Dr Derek Power took up the post of Consultant Medical Oncologist at Cork University Hospital and The Mercy University Hospital as of July 1st 2010.
He obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Pharmacy from Trinity College Dublin and worked for several years in hospital pharmacy. It was during this time that he developed an interest in drug therapeutics and the pharmacology of cytotoxic chemotherapy. To further this interest he returned to university and obtained a medical degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He completed his basic medical training and specialist training in medical oncology in Ireland. He was then awarded a research bursary by the Irish Society of Medical Oncology allowing him to embark on a research/clinical fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York. In this institution he worked in solid tumour medical oncology and cancer genetics. His research included drug development, e.g. development of the check-point inhibitor Flavopiridol to overcome chemotherapy resistance in solid tumours, as well as phase I, II, and III trials, e.g. He published a multicenter phase II study of bortezomib in patients with unresectable or metastatic gastric and gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma.
For the past 2 years he has worked in the cancer genetics service in Memorial Sloan Kettering. Responsibilities in this setting included the work-up, treatment and management of patients with an inherited predisposition to cancer. His research involved correlating known cancer risk single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) as defined by genome wide association studies with clinic-pathologic characteristics of individual solid tumours. This research is being presented as an oral presentation at the European Society of Medical Oncology this year and has helped to highlight specific populations associated with cancer phenotype. The findings are being used to develop screening and surveillance strategies.
