Developing New Medicine In Turkey

Dr Ayhan Çavdar developed the practice of pediatric oncology in Turkey.

Dr Ayhan Çavdar, two-time President of the Turkish Academy of Sciences and the leading pediatric oncologist in her country, has fulfilled her lifelong dream to make a difference through medicine. Under her guidance, what began as a single bed for admission of a pediatric oncology patient at the Medical School of Ankara University has grown into twin pediatric oncology centers that treat young patients with the best medicine available, and a research center that is carrying on vital scientific work in the battle against cancer.

Çavdar, who first trained in pediatric medicine at Ankara University, pursued additional training in hematology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She spent four years in the United States as a clinical and research fellow, returning to her native Turkey in 1961. There, she served as chief resident in the department of pediatrics at Ankara University, working to build her subspecialty and teaching other physicians how to treat young oncology patients with new chemotherapeutic agents. "I had great difficulties to convince the director of the department and my colleagues that I should work and take care of patients in my subspecialty since there was no other staff member who had subspecialty training at that time," she says. Little more than twenty years later, the Ministry of Health accepted pediatric oncology as a subspecialty.

When she returned to Turkey from the USA in 1961, she recognized that treatments of pediatric malignancies through chemotherapy were seriously deficient. She utilized the connections she had made in the United States to improve the options available to Turkish children and their families. "I joined the research projects in collaboration with the USA's National Cancer Institute, and obtained new drugs which were introduced for the first time in my country. In addition to this, through numerous contacts with the Ministry of Health, chemotherapeutic agents were officially imported in the following years."

Most of the new chemotherapeutic agents for childhood cancers were used for the first time by her pediatric oncology group in Turkey. Chemotherapy regimens employed such drugs as vincristine, daunomycin, adriamycin, cytarabine and idarubicin, with great success. Çavdar also initiated chemotherapy regimens using MOPP, VAMP, ABVD, and OPPA for the first time in her country. Her group also was the first to demonstrate that malignant lymphomas were the second most common childhood tumors in Turkey, a statistic that still stands today.

She also is responsible for establishing the first research unit in pediatric oncology in 1975. This research unit, supported by the Turkish Scientific and Technical Research Council, produced several important professional papers that have been published in international journals such as Cancer, the American Journal of Pediatric Hematology Oncology, and Lancet, and has since grown into a Research Center now affiliated with Ankara University. This center, established in 1987, continues research activity in pediatric oncology in addition to the study of trace elements, particularly zinc, for their effectiveness in treating cancer and other diseases.

An international leader in her field, Çavdar has organized several symposia and congresses, including a Symposium on Acute Leukemias during the National Hematology Congress in 1975, the European-African Hematology Congress in 1977, the Pediatric Hodgkins Symposium in 1987, and the Symposium on Malignant Lymphomas in Childhood, in 1995.

submitted by M. Landskroener