Humanitarian Spirit Drives Kris as a Pioneer in Thoracic Oncology

Even early in life, science and medicine swirled around Mark G. Kris, MD. It's hard to avoid them when they're part of the family business. Kris grew up in Buffalo, New York, where the work of his parents at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center helped shape his early interests and spark a career of his own.

His mother, a nurse in gynecologic oncology, tended to patients in the outpatient clinic. His father, a chemist at Roswell Park, worked in the laboratory of the late James F. Holland, MD, a leukemia pioneer.

Through his parents’ work, Kris received an early introduction to the field of oncology; his own work would help address some of the inadequacies of the field. In the 1970s and 1980s, cancer treatment was often grueling, with treatments consisting primarily of major surgeries and chemotherapy like cisplatin administered without adequate antinausea support and with long recovery times. “It was pretty gnarly back in the day,” Kris said. “There was a lot of room for improvement.”

Kris became an integral part of transforming care in lung cancer after landing at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) in New York, New York, where he holds the William and Joy Ruane Chair in Thoracic Oncology. Thanks to Kris’ work, his father is now connected to a pair of Giants of Cancer Care. Holland was honored as the 2016 inductee for hematologic malignancies, and Kris was named the 2025 Giant of Cancer Care in Thoracic Malignancies.

Breaking Ground in Treatment Support

As cancer research evolved and helped transform treatment, a large focus for Kris was improving patient outcomes and quality of life with the already- established modalities.

One of the pivotal figures in Kris’ career was Richard J. Gralla, MD, director of oncology research for the North Bronx Healthcare Network in New York—a pioneer who Kris said was integral in demonstrating that chemotherapy could meaningfully improve outcomes

for patients with lung cancer. Gralla’s work earned him the 2020 Giants of Cancer Care award in supportive, palliative, and/or geriatric care—a field where Kris also made his mark. Fittingly, Gralla also introduced Kris to the world of supportive care and the need for additional advancements in the field.

Kris’ landmark work came in the form of antiemetics to prevent and manage the nausea and vomiting so dreaded by patients receiving chemotherapy. Those common adverse effects (AEs) of chemotherapy, such as hair loss and vomiting, remain a primary concern for patients, on top of survival and efficacy outcomes. “Being able to address the No. 1 fear of patients [is] probably the most satisfying thing,” he said.

Through clinical trials, Kris and his colleagues helped establish regimens utilizing 5-HT3 antagonists, NK-1 inhibitors, and other agents intended to manage the nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy, helping transform the chemotherapy experience. What was once a novel concept in the field of chemotherapy has become a standard of care, with antiemetic orders now embedded into chemotherapy protocols. At MSK, for example, Kris said the integration of antiemetics has become so streamlined that patients automatically receive them without oncologists having to write separate prescriptions with chemotherapy.

When Kris began his career, he said that some clinical trials were still examining the value of administering chemotherapy vs no treatment, given the toxicity associated with chemotherapy and questions about the overall benefit patients garnered.

“[Accepting chemotherapy as a treatment modality] meant getting over that attitude that it’s okay not to treat people. It just goes against what I was taught by my surgeons,” Kris said. “You have the person sitting in front of you. Is doing nothing better? I don’t think so. I understand the need for proof, but you have to be very flexible here. You can’t be dogmatic.”

The effect was profound, as patients became better prepared to tolerate chemotherapy, adhere to treatment schedules, and experience the benefits of therapy. These antiemetic regimens have become a standard with chemotherapy across various tumor types as a result of the work by Kris and his colleagues.

“It’s not people like me—I don’t put these innovations into play. It’s nurses,” Kris said. “They’re the interface with the patient, and our antiemetic work would never have moved along without our research nurses who sat in the room [with patients] and counted how many times people vomited and recorded it. That’s what changed minds.”

Along with patients in the advanced disease setting receiving needed therapy, the improved tolerability of chemotherapy with the use of antiemetics opened the door to more aggressive and strategic treatments, including in the neoadjuvant setting with the goal of improving cure rates.

Kris pointed to thoracic surgeons such as the late Nael Martini, MD, and Robert Ginsberg, MD, FRCS(S) of MSK, who mentored him in patient-focused care and the relentless pursuit of a cure.

“Surgeons have a tremendous focus on the patient: ‘What can I do for this patient?’ Medical [oncologists] say, ‘What does the literature say?’ ” Kris remarked. “[Surgeons] are all about the patient, and what happens to this patient matters—not what happens to everybody with lung cancer. A lot of the medical oncologists don’t appreciate that enough.”

By having the perspective of surgeons ingrained in his approach to treating patients early in his career, Kris emphasized exploring every possible option for the patient in from him.

