has had a front-row seat at the breakthroughs that have taken place in the fields of hematology and oncology.
Stuart was accepted to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where research in treatments like bone marrow transplants was just starting more than three decades ago.
“At (Johns) Hopkins, I was inspired by a group of doctors,” Stuart said. “They were like the people who climb Mount Everest without oxygen. I was captivated by that attitude.”
So Stuart began his elective work in oncology, where important medical changes were coming to the university specifically and to cancer research.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon launched the War on Cancer, setting aside $100 million to create national cancer centers. Johns Hopkins received some of that funding for a new facility. Again, Stuart was there to witness the progress.
Stuart became a professor of oncology and medicine at Johns Hopkins before coming to the Medical University of South Carolina in the mid-1980s. Stuart was the first certified oncologist on the MUSC faculty. He performed the first bone marrow transplant in South Carolina in 1987 and was actively involved in the development of the Hollings Cancer Center, even hand delivering the proposal to Sen. Fritz Hollings’ office.
In 1997, Stuart took a break from MUSC for a four-year stint as chairman of the Department of Oncology at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
There he helped the hospital transition from inpatient to outpatient chemotherapy treatment. He also aided in the facility’s shift from its reliance on Western leadership to local, Saudi leadership.
Stuart later returned to MUSC, where he has since remained as a professor of medicine in the hematology/oncology division. He also leads the clinical research of the Hollings Cancer Center’s Malignant Hematology Program.
Throughout his career, Stuart’s life has been touched by cancer as he worked with patients to treat their disease. Yet it has been Stuart’s personal cancer encounters that have given him an even deeper understanding of how cancer impacts people.
In 1991, Stuart was diagnosed with kidney cancer and treated with surgery. While he and his wife were in Saudi Arabia, she was diagnosed with leukemia and received a bone marrow transplant.
At this stage of his career, Stuart continues to treat patients while staying focused on clinical research. He is working on a clinical drug trial to test a compound, thought to make standard leukemia treatments more effective without adding another level of toxicity.
He believes strongly in what research can do. A lapel pin on his lab coat reads, “Cancer
clinical trials bring hope.”
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