Inspired by the doctors she met during her residency training, Janice P. Dutcher, MD, became involved in her profession during a time when new advances in medicine were still being discovered. Since 1998, she has served as a professor in medicine at New York Medical College and the co-founder and associate director of the Cancer Research Foundation (CRF), which focuses on rarer “orphan diseases” such as leukemia, lymphoma renal cell cancer and melanoma. The CRF specifically supports research into familial hematologic malignancies and investigates associations between these malignancies and other tumor types. To that end, it continues to support the Familial Hematologic Malignancy Registry, which now has over 700 families enrolled, and continues to seek and document new families and pedigrees with the assistance of collaborating physicians, genetic counselors and patients.
Dr. Dutcher began her career at Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago as an intern from 1975 to 1976 and resident from 1976 to 1978. She then joined the NCI Baltimore Cancer Research Center, serving as a clinical associate from 1978 to 1981 and senior investigator from 1981 to 1982, and later was an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore for one year. Moving to New York, she joined the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, moving up the ranks from assistant professor to roles such as co-director of advances in cancer treatment research, associate professor, and full professor. Serving a decade as the associate director of Comprehensive Cancer Center clinical affairs and director of oncology apheresis at the Montefiore Wakefield Division, Dr. Dutcher went on to become the division’s oncology site director from 2009 to 2010 and director of the immunotherapy program in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s from 2010 to 2012.
In addition to this tenure, Dr. Dutcher has served on the ECOG-ACRIN publications committee since 2000 and on the advisory board of the ECOG Foundation since 2010. She has also co-chaired the medical oncology section of the NIH Renal Cancer Task Force for the last four years. Serving on a number of other boards and committees throughout her career, Dr. Dutcher thought medicine was something that she has always had a passion for since she was 10 years old. She read a book about the first woman doctor, and that is when she decided that she wanted to become a doctor because it was a great combination of science and people.
Prior to the start of her impressive career, Dr. Dutcher pursued a formal education at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, earning a Bachelor of Arts, with honors, in 1971. She then matriculated at the University of California Davis, where she obtained an MD in 1975. In addition to these academic honors, Dr. Dutcher is a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Medical Oncology and is a licensed medical practitioner in the states of New York and Maryland. During this time, she also served as a commissioned officer with the U.S. Public Health Service from 1978 to 1982.
Active in literature, Dr. Dutcher has been a section editor for Leukemia since 2010, previously serving in the same position for “Neoplastic Diseases of the Blood” in 1996 and “Chronic Leukemia” and “Current Treatment Options in Oncology” from 2000 to 2006. The editor of the “Handbook of Hematology/Oncology Emergencies” in 1987 and “Modern Transfusion Therapy” in 1990, she was an editorial board member for Medical Oncology, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, and the Journal of Clinical Pharmaceuticals. Additionally, Dr. Dutcher has contributed myriad articles to professional publications, including Blood, Leukemia, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the Journal of Immunotherapy, Clinical Cancer Research, and the American Cancer Society.
A fellow of the American College of Physicians, Dr. Dutcher keeps updated on trends in her field through her affiliations with numerous related organizations such as the European Society for Medical Oncology and the American Association of Blood Banks, among many others. In honor of her accomplishments, she received the Beecham Award in Hematology from the Southern Blood Club in 1983 and the Henry C. Moses Clinical Research Award from Montefiore Medical Center in 1989. Likewise, she was given the Outstanding Alumnus Award by her graduate alma mater in 1989 and was named an Outstanding Young Investigator by the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group in 1993. A recipient of many grants, Dr. Dutcher has been listed in several editions of various Who’s Who publications.