The University of Colorado Cancer Center’s new associate director for global oncology has just returned from Mexico, where he signed the first of what he hopes will be many partnership agreements with cancer centers in Latin America.
Since Enrique Soto Pérez de Celis, MD, PhD, arrived at the CU Cancer Center in April, “my vision has been to create a global oncology program that looks towards Latin America, particularly with the intention of bridging the gaps between our Latino communities here in Colorado and the places where many of them came from, one, two, three, or four generations ago and try to figure out ways in which the communities here and there can work together.”
One way to do that, he says, is “by creating links with institutions across Latin America that have similar goals.”
On Nov. 19, Soto was in Mexico City to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición Salvador Zubirán (the National Institute of Health Sciences and Nutrition), or INCMNSZ. Soto was a resident and fellow there, then remained as an internationally renowned geriatric oncologist and researcher.
“It’s an ideal strategic partnership,” Soto says. “It’s about collaboration on research, training, and clinical practice. The opportunities are endless.”
At the core of the agreement, he says, “is exchanging people for training and education. Through this MOU, we’ll be able to train more people from Mexico, and it’s also a great opportunity for our trainees and faculty to go abroad to gain a deeper understanding of how things are done in other places and the problems that are faced there. We already have started to apply for grants from the Union for International Cancer Control, of which we are members, to bring Mexican oncologists and trainees to the CU Cancer Center to train for a short fellowship.”
Soto believes that for oncologists working in Colorado, “understanding how patients interact with physicians and the health care system in their own culture in Latin America is extremely important because we have a very large Hispanic population here. Improving care of the Hispanic population here is one of the goals of the CU Cancer Center, both in clinical practice and in research, so this effort aligns perfectly with our mission.”
Ultimately, “the idea is to create agreements with institutions across Latin America,” Soto says. “Once we have a more robust global oncology program, particularly for research, we will have partnerships in place to deploy projects and recruit patients across the region. For every investigator, regardless of what they do, from basic science to epidemiological studies, having partner sites in other places where people have different genetic backgrounds, and where the types of tumors are different, is an incredible resource. Some of the things that are very hard to study here in the United States may be easier to study in other places where the cancer incidence is different.”
The hope is that the initial focus on partnerships in Mexico will soon expand to Central America and then large cancer institutes in countries like Brazil and Peru, he says.
Soto emphasizes that the goal of these agreements “is not for us to go to Latin America, take data, and do parasitic research. Sadly, a lot of institutions in high-income countries do that: They go to other countries, take samples, do research and then they publish papers. Our idea is to create true collaborations, because they always provide more fruitful results than unilateral work.”
It’s a busy time for Soto, a geriatric oncologist. As he’s been forging international alliances, he also has been serving as a board member for the International Society of Geriatric Oncology, known as SIOG. In October, at the SIOG annual meeting in Montreal, the society presented him with its Paul Calabresi Award, its foremost global honor, recognizing outstanding work that has significantly advanced geriatric oncology worldwide.
Soto is proud that he was nominated for the award by some of his mentees. “SIOG is a very tight-knit community. It was like getting an award from friends, which was really amazing.” He also was touched that he received the same honor as a key mentor, Arti Hurria, MD, former director of the Center for Cancer and Aging at City of Hope, under whom he pursued a postgraduate fellowship. Hurria died in 2018 at age 48 following a traffic accident.
Previously, Soto served on the board of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and is active on its committees. He serves as editor-in-chief of the open-access cancer journal ecancermedicalscience, and is an associate editor of the Journal of Geriatric Oncology.
In his few months in Colorado, Soto has found the Hispanic communities in the state to be “very rich and very diverse. There are people from all across Latin America, and the immigration has happened in waves. Now, for example, we have a growing population of people from Venezuela, but previous immigrations were from Central America, and even earlier from Mexico.”
Soto also specializes in treating breast cancer among women over age 65. “Many of these women have been living here for 40 or 50 years. They immigrated from Mexico a long time ago, and they’ve built their entire families and livelihood here in Colorado. Despite that, the way in which these people interact with each other and with physicians is very similar to the interactions I had with patients in Mexico just a few months ago. They’re acclimated to the U.S., but they mostly speak Spanish at home and they still have roots in Mexican or Latin American ways of being. I find that super-interesting.”
That said, Soto also notes that his patients represent many backgrounds across the world. “The other day I had patients from Mexico, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Iraq, plus patients from the U.S.,” he says. “Most of these people share a lot of the same concerns and challenges. We have to let go of this idea that people are very different. There are many more similarities than differences.”
Photo at top: Enrique Soto Pérez de Celis presenting at the International Society of Geriatric Oncology (SIOG) annual meeting in Montreal in October 2024, where he also received SIOG's Paul Calabresi Award recognizing his career. Photo courtesy of Enrique Soto Pérez de Celis.