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In honor of wellness and Black History Month, we celebrate, Dr. Jane Wright, who analyzed a wide range of anti-cancer agents, exploring the relationship between patient and tissue culture response.  Dr. Wright developed new techniques for administering cancer chemotherapy. By 1967, she was the highest ranking African American woman in a United States medical institution.

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Born in New York City in 1919, Jane Cooke Wright was the first of two daughters born to Corrine Cooke and Louis Tompkins Wright. Her father was one of the first African American graduates of Harvard Medical School, and he set a high standard for his daughters. Dr. Louis Wright was the first African American doctor appointed to a staff position at a municipal hospital in New York City and, in 1929, he became the city's first African American police surgeon.  He also established the Cancer Research Center at Harlem Hospital.

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Jane Wright graduated with honors from New York Medical College in 1945. She interned at Bellevue Hospital from 1945 to 1946, serving nine months as an assistant resident in internal medicine. While completing a residency at Harlem Hospital from 1947 to 1948, she married David Jones, Jr., a Harvard Law School graduate. After a six-month leave for the birth of her first child in 1948, she returned to complete her training at Harlem Hospital as chief resident.

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In January 1949, Dr. Wright was hired as a staff physician with the New York City Public Schools, and continued as a visiting physician at Harlem Hospital. After six months she left the school position to join her father, director of the Cancer Research Foundation at Harlem Hospital.

Chemotherapy was still mostly experimental at that time. At Harlem Hospital, her father had already re-directed the focus of foundation research to investigating anti-cancer chemicals. Dr. Louis Wright worked in the lab and Dr. Jane Wright would perform the patient trials. In 1949, the two began testing a new chemical on human leukemias and cancers of the lymphatic system. Several patients who participated in the trials had some remission. Following Dr. Louis Wright's death in 1952, Dr. Jane Wright was appointed head of the Cancer Research Foundation, at the age of 33.

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In 1955, Dr. Wright became an associate professor of surgical research at New York University and director of cancer chemotherapy research at New York University Medical Center and its affiliated Bellevue and University hospitals. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Dr. Wright to the President's Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer, and Stroke. Based on the Commission's report, a national network of treatment centers was established for these diseases. In 1967, Dr. Wright was named professor of surgery, head of the Cancer Chemotherapy Department, and associate dean at New York Medical College, her alma mater.

Dr. Wright was the highest ranked African American woman at a nationally recognized medical institution.

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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. In 1971, Dr. Jane Wright became the first woman president of the New York Cancer Society. After a long career of cancer research, Dr. Wright retired in 1987. During her forty-year career, Dr. Wright published many research papers on cancer chemotherapy and led delegations of cancer researchers to Africa, China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union.

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Jane Cooke Wright 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. She also pioneered the use of the drug methotrexate to treat breast cancer and skin cancer (mycosis fungoids).

 

Both Dr.  Wright and her father wanted to make chemotherapy a more accessible method for cancer treatment. They were the first to report the use of nitrogen mustard agents and folic acid antagonists as cancer treatments. The Folic acid antagonist can block folic acid in the body, which is required for cells to produce certain types of amino acids. By inhibiting the folic acids, cells are unable to make new strands of DNA/RNA or produce proteins to drive mitosis. Because cancer cells are highly proliferative compared to the other class in the human body, it is crucial to stop mitosis from happening. The folic acid antagonists that were tested were probably the most important discovery because the antifolates are highly potent against a vast array of solid tumors, including several types of leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, lymphosarcoma, melanoma, breast cancer, and prostate cancer.

 

Methotrexate is still one of the main chemotherapy drugs used today to treat many types of cancer, and it has been a basis for all modern chemotherapy.

Wright's research work involved studying the effects of various drugs on tumors. In 1951 with the help of her team she was the first to identify methotrexate, one of the foundational chemotherapy drugs, as an effective tool against cancerous tumors. 

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She was successful in identifying treatments for both breast and skin cancer, developing a chemotherapy protocol that increased skin cancer patient lifespans up to ten years.  Dr. Wright also developed a non-surgical method, using a catheter system, to deliver potent drugs to tumors located deep within the body such as the liver and spleen. She published more than 100 papers on cancer chemotherapeutics during her career and served on the editorial board of the Journal of the National Medical Association.

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Dr. Wright died on February 19, 2013, in Guttenberg, New Jersey, at the age of 93 years old.  We honor you and thank you.  Happy Black History Month!

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By Bryce Thompson