A pioneering cancer researcher and surgeon noted for her contributions to chemotherapy Jane Cooke Wright was born on November 30, 1919, in New York City. She was the first of two daughters born to Corrine and Louis Tompkins Wright. Her father was one of the first African American graduates of Harvard Medical School. He was a pioneering African American surgeon who advocated for racial equality in medicine. He also established the Cancer Research Center Foundation at Harlem Hospital. Her grandfather, Dr. Ceah Ketcham Wright, born enslaved but who later earned his medical degree from Meharry Medical College, and her step-grandfather, Dr. William Fletcher Penn, who was the first African American to graduate from Yale Medical College.
Growing up in this environment, Jane Cooke Wright developed a passion for medicine and a commitment to addressing healthcare disparities. Jane was a talented artist and originally began studying art at Smith College in Massachusetts before changing her major to pre-med. She went on to earn a scholarship to study medicine in New York Medical College. Jane graduated with honors as a part of an accelerated three-year program at the top of her class in 1945 . She interned at Bellevue Hospital from 1945 to 1946, serving nine months as an assistant resident in internal medicine. In 1947, she married Harvard Law graduate David Jones Jr. with whom she had two daughters.
During that same year, Jane Wright began her residency at Harlem Hospital, where she acted as chief resident. She completed her surgical residency at Harlem Hospital in 1948. In January 1949, Dr. Wright was hired as a staff physician with the New York City Public Schools. She continued as a visiting physician at Harlem Hospital. After six months Jane joined her father in working at the Cancer Research Foundation at Harlem Hospital as a researcher and clinician. It was here that she began her career in cancer research. It was here that she began her groundbreaking research in cancer treatment. Alongside her father, they investigated anti-cancer chemical testing, for the first time: chemicals on human leukemias and other lymphatic system cancers.
Chemotherapy is the use of medicines to treat cancer and kill cancer cells. In the 1940s, chemotherapy was still fairly experimental and used as a last resort. Her father had begun researching anti-cancer chemicals. Louis focused on the laboratory research and Wright ran the trials in patients. Wright’s early experiments focused on testing the effects of various chemotherapy agents on cancer cells in the laboratory. Together, they and others studied the effects of a variety of drugs on tumors, experimented with chemotherapeutic agents on leukemia in mice and eventually treated patients, with some success, with new anticancer drugs, including triethylene melamine.
Among all the drugs they tested, the folic acid antagonists were probably the most important. The most successful folic acid antagonist they tested was methotrexate, one of the foundational chemotherapy drugs, as an effective tool against cancerous tumors. This discovery truly formed the basis for all modern chemotherapy research. The drug is still used widely today to treat a number of different cancers. Following Dr. Louis Wright's death in 1952, Dr. Jane Wright was appointed head of the Cancer Research Foundation, at the age of 33. She was the first Black women to be named associate dean of a medical school. She is credited with developing the technique of using human tissue culture rather than laboratory mice to test the effects of potential drugs on cancer cells.
Two years later (1954), Jane Cooke Wright joined the American Association for Cancer Research and was passionate about learning, sharing and disseminating information about the positive possibilities of cancer chemotherapy. In 1955, Dr. Wright became an associate professor of surgical research at New York University. She was director of cancer chemotherapy research at New York University Medical Center and its affiliated Bellevue and University hospitals. Here, she began to focus her research on personalized medicine. Traditionally, the same medicine would have been given to all people with the same disease.
The issue with this approach is that there are many differences in each individual that can cause medications to work differently. The idea of personalized medicine is to choose the best treatment for a patient based on their unique genetic characteristics. Wright pioneered efforts in utilizing patient tumor biopsies for drug testing, to help select drugs that may work specifically against a particular tumor. Wright was passionate about making sure that her research was benefiting everyone. She and six other cancer specialists formed the American Society of Clinical Oncology in 1964. Dr. Wright was the only Black founding member of this group as well as the only woman.
The American Society of Clinical Oncology aimed to help educate doctors, provide training on cancer care, and help fund research. Also, in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Dr. Wright to the President's Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer, and Stroke. The commission's recommendations resulted in a national network of cancer treatment centers for the three diseases. diseases. That same year, Dr. Wright described a method of using intra-arterial infusion through a catheter to deliver large doses of chemotherapy to tumors in the rectum, colon, cervix, pancreas, kidneys, skin, and other sites. The study suggested that chemotherapy could be infused through most major blood vessels in the body using this technique.
By 1967, Dr. Wright left NYU to take a position as the head of the Cancer Chemotherapy Department, professor of surgery and associate dean at New York Medical College, where she graduated. In a field dominated by White men, Dr. Wright was the only African-American woman in a high-ranking position at a nationally recognized medical institution. This was only one of a number of high-ranking positions held by Wright over the next 20 years. While pursuing private research at the New York Medical College, she implemented a new comprehensive program to study stroke, heart disease, and cancer, and created another program to instruct doctors in chemotherapy.
From 1966 until 1970, Wright was active on the National Cancer Advisory Committee of the U.S. National Cancer Institute. In 1971, Dr. Jane Wright became the first woman president of the New York Cancer Society. Internationally, Dr. Wright led delegations of oncologists across China, the Soviet Union, Africa, and Eastern Europe and served as vice president of the African Research and Medical Foundation between 1973-1984. In 1985, Dr. Jane Cooke Wright retired after a 40-year career dedicated to cancer research. While holding multiple leadership positions, she authored over one hundred scientific articles throughout her career. Two years later, she was appointed emerita professor at New York Medical College.
She held leadership positions in numerous associations, won several awards including the American Association for Cancer Research Award and was recognized for her work by an eponymous award and lecture. She has published over 100 articles during her career. Despite the barriers she faced as a Black woman, Dr. Wright has made enormous contributions to the field of cancer medicine. Dr. Jane C. Wright was one of the leading physician-scientists of her time, screening hundreds of drugs for their potential to kill human tumors and studying how these drugs could be tested in cell culture. The sum of her work revolutionized cancer research and how physicians treat cancer.