Dr. Maura L. Gillison once told an interviewer that she had wanted to be a doctor and a scientist since childhood. She trained in ballet, but as she grew to 6-foot-2, dance became an unlikely career path because she felt that it would draw too much attention to her height.
Instead, she forged a trailblazing career studying head and neck cancers as a medical oncologist and a molecular epidemiologist. In the early 2000s, she was credited as the first researcher to show definitively that the human papillomavirus, or HPV — the most common sexually transmitted infection — caused so-called oropharyngeal cancers of the throat, tonsils and base of the tongue.
“No head and neck medical oncologist has had a bigger impact on patients than Maura Gillison,” Dr. John V. Heymach, the chair of thoracic/head and neck oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where Dr. Gillison conducted research beginning in 2017, said in an interview.
Dr. Gillison died on June 21 at her childhood family home in Willoughby, Ohio, northeast of Cleveland. She was 61. The cause was a rare cancer of the small intestine, her husband Dr. David E. Symer, an oncologist, said.
For almost a century, a vast majority of throat cancers were attributed to cigarette smoking and excessive alcohol consumption. Then cases of cancer of the tonsils began to rise in the 1970s and 1980s. While HPV was detected in some head and neck cancers, many researchers dismissed the findings as laboratory contamination.
“I couldn’t help but wonder, What if it wasn’t,” Dr. Gillison told the magazine of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University in its 2023/24 issue.
Dr. Gillison graduated from medical school at Johns Hopkins in 1991 and returned in 1996 to pursue a doctorate in clinical investigation at the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2000, the major finding of her doctoral thesis was published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, showing a strong association between HPV and head and neck cancer.
In 2007, she led a team that demonstrated more conclusively that HPV caused cancer of the throat, tonsils and base of the tongue in a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine. This subset of cancers was distinct from cancers of the mouth caused largely by smoking and drinking.
She told NPR in 2011 that she suspected the sexual revolution of the 1960s had resulted in more sexual relationships with more partners, more oral sex and thus more chances of contracting HPV-related infections and cancer.
Having challenged settled research norms, she faced pushback.
Dr. Gillison’s findings about HPV and oropharyngeal cancer were “very controversial” at the time, Dr. Symer, her husband and collaborator, said in an interview. “Who knew that the number of sex partners, particularly oral sex partners, could be related to a head and neck type of cancer?”
She remained buoyed in her conclusions by a saying from one of her mentors: “An exclusive focus on the data helps one rise above the politics.”
She found that HPV caused about 70 percent of oropharyngeal cancers in the United States. Cases have surged among men in recent decades to what scientists say is epidemic levels.
As Dr. Gillison and others predicted, cancer of the throat, tonsils and base of the tongue has surpassed cervical cancer as the most common HPV-related malignancy. Roughly 18,700 men and 3,800 women are diagnosed yearly with oropharyngeal cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared with about 13,000 cases of cervical cancer.
At the same time, most people with HPV infections do not develop cancer. Patients who do contract oropharyngeal cancer, Dr. Gillison and colleagues determined, responded well to treatment and had a higher survival rate than those with other head and neck cancers.
Her work helped lead to a separate system for labeling stages of oropharyngeal cancer. And it led to clinical trials to assess using less toxic treatments of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, instead of providing identical care to all patients with head and neck cancers.
Her research “totally changed our understanding” of head and neck cancer “and demonstrated that one person can make a difference,” Dr. Otis Brawley, a professor of oncology and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins and a former top official of the American Cancer Society, told The Cancer Letter, a news outlet, after Dr. Gillison’s death.
Maura Lianne Gillison was born on Jan. 4, 1965, in London, Ontario, west of Toronto. Her father, Robert W. Gillison III, was a business executive. Her mother, Marvis (Esko) Gillison, ran the household. Both survive her.
The family moved often for Mr. Gillison’s work and settled in the Cleveland area when Maura was in elementary school. In high school, she won a fellowship and worked in a biochemistry lab at Case Western Reserve University. Partly to escape the winter cold, she attended Duke University, where she studied zoology and graduated summa cum laude in 1987.
As her career progressed from Johns Hopkins to Ohio State University to MD Anderson, Dr. Gillison often said that she considered herself a scientist first and a physician second, a colleague, Dr. Weihong Xiao, said in a tribute after her death, “because research could reach far more people than any one doctor ever could.”
After her seminal research proved a causal link between a strain of the human papillomavirus (HPV-16) and oropharyngeal cancer, she urged parents to get their sons, as well as their daughters, vaccinated for the human papilloma virus.
“When my patients ask whether they should vaccinate their sons, I say, ‘Certainly,’” Dr. Gillison told The Times of London in 2011. “The vaccine will protect them against genital warts and anal cancer and also, as a potential byproduct of that, it may protect them against oral cancer caused by HPV.”
In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration expanded approval of the vaccine for the prevention of oropharyngeal and other head and neck cancers. Yet cases are still rising for reasons that include a latency period of 20 or more years between exposure to HPV and development of malignant tumors and lagging vaccination and screening among men.
In addition to her husband, whom she married in 1992, and her parents, Dr. Gillison is survived by two daughters, Sanna and Lia Symer; a sister, Elizabeth Gillison; and two brothers, Robert and James Gillison.
Her later research focused on the genetic causes of oropharyngeal cancer. She had cartoon videos made to explain to the public and the research community how HPV inserted its own genetic material into human cells and caused chaos by rearranging pieces of DNA “like mismatching puzzle pieces.” She also investigated using the body’s immune system for targeted attacks on head and neck cancers.
In 2021, she received the David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award, the highest honor given by the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Last year, she and three other American researchers received the VinFuture Prize, a global award for breakthrough research and innovations that benefit humanity.
“The dancing world’s loss has been the head and neck cancer patients’ gain,” Dr. Heymach of MD Anderson said of Dr. Gillison. “On balance, we’re lucky.”
