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The Evolution of Leadership: A Candid Conversation With Dr Louis Weiner
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Released: March 25, 2026

John Marshall
John Marshall, MD

         

 
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The Evolution of Leadership: A Candid Conversation With Dr Louis Weiner

John Marshall, MD: Hey, everybody. John Marshall, Oncology Unscripted, and as you know, I get to interview the smartest people in the world for this part of my day, and there is no smarter person than—also my very good friend and my boss and my colleague, Dr. Louis Weiner. And so let me introduce you guys to the guy I’ve been spending the last two decades with here at Lombardi.

Dr. Louis Weiner, our cancer center director. Lou, thank you for joining us today for Oncology Unscripted.

Louis Weiner, MD: Thank you, John. It’s a real pleasure to be here with you today. Although I’m confused. You said you were interviewing the smartest people in the world, so I don’t think I qualify.

John Marshall, MD: Oh, no.

Louis Weiner, MD: I’m really happy to be here.

John Marshall, MD: We are so glad you’re here and joining us. And you know what really spawned all of this is, you know, I just got back from a trip of a lifetime to go to the Galapagos and was thinking a lot about science of the past 200 years ago, what Darwin could know, what he could write about 200 years ago without the advantage of all the science we have today.

You are having a little—I had a change of life with stepping down as the chief—your decision to step down as the cancer center director, evolution going forward. So it really inspired me to say, well, let’s talk about this a little bit. But let me first sort of set this up. So you’ve been a cancer center director, what, 20 years? Right around there.

Louis Weiner, MD: Eighteen years, preceded by 13 years as chair of the Department of Oncology at Fox Chase Cancer Center.

John Marshall, MD: But who’s counting, right? Eighteen years. Yeah.

Louis Weiner, MD: Years of performance reviews and budget analysis.

John Marshall, MD: So let’s start there. What was the worst part of being a cancer center director?

Louis Weiner, MD: I just told you. No. You know, so here’s the thing. If you take the job seriously, which I certainly do, what you care about, other than the broader mission, of course, are the people you work with and the people who look to you for guidance, support, and for help in their career journeys. And having to make difficult decisions about who stays employed and who I support and who I don’t support as much, you know, in terms of the available resources, that’s been painful. And I’m glad it was painful because if you stop feeling that, then you shouldn’t be doing the job.

And I had the privilege of beginning my tenure as a cancer center director at the end of 2007, beginning of 2008, just as the world was catching fire financially with the dawn of the Great Recession and the necessary impact it had on our ability to do work. And I’ve lived through not only that and the painful recovery from that, COVID and all the challenges that that created, and now the challenges that are associated with a seeming lack of interest in progress in cancer research from the federal authorities as they exist now, which really continues a long-term gradual decline, or not a decline as much as a dissonance between the level of opportunity we have scientifically to make a difference and the amount of resource that’s available to actually pursue those ideas. And so that’s been the biggest challenge.

John Marshall, MD: You know, Sara and I talk a lot on this program about the impact of the government on oncology and on healthcare, et cetera, and we have made reference to the current funding cycle. You know, I know in our executive meetings we’ve been talking about that a little bit. Can you reflect a little bit about how much that increases the steepness of the climb or the rolling the rock up the hill when you have to also fight the fundamental funding source?

Louis Weiner, MD: Well, first of all, my nickname should be Sisyphus because that’s exactly what happens. Every time we feel like we’re moving forward and we can see a path toward really significant progress, something seems to happen. And I think that’s the nature of the job, and I think that’s the nature of life.

But what I find so challenging is that right now there are people at our cancer center who have had grants favorably reviewed. Ben Weinberg, my colleague, and I had one of them, actually, that get really spectacular scores and percentile rankings in the top 10%, in the top 10% of all grants that have been rated.

Okay, they don’t get funded anymore.

John Marshall, MD: Right.

Louis Weiner, MD: And so what happens is it’s very discouraging. And then for old guys like us, you know, we’ve been through the battles and we sort of have a built-in resilience because we sort of understand there are going to be cycles to this and there’ll be future opportunities or different opportunities. But I really worry about my earlier-career colleagues who are trying to establish a foothold, you know, to climb up, to push that rock up the hill, and they’re not able to get that foothold. And I just think that the long-term impact on American science is going to be really profound. So I worry about that all the time.

John Marshall, MD: Yeah, and these are the people, of course, that are going to take the science that you and I have helped contribute to and take to the next level. And if they don’t have, as you refer to it, a good foothold—

Louis Weiner, MD: Right.

John Marshall, MD: You know, it won’t make progress. But let me let you brag a bit about the impact that you’ve had on our science today.

I mean, when I think about one of the grants I put in 25 years ago, it was about immunotherapy and GI cancers, and people said, “That’s never going to work, so why are you going to bother to do that?” I know that’s been one of your key sciences. Do you think that’s been the most impactful thing over the last couple of decades, or has there been other stuff, precision medicine? What do you think has been the most impactful?

Louis Weiner, MD: So first of all, I wake up in the morning and I pinch myself thinking of how lucky I am because I’ve had the opportunity, for whatever reasons, to make important contributions, and I think I have to divide my pinches into two major realms. One of them is what I’ve accomplished in leadership because, at the end of the day, we are all servants for a larger cause, right? And that larger cause is much bigger than any one discovery.

To have been able to lay the groundwork and make it possible for two generations of young emerging scientists and clinicians and clinician leaders to do their work and do things that I would never have thought of doing, and to see them develop and to contribute to progress is enormously satisfying for me. So let’s get that out of the way right away.

