Leadership Spotlight: John C. Byrd, MD

This content originally appeared in the UPMC Health Discovery Report, in partnership with University of Pittsburgh.

When John C. Byrd, MD, reflects on cancer care, his perspective is grounded not only in decades of scientific achievement but also in personal experience.

Growing up in rural northeastern Arkansas, Dr. Byrd witnessed the challenges his mother, Carol, faced after her cancer diagnosis — traveling 75 miles each way for treatment. The strain of distance, layered onto the physical side effects and emotional toll of the disease, left a lasting impression. That experience, and losing her during his medical training, shaped his commitment to improving access to high-quality cancer care.

Today, as director of UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and associate vice chancellor for cancer affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Byrd leads a nationally recognized cancer program with that mission at its core.

Dr. Byrd’s path to medicine began in the laboratory. As an undergraduate, he studied chemistry and spent several years developing a potential treatment for malaria. Over time, however, he realized that although discovery was deeply fulfilling, he was equally drawn to the human side of medicine: the opportunity to see how new treatments could directly impact patients’ lives.

He went on to earn his medical degree from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and complete his training in internal medicine and hematology and oncology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Johns Hopkins University.

These experiences established the foundation for a career that bridges clinical care and translational research.

Over more than three decades, Dr. Byrd has built a distinguished career as both a physician-scientist and academic leader. At the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute at The Ohio State University, he spent more than 20 years on faculty and served as the founding director of the Division of Hematology, helping to grow it into a leading program in blood cancer research and care.

He later served as chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Medicine and chief of internal medicine at UC Health. There, he also acted as senior advisor to the University of Cincinnati Cancer Center, leading the development of its comprehensive blood cancer program. Across these roles, Dr. Byrd advanced a model that integrates scientific discovery, clinical trials, and patient-centered care.

Dr. Byrd has remained at the forefront of research, authoring more than 700 scientific publications and contributing to therapies that have transformed the treatment landscape for leukemia and related blood cancers.

This combination of experience is what drew him to UPMC Hillman Cancer Center.

“It was very clear to me that UPMC Hillman is at an inflection point,” Dr. Byrd said. “There’s an opportunity to bring exceptional care to patients within miles of where they live, while also advancing the kind of research that can change practice.”

A central priority for Dr. Byrd is strengthening the connection between discovery and care. He leads a translational research laboratory focused on chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and drug development in hematologic malignancies. Through decades of work in cancer drug development and longstanding collaborations across academia and industry, Dr. Byrd brings new molecules into early clinical testing at UPMC Hillman for a variety of blood cancers. Under his leadership, precision medicine–based approaches in hematologic malignancies will continue to expand at UPMC Hillman and its network sites.

More broadly, Dr. Byrd is advancing a comprehensive approach to cancer care, from prevention and early detection to survivorship, while expanding clinical trials, recruiting leading physician-scientists, and enhancing UPMC Hillman’s ability to serve patients both within the region and beyond. Over the next several years, Dr. Byrd hopes to strengthen cancer care across the lifespan by bridging pediatric cancer care at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh with UPMC Hillman through an adolescent–young adult oncology program and expanding the geriatric oncology program.

As he begins his tenure, Dr. Byrd sees significant opportunities ahead to not only advance scientific discovery but also to strengthen the partnerships that make innovation possible.

Q: What inspired you to pursue a career in medicine?

A: I didn’t know that I wanted to go into medicine initially. In college, I thought I wanted to be a chemist, and I spent three years developing a molecule intended for malaria treatment. As I headed into my junior year of college, I realized that, as a chemist, I could be actively involved in developing medicines that could help people, but ultimately, I would never get to see them through. And the idea of seeing things through really appealed to me, so I decided to go to medical school.

I didn’t like the pre-clinical classroom work that first year because it was mostly rote memorization. But in my second year, we got into pathology and understanding pharmacology, and then in my third year, we started on clinical medicine, and I loved it. When I started residency, I thought there was no chance I would go into research; I just wanted to practice medicine.

In 1991, my first year as an intern, I had a patient with CLL who’d gone on an investigational therapy called fludarabine, which was a new medicine. He was admitted with a type of pneumonia that wasn’t seen in CLL and AIDS patients who were coming into the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Caring for that patient — who would have passed away from his leukemia without the new medicine — really inspired me to pursue research.

