David Steensma: Those of us Bob trained won’t forget his influence.
David Steensma, renowned hematologist-oncologist and the CMO of Ajax Therapeutics, shared on X (Twitter),
“I learned today Dr. Bob Phyliky [from] Mayo Clinic, died Friday at the age of 87.
Bob was an important clinical mentor for me. Whenever I had a challenging non-malignant hematology case as a fellow or young consultant, he was the person to seek advice from.
When I was starting lab work around 2000, Bob said, “You should think about working on JAK-STAT. There must be an activating mutation in JAK2 or STAT3/5 driving myeloproliferative disorders” [as we called them then]. But I got too caught up in RNA splicing to look at JAK/STAT.
In 2005 this paper came out in Nature from Vainchenker et al, and the whole field shifted. In fact, I now work at a startup trying to target JAK2 better than existing therapies in MPN! Bob was a thoughtful clinician who read widely and envision this years in advance.
Bob also had an uncanny ability to predict what treatments might work in cases of refractory ITP, LGL, WAIHA etc. He’d say “Maybe give azathioprine a try” or “Once I had a patient like that who responded to vincristine” and we’d discuss with pt. and try and often it would work.
(If those sound like old-fashioned therapies – it was a different era, 20-25 years ago, when rituximab was brand new and all these fancy new-fangled things like TPO agonists, Syk inhibitors, next-gen MoAbs, etc didn’t exist yet.)
Bob was the best person to sign challenging as a trainee. If you forgot to order a test, instead of making you feel like an idiot he’d gently say, “It’s really important to check for a TCR gene rearrangement in these cases.” Better believe you’d never make that oversight again.
Bob also had an ability to be encouraging of fellows even if their career paths didn’t phenocopy his. When trainees had success, he would celebrate with genuine happiness & without envy. (The combination of those traits turned out to be less common than I had imagined.)
I just thought of Bob Phyliky last week when I posted about William H. Crosby’s 1951 paper on PNH. Phyliky had been a fellow at New England Medical Center in Boston circa 1970 before joining the Mayo staff, was also ex-military like Crosby, and Crosby was influential for him.
I mentioned that history in this ASH Clinical News 2019 article on our personal “genealogies” in hematology.
https://ashpublications.org/ashclinicalnews/news/4697/Fathers-and-Mothers-of-Hematology
And finally, a funny thing: when I mentioned to Bob years ago that my wife was expecting, he congratulated us and smiled and said, “Hematologists in our department seem to have daughters. Be prepared for that.” We had all girls…😉
My sincere condolences to Bob’s wife Julia, and their daughters and grandchilden and their families. Those of us Bob trained won’t forget his influence.”
Source: David Steensma / X (Twitter)