HAAKON RAGDE was named the 2016 Honorary Member of the American Society for Radiation Oncology, the highest honor ASTRO bestows on members in disciplines other than radiation oncology, radiobiology or radiation physics.
Ragde will be inducted during an awards ceremony at ASTRO’s 58th Annual Meeting, Sept. 25-28 in Boston. Ragde is the 33rd physician to be chosen for the honor.
“Dr. Ragde is a luminary in the field of medicine,” said ASTRO Chair Bruce Minsky. “His work has become the standard of care in a number of areas. As a board certified urologist, he has an impressive array of achievements, including introducing seed implantation for prostate cancer into the U.S., introducing transrectal ultrasonography and introducing the transrectal ultrasound-guided prostate biopsy method now used. He also took part in bone marrow transplant research that earned researcher E. Donnall Thomas, MD, the Nobel Peace Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1990. ASTRO thanks Dr. Ragde for his outstanding accomplishments.”
He accepted a staff position in 1965 in general surgery and urology at the University of Washington. There, Ragde and a colleague performed the first successful kidney transplants in the state of Washington. However, following these procedures, he was unable to raise money for continuing research. So when Thomas, the hematology professor who would ultimately win the Nobel Prize, approached Ragde with an offer to join Thomas’ bone marrow transplantation research team, Ragde agreed.
The team—Thomas, Ragde and two internists, Ranier Storb and Robert Epstein—studied how bone marrow transplantation might cure leukemia and other cancers of the blood by replacing the diseased marrow with healthy marrow. Ragde said the Nobel Peace Prize for the research did not surprise him. Not only did the five years of work change his life, but he also became good friends with Thomas.
According to Ragde, his greatest career accomplishment was template-directed brachytherapy for prostate cancer. He opened a private practice in urology in Seattle following his work with Thomas and became an expert in transrectal ultrasonography of the prostate. Ragde was trained in the technique by physicians at the University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark and Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. His mentor in Denmark called him to Copenhagen to see the accurate placement of ultrasound-directed radioactive seeds into a cancerous prostate. Ragde then took the technique back to his practice in Seattle.
Ragde established the Pacific Northwest Cancer Foundation (which created Northwest Biotherapeutics Inc.) and the Haakon Ragde Foundation for Advanced Cancer Studies. He retired from active practice in 2003 and now researches immunotherapy. He is conducting a study on immunotherapy on advanced prostate cancer patients at the University of Bergen in Norway.