Losing my own mother to cancer during my fellowship cemented that this was the path I wanted to go down. I decided to specialize in blood cancers, in part selfishly, because every solid tumor patient I saw after my mom died from cancer, I could see part of her in them, and that was hard.

Q: Why was this the right moment — and the right place — for you to lead UPMC Hillman Cancer Center?

A: It was very clear to me that UPMC Hillman is at an inflection point. The network concept Stanley Marks, MD, established with UPMC is truly incredible — we have phenomenal fundamental scientists, along with exceptional clinicians, who extend from the flagship at UPMC Shadyside throughout 80 locations across four U.S. states and three countries in Europe. This provided an exceptional opportunity to come in and be part of a team that delivers exceptional care through this network, both in active clinical trials and in translational work that leads to more clinical trials that can change practice.

Patients receiving care as close to home as possible — that’s very important to me. Growing up, my mother was diagnosed with cancer in the poorest county in the 49th poorest state, and she had to drive 75 miles one way for her blood tests and treatment. Along with the chemotherapy that she received, that really broke her.

Having the opportunity to lead a team that delivers the best care within miles of the patient and has the potential to change lives, both in regular treatment and in clinical trials, really motivated me. I saw the opportunity, and it was just too hard to pass up.

Q: What is your vision for the future of UPMC Hillman? What are your top priorities for advancing cancer research, patient care initiatives, and education in the community?

A: While UPMC Hillman already provides exceptional care, there are still opportunities to improve. We are building a continuum of care from pediatric to adult patients that incorporates not only appropriate treatment but also survivorship. We’re addressing issues that cancer survivors have, which can include complications of their therapy and surgeries, and preventing other cancers that may arise. We aim to make these improvements in a research-informed way so we can be confident that every intervention is making a difference.

In addition to survivorship care research, we want to strengthen the fundamental science and translate cancer research through early clinical trials to show what approaches are most effective. These types of clinical trials might bring people from across the country not only to benefit our region but also to receive the therapies discovered here.

What’s unique about our network is that as these studies become less complex and we learn more about the drugs, we can disseminate our findings to network physicians worldwide to rapidly improve cancer care for our patients.

I’d also like to see us approach cancer in a manner that either prevents it, which can happen through a variety of interventions, or detects it very early. There are numerous blood tests and other types of screenings that we can better utilize across all populations. There are underserved populations that don’t have access to these screenings, but by expanding access to these tools, we can prevent cancers before they become lethal and even prevent patients from having to receive therapy.

Q: What do you think UPMC Hillman is uniquely positioned to do in the next three to five years?

A: We have an incredible hub-and-spoke model that lets us take new ideas — perhaps a therapy that hasn’t been tested broadly — and run a definitive trial because our network is so large.

Many therapies or interventions developed in clinical trials aren’t immediately disseminated or widely adopted by the community. In my area of CLL, a good example is the oral medication venetoclax that’s not widely used, even though it’s approved for CLL therapy. Our network can be used to understand why dissemination is initially limited and to develop new approaches to expand access and use.

Finally, we have phenomenal basic scientists who are translating research findings into new treatment and prevention approaches used in the clinic. With the application of the great physicians we already have here, and by bringing in new physicians to help with clinical translation, I think we will see numerous treatments developed for different cancers that impact patients at UPMC Hillman and broadly.

Q: Is there a program or initiative that you’d love to be known for launching at UPMC Hillman?

A: Something I’m really excited about, and that we’re in the process of expanding, is building destination programs.

UPMC Hillman has dominated the cancer care market in western Pennsylvania; there’s no doubt about that. Less than 10% of our patients come from outside our regional network, and for all the great work we’re doing across different blood and solid tumor cancers, that really doesn’t make sense.

Part of this problem is that we’ve not emphasized destination programs that also facilitate patients coming from outside of the region for care. We need to set up our local ecosystem to support such referrals, where people can be evaluated by several specialists in a short period of time, get imaging and testing, and potentially even receive treatment, whether it’s surgery, radiation therapy, or targeted therapy that a medical oncologist or hematologist would give. We plan to start with several diseases that we’re really strong in, including head and neck cancers, gastrointestinal cancers, and hematologic malignancies, as well as our phase I program.

This enables us not only to disseminate our findings and raise the visibility of our great center among people in our region, but also nationally.

Refer a patient to UPMC Hillman Cancer Center.