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Nebraska Quarterly Magazine
By Tom Nugent
Marty Liggett's typical workday begins at 5:30 a.m., when she plunges head-on into a full-speed-ahead exercise workout at an outdoor fitness class just outside Washington, D.C. And that's the easy part of her daily work schedule ... as the veteran executive director for the 14,000-member American Society of Hematology (ASH). Liggett's crucially important mission: Helping to facilitate research and publication for a professional association that includes the world's largest group of physicians and researchers dedicated to fighting blood diseases of every kind.
It was an afternoon that Martha ("Marty") Liggett (B.S. '72) said she will never forget. And it took place during an annual meeting of physicians and medical researchers that she had helped to organize, down to the smallest detail.
The date was Dec. 3, 1999 ... and the gathering of thousands of medical professionals in New Orleans that Marty Liggett and her staff had put together was known formally as "The 41st Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology."
It was there that a hematologist (blood specialist) would announce a huge research breakthrough in the battle against one of the world's most lethal forms of blood cancer: chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML.
Although the biochemistry involved in CML was extremely complex, the basic disease process and its effects on human beings were frighteningly clear. Put simply, CML was a bone marrow stem cell disorder in which genetic flaws caused potentially fatal cancer in white blood cells.
Until the late 1990s, when medical researchers began to make inroads in understanding the disease and designing drug compounds that could fight it, CML had been a merciless killer. For most patients, in fact, a CML diagnosis usually meant a rapid decline into disabling illness – followed by months of agonizing pain in bones and tissues, and then death.
But now there was a new sense of hope among the nation's hematologists. And that feeling of hope was palpable, as more than 10,000 of them gathered that December to listen to presentations and review research findings in a number of areas related to treating blood cancers and other blood diseases.
For months preceding the New Orleans meeting, there had been growing speculation about new CML discoveries being made by a group of hematology researchers in the United States.
One of those cutting-edge investigators, Brian J. Druker, M.D. – then a 44-year-old scientist at the Oregon Health & Science University – was even rumored to have found a drug compound that could interrupt the growth of CML cancer by preventing a key enzyme reaction in the reproduction of the malignant cells.
This powerful new compound (known medically as a tyrosinekinase inhibitor) was eventually called Imatinib ... and its great strength was its ability to shut down protein growth in cancer cells by blocking a key enzyme reaction essential to the process.
Until the 1999 ASH meeting, however, no researcher had come forward with the results of the introductory clinical trials (known as "Phase 1 Trials") that would be the first step in determining just how effective the discovery might be in protecting human beings from CML.
Enter Dr. Druker
"You can imagine how I felt," she told Nebraska Magazine during a recent interview in her Washington office. "Our whole purpose [at ASH] is to facilitate communication among hematologists – through our publications and by organizing and managing meetings like that one, so that pioneering research can go forward with maximum effectiveness. And there was Brian Druker coming forward to deliver some research findings that would permanently change the world of leukemia."
When the Oregon researcher stepped up to the microphone that day to announce that the "Phase 1 Trials" had been overwhelmingly successful and that Imatinib showed immense promise as a therapy that could prevent CML from killing people, the response was electrifying.
Thrilled with the knowledge of what this meant for CML patients and what it could promise for many others, thousands of doctors and researchers in the great hall rose to their feet in roaring waves of spontaneous applause. Recalling that astonishing moment later, Druker himself told reporters: "It was a standing-room-only crowd and there was an enormous amount of excitement.
You could have heard a pin drop during my presentation, and there was ... thunderous applause at the end. That was unusual because the typical reaction to a Phase 1 Trial is: ‘Well, that's interesting, but it's still pretty early – we'll need more studies to confirm [the findings].'
"But in this case, there was none of that. Just this incredible validation and genuine enthusiasm."
And the eventual results?
Before the discovery of Imatinib and other related drug compounds, more than two thirds of the people who are annually diagnosed with CML worldwide died within a few years.
Today, however, about 90 percent of U.S. CML patients survive at least five years ... and the survival rate is climbing rapidly in most other areas of the globe as well.
For many American researchers, the story of how Druker and his team revolutionized the treatment of CML (and began saving thousands of lives each year as a result) now ranks as one of the most thrilling and uplifting chapters in the history of medical research.
But the story has a special poignancy for Marty Liggett, the 63-year-old former UNL dental hygiene student who has been serving as the executive director of Washington based ASH for the past 17 years.
"What's especially rewarding for me is that the father of one of my own colleagues here at ASH has CML," said the fiercely determined medical association administrator.
"There's very little doubt that before the emergence of this new drug therapy, he would have died of CML within a short time. But now he's thriving ... by taking a single pill each day. And for me, that's just terribly meaningful.
"I mean ... our job at ASH is to help move the science of hematology forward, and to facilitate the sharing of new research – just like the research that is now saving so many people from CML. And when you see the effects of that up close ... where a man is still alive and enjoying his family every single day ...
