President of Croatia honors work of Stanford oncologist
BY MICHELLE L. BRANDT
President Stjepan Mesic (left) of Croatia awards his Presidential Medal for Science and Medicine to Branimir Sikic, Stanford Cancer Center associate director and professor of medicine, at a Jan. 19 ceremony in Zagreb.
Branimir Sikic, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of Oncology, has been awarded the Presidential Medal for Science and Medicine from Croatia’s president. The award recognizes his achievements in cancer research and his contributions to medical education and cancer care and prevention in Croatia.
Sikic is also associate director of the Stanford Cancer Center and is a leading expert in the pharmacology of anticancer drugs. His lab studies mechanisms of drug resistance and predictive therapeutic biomarkers; his clinical research team develops new cancer therapies.
Sikic, who called the award “unexpected and wonderful,” has strong ties to Croatia. His family emigrated from the country to the United States when he was 8 years old, and many family members still live and practice medicine in the Balkan country. (He counts 16 physicians in his extended family.)
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Sikic’s work in Croatia began in the mid-1990s, when it “was economically devastated,” he said. “Their national health system was in disarray.”
Croatian physicians lacked the resources to attend medical meetings, so Sikic organized and led the Central European Oncology Congress, a continuing medical education meeting there. The biennial conference draws hundreds of doctors from central and western Europe, with oncologists from the United States, Canada and Europe presenting the latest in cancer therapies and multidisciplinary cancer care.
In 2007, Sikic joined a delegation of medical experts, including Elias Zerhouni, MD, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, to advise Croatian officials on strategic planning in clinical oncology. In addition to spawning projects between the National Cancer Institute and Croatian investigators, a key outcome of the meeting was a 2008 law that banned cigarette smoking in public places in Croatia. Given the prevalence and acceptance of cigarettes—even physicians commonly smoked—Sikic considers this one of his proudest accomplishments.
“Now when you go to Croatia and eat at a restaurant you don’t have to inhale cigarette smoke,” he said. “It’s been a major contribution to public health.”
President Stjepan Mesic gave the medal to Sikic, as his wife and three sons watched, on Jan. 19 in Zagreb.
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