Page 46 - Gates-AnnualReport-2018

NEW FACES
AT THE GATES CENTER
Roger Giller, M.D.: Effective July 2018, Roger Giller joined the Gates Center’s Gates Biomanufacturing Facility as Medical Director with over 30 years of experience in laboratory research, clinical research and patient care in the fields of human bone marrow transplantation and other forms of cellular therapy. Coupled with his intimate familiarity with the Anschutz Medical Campus as a professor of pediatrics and attending physician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, he was an ideal choice.
Roger was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, where he became interested in medicine and medical research. He attended medical school at the Medical College of Wisconsin and spent his internship, residency and fellowship at the University of Colorado
and Children’s Hospital Colorado. As a young researcher and clinician, he left Colorado to help begin the pediatric bone marrow program at the University of Iowa. He returned to Denver in 1993 to found the Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplant Program at Children’s Hospital Colorado, which he directed until 2016. During that time, the program carried out nearly 1000 transplants for a range of malignant and noncancerous conditions in infants, children, adolescents and young adults. An active clinical research program was established involving local investigators as well as national and international collaborators, and external regulatory certification of the Program thru the Foundation for Accreditation of Cellular Therapy (FACT) was continuously maintained.
Roger has an interesting historical perspective going back to the 1970’s. He recalls as a college and medical student being involved in preclinical bone marrow transplant research conducted in mice and dogs, and the early days of trying to understand both the rejection and acceptance of foreign tissue and the role and power of the immune system to protect and to cause disease. He now has knowledge of and experience administering leading-edge therapies such as immunotherapy, which keeps him enthusiastic about brighter futures for difficult patients. Several years ago he worked with recent Anschutz Medical Campus recruit Terry Fry, M.D. to enroll a little boy suffering from intractable leukemia in a clinical trial at the National Cancer Institute. Following a transplant, the young boy has been in remission for three years—something that would have not been possible five years ago.
According to Roger, the current Anschutz Medical Campus is an increasingly exciting place to be as it continues to evolve and develop resources—particularly its human resources. He feels that science leading to innovation needs brilliant researchers and clinicians working together with different strategies, approaches and knowledge of disease, and that the Gates Center is key to promoting that sort of collaboration. Likewise, he believes that the development and manufacture of novel cellular and protein therapies destined for early phase human trials depends on the resources and procedures that only a facility such as the Gates Biomanufacturing Facility can provide.
Roger thinks we are just at the beginning and that we can develop technology to take on some of the most challenging medical problems. We are thrilled to have him join our team.
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