"Well, I just think it makes you want to tell the entire world about hematology!"
Facing the Gender Barrier
Born and raised in York – where she grew up as the daughter of one of the city's leading dentists, George Liggett – Marty Liggett readily admits that she became a dental hygienist in order to please her hard-working dad. "I wound up in dental hygiene because my dad thought I should have a career that I could do part-time [while raising children]," she will tell you with a smile of bittersweet nostalgia.
"I went ahead and studied it at UNL, and I did okay. And then I worked for about a year as a dental
hygienist in Kearney – and I immediately knew that wasn't the job for me. It just wasn't sufficiently challenging intellectually... and after a while, I was afraid that I'd lose my enthusiasm for the profession if I couldn't expand my horizons."
While preparing for what she had assumed would be a career in dental hygiene, Liggett worked many
hours at the School of Dentistry on the East Campus. In the late 1960s, she said, gender strongly influenced the organization of the training program at the dental school.
"There were very few, if any, women dental students back then," she said, "and there weren't any men dental hygiene students. As a [female] student, you had to wear your white uniform whenever you were in clinic. And pre-clinical laboratories were even worse, as we were locked away in the dental hygiene
area ... in order to keep us away from [the men in the dental
school]."
The program was administered by professor Elizabeth Warner Waggoner, who ran a tight ship, according to Liggett. And yet she was also a source of inspiration for the hungry kid from York: "She'd actually worked in Washington [D.C., before coming to UNL to teach], where she'd worked developing oral health policy at the Department of Health and Human Services.
"And I was impressed by the fact that she'd lived and worked in Washington, and she'd had the experience of shaping health care on a national level. And that had great influence on me later, when I went to work myself for the same dentist she had worked with at DHHS.
After earning her degree in dental hygiene at UNL in 1972 and then spending a year cleaning teeth in Kearney, Liggett decided that she needed a bigger stage on which to perform. "I had tried like crazy to make [cleaning teeth] as interesting as I could," she recalled. "But it didn't work, and so I went ahead and applied to graduate school in dental hygiene, so that I could teach it. I kept thinking: I gotta do something that's challenging.
"So I applied for a master's at Columbia in New York City ... and as part of that, I got a [paid] teaching internship at the university. And my dad said: ‘Well, if they're gonna pay for it, I think you should go there ... because if you think I'm going to pay for a master's degree for a woman, you're crazy!'"
(But Liggett also pointed out that her father grew much more understanding after that ... and that by the time she entered law school at Georgetown University, her next major career move, he was "actually very supportive and very helpful in my taking that next step.")
After earning the Georgetown law degree (and also being admitted to the bar in Washington, D.C.), Liggett settled into her first long-term career post, as general counsel and assistant executive director for the American Association of Dental Schools. There she established a growing national reputation as a legal-eagle with a keen eye for understanding what makes a successful D.C. lobbying outfit tick.
Tapped in 1996 for her current post at ASH, Liggett today manages a staff of 70 educators, managers, public relations professionals, meeting organizers, medical journal editors (ASH's in-house Blood hematology journal is the leader in its field) and administrators – while running a globally oriented non-profit that includes dedicated physicians and blood researchers from around the world in its ranks.
Headquartered in its own $64 million, ten-story highrise on Washington's downtown "L" Street (the building recently won a coveted LEED "Platinum" designation for its environmentally friendly energy conservation features), ASH in 2013 ranks easily as one of the premiere research-and-publication non-profits now at work in the world of medical science.
Lean and fit (she's an enthusiastic golfer who's also proud of having completed the D.C. Marine Corps Marathon in just over five hours), Marty Liggett typically puts in a 10-to-12-hour day in the ceaseless quest to do everything she can to "facilitate the exchange of ideas and new research findings throughout the world of hematology, whether it's through our Blood journal or our annual meeting each year, or the smaller meetings of doctors and researchers that we frequently orchestrate."
Example: Only a day before sitting down with Nebraska Magazine to talk about her life in the nation's capital (husband Dr. Jim Bader is a successful dental researcher, and son Nicholas is currently serving in the Peace Corps in Nepal), Liggett had returned from a conference in Rome that was designed to help developing countries better implement the latest research findings in hematology.
"That was a very exciting meeting," she said with the bright, energetic smile that is her trademark.
"We've been working for nine years now to help foster a group called the International Consortium on Acute Leukemias, and in Rome we were able to work with some very committed partners from these developing countries. We're trying to help them form their own research networks and their own educational programs in acute leukemia – and we're very encouraged, because in some of these countries now, the survival rate for the cancer we have focused on is beginning to approach Western levels.
"So a lot of patients are getting saved, and hematologists have started working with each other in the countries that are participating in this project. They're helping each other, and providing free training, and there's just a lot more dialogue going on. And ASH is helping to facilitate that. "This is a very exciting time for hematology, and I just feel very privileged to be a part of it all."