Biology, Compassion, and Patience Motivate Stock as a Pioneer in Leukemia

"Slow and steady wins the race,” is a proverb that has been ever- present in the life of Wendy Stock, MD. Throughout her career, she never believed that rushing or feeling like she wasn’t achieving enough was the answer.

“If anybody is a turtle in that respect, it’s me,” said Stock, the Anjuli Seth Nayak Professor of Medicine and director of the Adolescent & Young Adult Oncology Program at the University of Chicago Medicine in Illinois. “You keep going with what you love and what you feel interested in. You try to absorb as much as you can and be as gracious as you can with both patients and your colleagues, and good things will happen. You have to persist and put in the work, but you don’t need to feel like everything has to come quickly because for me, it certainly didn’t.”

That long-term mentality and perseverance paid off, helping Stock become the 2025 Giant of Cancer Care in Leukemia.

Her self-advice has also served as a form of encouragement for colleagues and fellows: it’s OK to take their career at their own pace and not to get discouraged. Rewards come with time, and they may not be related to academic recognition. However, adding self-pressure in a career where pressure is omnipresent is not the answer, she said. At the end of the day, focusing on the real responsibility and honor of working toward improving the length and quality of life for patients with leukemia is most important, she emphasized.

Stock’s dedication to the leukemia field and genuine care for patients proved to be an inspirational act to follow, especially to former fellow, Lori Muffly, MD, who is now an associate professor in the Division of Blood and Marrow Transplantation & Cellular Therapy at Stanford Medicine in Stanford, California.

“My approach to patient care has been informed directly from watching and emulating Dr Stock with her patients and their families. I try to think, ‘What would Wendy do?’ in the clinic, and to remain empathetic and engaged with all of my patients,” Muffly said.

Beyond Stock’s remarkable contributions to the leukemia field, Muffly noted how thoughtful Stock is.

“During a time when I was struggling with an incredibly difficult personal and professional decision after fellowship, she talked me through the pros and cons of my options late into the night,” Muffly recalled. “This conversation was instrumental to my joining the group at Stanford and to my entire subsequent career path.”

The Early Days

With full intentions of becoming a biologist after graduate school, Stock never considered the possibility of specializing in hematology. However, at the time, she was interested in mechanisms of tumor progression and was intrigued by early papers on clonal hematopoiesis, along with the development of leukemias. The puzzle pieces started falling together when a mentor in graduate school approached her.

“[He told me], ‘Wendy, I don’t think you know what you want to do [in your career], and I have a suggestion. You should go to medical school because it gives you so many options,’” Stock said. “He was a physician-scientist, and I’m very grateful to him. He was right on the money. During that time, my brother was in medical school, and he seemed super happy. I thought, ‘That looks good to me. Maybe this would be a good way of contributing.’ I applied to medical school and was lucky enough to get in.”

As a junior medical student at the University of Minnesota, she landed in the hematology service during the early 1980s, when treatments for acute leukemias with stellar efficacy were scarce. Nevertheless, Stock was immediately fascinated by the hands-on experience and the disease process, which “seemed like the perfect fit right away,” she noted.

Moving the Needle in the Leukemia Landscape

In 2017, the FDA approved inotuzumab ozogamicin (Besponsa) for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed/refractory B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).¹ The approval was supported by data from the phase 3 INO-VATE ALL trial (NCT01564784), which included Stock as a study investigator. The trial evaluated the efficacy and safety of inotuzumab ozogamicin specifically for the treatment of patients with CD22-positive ALL (N = 326), who were randomly assigned to receive either inotuzumab ozogamicin (n = 164) or standard-of-care (SOC) intensive chemotherapy (n = 162).2 Data revealed a median overall survival (OS) of 7.7 months and 6.2 months in the inotuzumab ozogamicin arm and SOC arm, respectively.

“[The FDA-approval] was very exciting because inotuzumab ozogamicin provided a very novel treatment strategy that is now widely used in relapsed ALL and in other settings, including the frontline setting, which [it] hasn’t been approved for yet,” Stock noted. “It’s always exciting to be part of a drug approval process.”

Stemming from Stock’s days as a fellow assessing new genes and prognostic markers, she has been fascinated by ALL, especially because of its prevalence across age groups, spanning infants to older adults. Despite the widespread age distribution, the biology of ALL can vary vastly in each age range, which is also why it piqued her interest.