“[Surgeons] taught me you have to consider the possibility of cure for every single patient,” he said.

Chemo Is Still Key

In the latter half of Kris’ career, the lung cancer field underwent tremendous transformation with the advent of immunotherapy and targeted therapy, helping different subsets of patients with lung cancer access agents beyond chemotherapy to combat their disease.

Kris played an integral role in the emergence of targeted therapy and in the understanding of how mutations drive growth and treatment resistance within lung cancer. By the late 1990s, Kris’ focus expanded into the emerging field of targeted therapies. Influenced by the research of the late John Mendelsohn, MD, on EGFR mutations, he joined early clinical trials testing EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors in lung cancer. Kris also worked with colleagues on the coexistence of PIK3CA mutations and other oncogenic alterations in relation to EGFR mutations.¹

Nationally, Kris helped lead the Lung Cancer Mutation Consortium, which was founded in 2009 with the goal of finding and targeting mutations to improve patient outcomes. This work laid the foundation for today’s multiplex testing, which can detect a dozen actionable mutations from a single tumor sample.

The use of immunotherapy agents such as PD-1 and PD-L1 inhibitors also helped shift the lung cancer treatment paradigm during Kris’ career, although he admits he was initially skeptical, given the century-long history of attempts by researchers and oncologists to harness the immune system to fight cancer. Ultimately, the data and the work of colleagues such as Naiyer A. Rizvi, MD, chief medical officer of Synthekine, and Matt Hellmann, MD, vice president of early oncology development at AstraZeneca, helped convert Kris into a believer about the value of immune checkpoint inhibitors to help produce long-lasting remissions in metastatic lung cancer, something he had never seen before.

Despite all the advances with immunotherapy and targeted therapy, Kris continually returns to one key point.

“What modality of treatment does every patient with lung cancer get in 2025?” Kris asked. “It’s not targeted therapy. It’s not immunotherapy. It’s chemotherapy. And people forget that.”

Although targeted therapy and immunotherapy have become standards of care within clinical practice, chemotherapy is routinely used, either as part of combinations or as the best treatment for a given patient, Kris said. He explained that these other modalities also have AEs associated with them, underscoring the need to remember the individual patient when developing treatment plans.

In a world where oncologic research is striving to increase chemotherapy-free regimens available to patients, Kris underscored that chemotherapy will still have its role.

“You need to talk to the [patients], and you need to listen to the patients about what their issues are. For many people, chemotherapy [may be better than other types of therapies], and you [have] to get over that,” Kris said. “People don’t want chemotherapy, [but] people don’t want [any] cancer therapy. They want to get on with their life.”

A Family Centered on Help

Asked to name his proudest professional accomplishment, Kris returned to the antiemetic work. Although these agents aren’t glamorous or designed to cure patients with lung cancer, they have improved the experience of patients receiving chemotherapy around the world.

Given his professional accomplishments, it comes as no shock that Kris’ humanitarian spirit permeates his personal life. Outside the clinic, Kris is grounded by family. His wife, Mary Ellen, is a lawyer whose career spans environmental regulation and immigration advocacy. His daughter, Mary Kiernan, is an elementary school teacher. His son, Robert, is a diplomat in the US State Department and a former member of the National Security Council.

Service, in different forms, runs in the family.

“I’m very proud of what [Mary Kiernan and Robert] have done over these years,” Kris said.

Kris is a skilled builder and home repair enthusiast; he and his wife have focused on disaster relief for their philanthropic efforts, including work in Mississippi and Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and projects in Haiti, Costa Rica, and flood-stricken communities within New York. He also enjoys the outdoors, cooking, and photography, but said his greatest joy is spending time with his family.

“I always had that instilled with me, probably from my parents and education. I grew up with the Jesuits, and the theme back then was ‘men for others.’ It was up to you to make a difference in this world,” Kris said. “I always felt that way, and I’m very proud of what my kids and wife have done.”

Whether surrounded by colleagues at MSK or volunteering with his family, Kris said this type of work would never be as successful or fulfilling without others involved.

“Everything that I did, I was part of a group of equally dedicated people. I’m a firm believer in this collective intelligence. A group of smart people does better than 1 unbelievably brilliant person,” Kris said. “All these developments, it wasn’t 1 person. Whatever your goal in life, it’s a lot better working together. The things I did would never have happened just because of me; I was lucky enough to be there and contribute.”

Reference

Chaft JE, Arcila ME, Paik PK, et al. Coexistence of PIK3CA and other oncogene mutations in lung adenocarcinoma-rationale for comprehensive mutation profiling. Mol Cancer Ther. 2012;11(2):485-491. doi:10.1158/1535-7163.MCT-11-0692