On a personal note, I was a bit naive and stubborn, but I guess in some ways had a vision that turned out to be true. I believed early, when I was interviewing for a fellowship, that there was a capacity for the immune system to be used to treat human cancer. Everybody thought I was an idiot for feeling that way.

And then when I finished my fellowship and I started working back then in Philadelphia trying to develop these things called monoclonal antibodies to treat cancer, I had very talented and accomplished people, some of whom you and I know very well, say, “You know what? Are you wasting your time on that stuff for? You seem like a bright guy. Find yourself a disease and do your stuff.”

And I said, “No, no. This is going to work. I think so.” And you know what? Those people who told me that did just fine in their careers, and I’ve done just fine in my career. And so I think the thing that I’m most proud of is the idea that you could harness the power of the body’s immune system to attack cancer.

And initially that was done with monoclonal antibodies. I was involved in the earliest antibodies. I made some of the first bispecifics and actually tested one in the clinic. We did hardcore lab work that identified the properties of antibodies, their affinity, how tightly they attached to their targets, their size, other molecular properties, what was necessary for things to work in the clinic. And some of those principles became the foundational elements of modern antibody therapies of cancer.

How cool is that? How neat is it to have been able to play a role in the development of those things and to see the field now? As I was talking to somebody the other day who is taking Humira (adalimumab), a monoclonal antibody, for treatment of an ulcerative proctitis kind of problem, and he said, “You know, you don’t realize it, but I’m not pooping blood because of the work you did years ago to create these monoclonal antibodies. So thank you very much.”

John Marshall, MD: Yeah.

Louis Weiner, MD: It was kind of cool. It’s kind of cool. So I—and then, you know, even though that had happened, nobody really believed that immunotherapy could work.

And this is really even before checkpoint antibodies exploded and became such an important thing. And I was able to convince the American Association for Cancer Research to do two things. One was to found an immunology-focused journal, which is called Cancer Immunology Research, which I’m now finally, after God knows how many years, rotating off the editorial board of. And the other was to create the Cancer Immunology Working Group, started off with a couple hundred people in a 25,000-person organization and I think now is 35,000 members. And to have had a role in creating and enabling infrastructure like that, that has now allowed people with interest in immunotherapy to talk to each other, collaborate with each other, and make discoveries together has been fantastic.

John Marshall, MD: Yeah. I wanted to kind of wrap us up a little bit. You struck me at a meeting we were at last week together when you were talking about stepping down as cancer center director, that it was kind of time for a new voice. And having done this myself as the Chief here, I felt the same way, a time for a new voice.

And I think you even used the term evolution and that it just needs a fresh look. Could you reflect on that a little bit? Because one of our themes is remembering the past, but it is important as we move forward. And I find myself as a teacher down in clinic still coaching people how to give 5-FU and how it works and some of the fundamental studies that we did.

It’s important to remember history—

Louis Weiner, MD: Yeah.

John Marshall, MD: —that our government is, by the way, trying to rewrite, but it’s important to remember our medical history so that we can help guide the next generation. Reflect a bit on that.

Louis Weiner, MD: Well, first of all, I think that it’s not surprising to me that a man who just returned from the Galapagos would be asking me these questions. But I will say that I’ve been interested in the notion of evolutionary biology and its role in cancer. When you really think through how we give therapies, if we ignore the capacity of cell populations to evolve in response to what we do, we suffer the fate of fools, in my view. And I think we’re only now beginning to understand that.

But I think you can actually scale that not only from the cell and the organism, but all the way through into society. And I think that we are in an evolution. We are always evolving, and if we try not to evolve, we suffer the fate of dinosaurs.

John Marshall, MD: Hmm.

Louis Weiner, MD: So I grew up in a world where there was more money available to support science, where there was a kind of order to it. Right? There were rules and there were orders, there were hierarchies, and those of us who succeeded learned how to navigate those hierarchies and how to succeed within them using the tools available to us.

And, you know, basically that’s all been blown up in a lot of ways, not only by the current political climate, but by the accelerating pace of change, the advent of AI and the still unknown ways it’s going to work, right? The ways in which we have to become more creative in how we try to finance research, create public-private partnerships, things like that.

And, you know, I am a perfectly honed creation of the evolutionary selection pressures that were applied on me as I was growing up and developing as a scientist. And while I think I still have a lot to contribute and look forward to being able to do it, I think you want somebody with a longer runway than I might have, and also somebody who’s been forged in the crucible of the current level of evolutionary biology, evolutionary selection pressures, if you will, in order to move forward.

I think healthy organizations benefit from hybrid vigor. They benefit from dynamic new leadership that respects and honors the past, but also takes a fresh look at it and says, “How do we move forward in the future?” You and I have a boss in Norm Beauchamp, for example, our EVP, who represents a really good example of how hybrid vigor can energize an organization and move things forward.

And so, you know, I’m super excited about what’s next for me because I have all kinds of things I want to accomplish, both in helping the cancer center, advancing my own research, which is still moving forward really nicely, and maybe spending a little more time enjoying a grandchild or two from time to time as I go through it.

John Marshall, MD: We will leave it right there. I could not have said any of that any better. So Dr. Louis Weiner, partner, friend, boss, mentor to so many, not just me, I really am appreciative of our time that we have spent together as we’ve walked through our cancer journeys, cancer research journeys together. And thank you for spending the time with us today on Oncology Unscripted, Lou. Thank you.

Louis Weiner, MD: It’s been a ball.

This transcript has been generated by AI and edited for clarity.