Benutzer:Tiefenhyperthermie/Rolf Issels

Rolf Dieter Josef Issels (* 25 April 1948 in Mönchengladbach, Germany) is a medical oncologist and biochemist. He performed the first regional hyperthermia in combination with chemotherapy in 1986. From 1978 to 2014, he worked clinically at the LMU-Klinikum Munich, Med. Klinik III/Campus Großhadern and was head of a clinical cooperation group of the Helmholtz Centre Munich. Since 2018 he has been a senior consultant at the Med. Klinik III.

Life

Issels grew up in Rottach-Egern am Tegernsee and in Munich. In Munich he attended the humanistic Maximiliansgymnasium. After graduating from high school, he studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and biochemistry at the Karl Eberhard University in Tübingen. He passed the medical state examination in Munich in 1975 and received his doctorate magna cum laude in 1977 with a hematological doctoral thesis (Influencing T cell activity in chronic lymphocytic leukemia through various forms of therapy) under Prof. H. Begemann at the Munich Schwabing Hospital. He received his diploma in biochemistry summa cum laude in 1980 in Tübingen with a thesis (superoxide dismutase in lymphoma cells) under Prof. U. Weser. Instead of starting a career in the privat clinic of his father, Dr. Josef Issels, for holistic tumor therapy, he decided to do a comprehensive residency in internal medicine with focus on medical oncology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.

In 1978 he began his internal medicine training as an assistant to Prof. Wolfgang Wilmanns, the then chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine III with a focus on hematology - oncology. After a guest lecture focusing on innovative sarcoma therapy by Prof. Suit, Director of Radiotherapy at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, at the Klink Großhadern, Issels began a short time later as a Harvard Research Fellow with a grant from the German Cancer Aid (1980-82) with experimental studies on sarcoma cells and heat shock in Prof Suit's laboratory. Throughout his life, he never left this topic in clinic and research. After his return to Munich, Issels became a senior physician at the Medical Klinik III of the LMU. There he opened the first Hyperthermia Unit in 1986 with funding from the State of Bavaria. The necessary personnel funds and technological equipment for this project were approved by the German Cancer Aid (Deutsche Krebshilfe). His appointment as professor in 1996 was followed by his nomination as head of a Clinical Cooperation Group of the Helmholtz Centre Munich. In 2011, he became head of the newly founded Sarcoma Centre (SarKUM) at the LMU.

On 10 July 1986, Issels performed the first regional hyperthermia with systemic chemotherapy in the world at the Großhadern Klinik on a 36-year-old female patient with extensive pelvic sarcoma without complications. From July 1986 to July 1989, a tumor response rate of 37% was achieved in a phase II study in a total of 40 therapy-resistant sarcoma patients, whereby the temperature measured in the tumor significantly separated the responders from the non-responders. Issels was awarded the annual German Cancer Prize of the German Cancer Society in 1991 for the publication on these results in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The subsequent randomized, multi-centric phase III EORTC-ESHO 95 study in Europe with 341 high-risk soft tissue sarcomas showed a significant survival advantage for patients who received a combination of regional hyperthermia with chemotherapy prior and after surgery,. The results led to the inclusion of regional hyperthermia in the therapy guidelines for sarcomas and the reimbursement of the treatment costs by the health insurance funds.The analyses of the immune infiltrates in patients revealed a significant increase in tumor infiltrating immune cells with simultaneous silencing of immunosuppressive factors. Therefore, there is the greatest interest in a possible combination of hyperthermia with checkpoint inhibitors and/or tumor vaccination, in which he and his colleagues see a possibility for the future, as "cold tumors" represent the greatest hurdle to treatment success in the field of current immune oncology. Beside his clinical research, Issels has been involved since 1982 with biochemical studies on the induction of heat-shock proteins and beginning in 1992 with the immunological significance of stress proteins for the immune response against cancer in a research group funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG),. Since 2018 he has been appointed by Prof. von Bergwelt, the present head of the Department of Internal Medicine III, as senior consultant.

Awards

• Annual Award of the German Cancer Society – 1991
• ESHO Award (European Society for Hyperthermic Oncology) – 2002
• Annual Award of the German Society for Medical Oncology – 2010
• First Thaddaeus Samulski Lectureship at Duke University Medical Center, USA – 2011
• Spinoza Chair Award, University Amsterdam Medical Center, Netherland – 2011
• ESHO Honorary President – Chairman of Clinical Committee – 2013
• Eugen Robinson Award of the American Society for Thermal Medicine (STM) – 2014
• Elected Fellow of the Cell Stress Society International (CSSI) – 2019
• George M. Hahn Award of the American Society for Thermal Medicine (STM) – 2021

Weblinks

• Prof. Dr. Rolf Issels, oncologist at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München discusses at the ECC2015 conference in Vienna youtube.com VEEF17kJ50Y

• DKK 2012 Interview (akustisch, deutsch) Prof. Rolf Issels: „Deutschland steht bei der Hyperthermieforschung mit an der Spitze" DKK 2012

• LMU-Klinikum München, Veröffentlichung vom 15.02.2018 LMU-Klinikum Veröffentlichung