- September 4, 2026
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Dr. Patrick Hwu, the president and CEO of the Moffitt Cancer Center and a preeminent researcher in the advent of immunotherapy, actually considered bypassing medicine to become a journalist.
This was in the late 1980s.
Hwu grew up in St. Albans, a small West Virginia town in Kanawha County outside of Charleston. It’s population today is about 18,000. It was about 13,000 when he was growing up.
The son of a chemical engineer who’d immigrated from mainland China, Hwu wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life after school. He considered medical research, law, journalism.
As part of that thought process, he did an internship at the Charleston Gazette in high school. There, Hwu shared his career considerations with colleagues, mostly veteran reporters, in the newsroom.
“It was unanimous — be a doctor! Do not be a journalist,” he says. “They all told me that.”
While there is little doubt Hwu would have made a good reporter, cancer patients worldwide are better off today because his curiosity has been focused on finding better ways to fight cancer.
Hwu, 63, has spent his career at the forefront of cancer research, helping develop new and innovative treatments that are saving lives. And as the head of Moffitt, a job he took in 2020, he leads the organization’s push to find new technologies and treatments that not only allow patients to live longer but have a better quality of life while undergoing treatment.
Among those innovations is a new proton therapy center that began treating patients July 27 at Moffitt’s Spero’s campus, a sprawling 775-acre medical and research center under construction in Pasco County.
Proton therapy, according to Moffitt, is a form of radiation therapy that allows doctors to pinpoint treatment of tumors in the body. Unlike more traditional radiation therapies, which damage the cells around a tumor, by using “high energy x-rays (photons), proton therapy harnesses charged proton particles to deliver radiation directly to a tumor.”
By focusing the treatment directly on the tumor, says Kosj Yamoah, the chair of Moffitt’s radiation oncology department, patients can recover faster because there are fewer side effects to deal with.
“There’ a lot of promise. Not only in what we can do this year, but in the coming years with this type of technology,” Yamoah says, crediting Hwu with being “very supportive of these technologies.”
“He is a visionary. Dr. Hwu’s leadership is transformative.”
And proton therapy is just one piece of what Moffitt is doing, says Hwu.
While the proton center opened in July, a 250,000-square-foot research building is scheduled to open at Speros in October.
Hwu expects the facility to be nothing less than “the Los Alamos of cancer research.” While that may sound hyperbolic, the idea is to bring together researchers, clinicians, biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies in order for the disparate groups to work toward the common goal of treating cancers.
For example, Moffitt’s metabolism department will work with its engineering department and clinicians. While involving engineers may sound counterintuitive, Hwu says, they bring a different mindset on how to approach problems and that the field is already permeating immunology, metabolism and nutrition research as well as ovarian and gastrointestinal cancer research.
“When you put that kind of a diversity together, you get magic, and things happen, and products are developed, and treatments are developed that you never would have developed alone,” he says.
One of the chief goals of the research is the development of radiopharmaceuticals. That’s when you take radioactive particles and bind them chemically to create a bond (in the form of a new drug) that goes to a specific cancer and kills it.
To do that sort of work requires infrastructure, Hwu says, including a cyclotron to make radioactive particles and chemists who know how to put the particles together with a binder and the binders themselves.
Then you need a place that can do trials in radiopharmaceuticals.
“We have all that,” he says.
Hwu’s focus on innovation and finding new ways to treat cancer harken back to the beginning of his career in medicine.
When Hwu decided to bypass journalism for medicine, he didn’t want to go into private practice. He wanted to focus on research — particularly cancer research.
Following high school graduation in 1981, he joined a six-year medical program where you attended Lehigh University for two year and then spent four years at the Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
In 1987, Hwu started his internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, spending just two years there because he wanted to be a cancer doctor. Given that, he began looking for a place on the forefront of studying the immune response against cancer.
The premier researcher at the time was Steven Rosenberg at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside of Washington D.C. Rosenberg is a pioneer in the development of immunotherapies and the doctor Hwu calls the father of immunotherapy.
Rosenberg became a role model and Hwu stayed at NCI for 14 years.
There he worked on the study and development of CAR T-cell therapies, widely seen as a monumental advancement in the treatment of cancer. (CAR T-cell therapy is short for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy.)
According to Moffitt, the therapy is a type of immunotherapy where a patient’s own T cells are engineered to recognize and destroy cancer cells. (T cells are a type of white blood cell that helps the body’s immune system fight viruses and bacteria.)
This is how Moffitt describes how CAR T-cell therapy works: T cells are collected and modified “to express a synthetic CAR that targets a specific protein on tumor cells, expanded in number, and reinfused back into the patient.” Once inside the body, these “supercharged” T cells bind to the target on cancer cells and eliminate them.
In layman’s terms, doctors use the body’s own defense system to fight the cancer.
Hwu’s work on the project involved the chimeric antigen receptor (a custom, laboratory-created receptor protein) that now has dozens of FDA approvals.
Today, Hwu is as an administrator and a researcher — and he also sees patients. And that’s where he’s sees the innovative results of his work on CAR T-cell therapies firsthand.
After NIH, Hwu went to work at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. There, he was the chair of melanoma medical oncology and head of the division of cancer medicine. He was at Anderson for 17 years and advised at Moffitt during some of that time.
Hwu recalls being told by others that treating melanoma must be depressing because his patients faired so poorly. And that assessment wasn’t wrong: he says 90% to 95% of his patients died within a year.
“It was hard," says Hwu.
Hwu is cheerful, outgoing and optimistic. But when he begins to talk about those days and his patients, one can see how difficult it is for him to deal with the harsh realities of what he — and other cancer doctors — deal with every day.
“What kept me going was the research. I saw the bright light that immunotherapy could bring to that field,” he says, then, after a pause, perks up again.
“Now over half my patients are having their tumors eliminated and living long lives. I'm becoming very deeply attached to them and it's wonderful.”