“I was very interested in trying to understand why differences in outcomes were so dramatic in the young adult population, who are just a slight continuum from he older children, and that’s what inspired me to look into this whole area,” she said.

Having seen how her colleagues in pediatric oncology delivered care in the outpatient clinic, Stock knew she wanted to incorporate a similar approach for adolescent and young adult (AYA) patients, which included other areas of care that helped address psychosocial, financial, and socioeconomic barriers. Modeling her colleagues’ program, she created her own for AYA patients and is currently leading the program as a director along with Adam DuVall, MD, MPH, an assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medicine.

One of the significant moments in Stock’s career was leading the phase 2 CALGB 10403 trial (NCT00558519), which evaluated the efficacy and safety of induction, consolidation, interim maintenance, delayed intensification, and long-term maintenance chemotherapy for the treatment of older adolescents and young
adults with ALL.3

Results from the trial revealed that after a median follow-up of 64 months, the median OS was not reached. Of note, the estimated 3-year OS rate was 73% (95% CI, 68%-78%) compared with the historical OS rate of 58% (95% CI, 52%-64%) among patients aged 16 to 29 years.

“I had always been very interested biologically in this population [of patients], and I learned a lot from my pediatric colleagues here at the University of Chicago,” Stock recalled. “I was puzzled by the fact that young adults didn’t seem to have the same outcomes as children. [CALGB 10403] led to some very interesting insights and a significant improvement in OS for young adults with ALL in the frontline setting.”

The basis of the phase 2 study, which demonstrated a significant change in clinical practice for the treatment of AYA patients with ALL, led to a real-world application of the CALGB 10403 regimen, which Stock has also contributed toward.4 The regimen was shown to have a similar efficacy and safety profile in the real world compared to the prospective phase 2 study in patients newly diagnosed with ALL.

A Full-Circle Moment

A native Chicagoan, Stock considers herself a true Midwesterner, only having left her home for school. She met her husband in the first week of undergrad at the University of Illinois, and the couple has now been married for 40 years. They have 2 children, a daughter who became a physician after attending the University of Chicago, and a son who followed in his father’s footsteps and became an architect.

When Stock isn’t leading the AYA program or contributing toward meaningful research, she finds creative outlets, such as playing the violin—a hobby Stock has maintained since she was 10 years of age—in her small community orchestra.

“We’re not very good, but we’re very happy, we really enjoy it,” Stock added. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for me, and it’s a great escape from [my day-to-day] because I have to focus [on playing violin] for a couple of hours a week, and I can’t think about other things. It’s a great break from my usual world.”

If not for her mentor’s advice to attend medical school, Stock might have been a musician, playing in ensembles and performing concerts on stage, she revealed. Nonetheless, she also aspired to become a journalist, although she prefers editing to writing.

“I was very engaged in journalism as a teenager, and I’ve always enjoyed reading. I love reading long articles in magazines,” Stock said. “[Journalism] would have been something I might have thought about [pursuing]. [I love National Geographic] and my initial dream as a child— which wraps everything together, except for the violin business—was to become a photojournalist...but then I diverted [to leukemia].”

References

1. FDA approves inotuzumab ozogamicin for relapsed or refractory B-cell precursor ALL. FDA. August 17, 2017. Accessed July 24, 2025. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/resources-information-approved-drugs/fda-approves-inotuzumab-ozogamicin-relapsed-or-refractory-b-cell-precursor-all
2. Kantarjian HM, DeAngelo DJ, Stelljes M, et al. Inotuzumab ozogamicin versus standard of care in relapsed or refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia: final report and long-term survival follow-up from the randomized, phase 3 INO-VATE study. Cancer. 2019;125(14):2474-2487. doi:10.1002/cncr.32116
3. Stock W, Luger SM, Advani AS, et al. A pediatric regimen for older adolescents and young adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia: results of CALGB 10403. Blood. 2019;133(14):1548- 1559. doi:10.1182/blood-2018-10-881961
4. DaSilva B, Darwin A, Zhang A, et al. Real-world performance of the CALGB 10403 regimen in young adults in the United States. Blood Neoplasia. 2025;2(3):100111. doi:10.1016/j. bneo.2025.100111