1. 66
Oncology Times • December 10, 2014 • oncology-times.com
Profiles in Oncology Social Media:
Wafik El-Deiry, MD, PhD, @weldeiry
BY LOLA BUTCHER
Continuing Series
The full archive of Oncology Social
Media Profiles can be found in this
Collection on the OT website:
http://bit.ly/OT-OncologySocial
MediaProfiles
Twitter Bio (@weldeiry):
Translational Physician-
Scientist, Deputy Director at
Fox Chase Cancer Center
From his LinkedIn bio:
Wafik El-Deiry, MD,
PhD, FACP, an American
Cancer Society professor,
is Deputy Director and
Program Leader at Fox
Chase Cancer Center. Until
September 2014, he was
the Rose Dunlap Professor
of Medicine & Chief of
Hematology/Oncolog y
and Associate Director for
Translational Research at
Penn State Hershey Cancer
Institute. He discovered
p21(WAF1) as a p53 tar-get
gene that explained the
mammalian stress response.
This is the most highly cited
original work published in
Cell.
How did you come to be
interested in social media?
“I started using Twitter and LinkedIn
back in 2008, so I have been doing this
for more than six years now and seeing
the evolution.
“I have two main goals: One is to
learn about the newest developments
in my fields of interest, which tend to
be broad. I’m interested in new can-cer
therapy drugs; I’m ­interested
in
breakthroughs. I have a fairly large
professional network of others who
are active in social media that has
been accumulated over the last few
years. This network allows me to
very often learn about things that
I wouldn’t have easily come across.
Every single day, people are making
reference to or commenting about
something that they have learned that
they are excited about.
“My other goal is to disseminate
information in my areas of inter-est
to my network. I have tweeted at
a number of national meetings, in-cluding
the American Association
for Cancer Research meeting and
several American Society of Clinical
Oncology meetings.
“I do this for different reasons. One
is to stay focused on the presentations
and to try to succinctly summarize
the point that speakers are making
and share exciting new developments.
Also, over the last few years, I’ve been
involved in post-ASCO reviews after
certain meetings. I can go back and
review my tweets and that helps me
organize presentations and remember
the important things.
“Tweeting at meetings is like tak-ing
notes, but in addition, I am sharing
them with a bunch of other people. And
very often the tweets start discussions
on either LinkedIn or Twitter.
“One of the things that Twitter al-lows,
which is very cool, is the pos-sibility
of creating a newspaper from
inputs that you select. You can pick
30, 40, or 50 reliable inputs from
journals, the government, or who-ever
you trust, and there is a program
that creates a newspaper. So I started
a newspaper several years ago called
The Cancer News Daily. That lets
me go back and review what my en-tire
network has been talking about
and reporting about, and
it’s very informative. It’s
yet another way to kind of
find out about things that I
may otherwise have missed.
Maybe they happened 15
hours ago, but they were
still captured in this news-paper
format.”
How do you
use LinkedIn?
“I started a group in
LinkedIn called the p53
Community. People who are
interested in the p53 tumor
suppressor are diehards;
they love p53. Many people
out there are spending their
lives studying p53, and this
group now has more than
800 members online.
“Several years ago,
I was organizing the
15th International p53
Workshop, which was scheduled for
2010. And it occurred to me that it
would be great to have an online com-munity,
so I invited some of the leaders
of the field to join the group and also
serve as moderators. People who are
interested in particular topics eventu-ally
find groups like this. Every single
day there are two or three people who
want to join.
“The vast majority are people I
would have never encountered if we
didn’t have this online community.
The things that are talked about on this
particular group include papers about
p53 that get published in high-profile
journals or new functions attributed to
the p53 protein.
“It’s a very nice forum for doing
that. I would say it still continues to
be a work in progress. Has it met its
potential? I don’t think so. The group
is still growing. Many of the members
are not particularly engaged, although
they may be reading the updates.
Perhaps the group hasn’t measured up
to what they expected, but, you know,
every member can also contribute
and make the group what they want it
to be.”
What’s the Personalizing
Cancer Therapy group
on LinkedIn?
“I started that one two years ago be-cause,
on my own career path, I be-came
very interested in personalizing
cancer therapy. Over a period of time, I
developed some concepts about how to
personalize cancer therapy in my own
“I have two main social-media
goals: (1) to learn about the newest
developments in my fields of interest;
and (2) to disseminate information in
my areas of interest to my network.”
continued on page 67

2. 67
Oncology Times • 12/10/14
CML: Urgent Call to Focus on Improving
Compliance
BY ROBERT H. CARLSON
NEW YORK—Oncologists are
failing their patients by not
emphasizing the importance
of oral-therapy compli-ance
said a speaker here at the National
Comprehensive Cancer Network’s
Annual Congress on Hematologic
Malignancies.
WAFIK EL-DEIRY
Continued from page 66
area of specialization, which is colorec-tal
cancer. I wanted to share these ideas
with a community of others who are
interested in personalized medicine or
precision medicine—not just to share
the ideas, but also to get their input, and
to have some sort of a forum for the
field to grow.
“I started the group as a way to dis-cuss
this very broad and emerging field,
and it has taken off very nicely, with
now more than 500 members. When I
started it, I didn’t invite many people
at all. I have sometimes been surprised
that such and such person from indus-try
or academia was actually interested
and requested to be a member of this
group. I am delighted to see that. Like
the other group, there is no advertising,
no promotion. It’s basically that people
find it.
“There have been some very inter-esting
discussions involving geneti-cists
and clinicians and others. Press
releases about developments in the
field often generate comments, or
somebody’s idea about where the field
is going.”
How do you see social
media evolving?
“Many more oncologists have become
engaged over the last two or three years.
It’s been great to watch the societies re-ally
start to promote social media for a
variety of uses, including asking ques-tions
at national meetings as well as dis-seminating
information.
“I still believe that the vast majority
of oncologists are not paying attention
to this. Over time, I think the younger
people will be doing this. But there’s re-ally
no reason why more of my colleagues
couldn’t become more engaged in this
and look into what this can do.
“As an example, can social media
use help optimize or increase public
awareness of clinical protocols or
emerging therapeutics, and therefore
improve clinical trial enrollment? It
hasn’t happened yet [Ed: Although Anas
Younes, MD, has had success with this—
OT 9/25/10 issue], but if it does, then
that would add value for our cancer
centers.” O
T
“We don’t
need a measure
of ­response;
we
need a measure
of ­compliance,”
said Jerald P. Radich,
MD, a Member of the Clinical Research
Division of Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research Center and Associate Professor
of Medical Oncology at the University of
Washington School of Medicine.
Radich’s topic was molecular moni-toring
in CML, but when he touched on
compliance he called non-compliance
“an enormous failure of the system, be-cause
most of the response is driven by
adherence.”
He cited the ADAGIO (Adherence
Assessment with Glivec: Indicators
and Outcomes) study with data on
continued on page 68