Clinical research is essential to advancing medical knowledge and improving patient outcomes, helping researchers deepen their understanding of diseases and leading to more effective treatments with fewer side effects.
“Modern medicine still has many things we need to learn,” said Hedy Lee Kindler, MD, Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago. “The only way that we're going to advance clinical care is to be able to evaluate new drugs and new devices in patients and show scientifically that they actually work and not just that we hope they work.”
Finding new treatments for mesothelioma
Kindler is Director of the Multidisciplinary Mesothelioma Program at UChicago and is widely recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the condition, which is a cancer in the lining of the lungs or abdomen, usually caused by exposure to asbestos. She previously specialized in the treatment of pancreatic cancer and has more than 25 years of experience investigating treatments for these cancers. She has also designed and led many national and international clinical trials, including practice-changing studies that have resulted in FDA approval of new drugs.
Cancer is an especially difficult disease to treat due to its complexity, adaptability, and the variable nature of cancer cells. Many treatments eventually stop working, so, finding new and better treatments is mission critical.
“If we can offer multiple options along the trajectory of their cancer, we have a better chance of being able to control the disease, helping to provide an improvement in both quality of life as well as length of life for our patients,” Kindler said. “Clinical trials of new treatments not only provide new options, but they also provide hope.”
In fact, the first life-extending treatment for mesothelioma was developed by Kindler’s mentor at UChicago when she was a junior faculty member. In 2003, Nicolas Vogelzang, MD, director of what was then called the UChicago Cancer Research Center, found that a combination of two chemotherapy drugs increased survival and improved outcomes in patients with pleural mesothelioma. This treatment regimen became the new standard of care at that time.
Since then, UChicago Medicine has made many new treatment options available, including immunotherapy, chemoimmunotherapy, and targeted therapies. Multimodality (chemotherapy plus surgery) options include HIPEC (hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy, PIPAC (pressurized intraperitoneal aerosol chemotherapy), and NIPEC (normothermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy). New options available in clinical trials have included precision medicine agents targeted to specific molecular on-off switches in tumor cells, CAR-T (Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell therapies), bispecific antibodies, antibody drug conjugates, and many others.
“Over the years, we've seen how clinical research can really transform a disease that isn't treatable to one that is treatable and manageable,” Kindler said. “Some of the mesothelioma patients who participated in our earliest trials of immunotherapy, for example, have had dramatic and durable responses to treatment and are now leading normal lives. That is truly heartwarming to see.”
She added that patients in her clinic come from across the country, and often across the world, to be able to have more treatment options than they would be able to get anywhere else.
A career leading innovative clinical research
Kindler has deep experience with the infrastructure required for a successful clinical trials enterprise. She is the principal investigator for a grant that supports the infrastructure to conduct national clinical trials through the National Cancer Institute’s National Clinical Trials Network.
For many years, she headed the UChicago Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Protocol Review and Monitoring System, which reviews the scientific merit, priority, and progress of all cancer clinical trials conducted at the university. She also spent five years as Associate Vice Chair for Clinical Research in the Department of Medicine, where she helped enhance the clinical research infrastructure.
In this role, she is a strategic leader for the Office of the Dean, creating synergy and operational excellence across BSD research entities. To achieve this goal, she partners with senior leaders in the University’s Office of Clinical Research to ensure that clinical trial infrastructure and processes are compliant, high-quality, and efficient.
“I understand clinical trials from the perspective of the investigator and draw from my experience in the cancer realm, where clinical research is just part of our DNA,” she said. “I'm really excited about this new role because it brings together all of the skills that I had from all of the different aspects that I've done in clinical research but allows me to look at things from the 50,000-foot view.”
Building a bright future
Kindler succeeded Walter Stadler, MD, who served in a similar role from 2019 to 2025 and played a pivotal role in modernizing the Office of Clinical Research.
Kindler is continuing that work to align the various components of clinical research to open trials sooner—a major hurdle in running clinical trials. There are a lot of regulatory processes in place to protect the patients, she explained. The more complex the trial, the longer it takes to get it up and running. There is room for efficiency; however, no short cuts are ever taken.
“The patient has to be our most important concern,” Kindler said. “We have to make sure that we are providing a safe environment for the patient, that the data is accurate, that we are not ever doing harm to a patient, and that we are doing this for the patient's benefit.”
Bringing clinical trials closer to home
Another strategic priority is expanding clinical trials across the UChicago Health System, which now includes a partnership with AdventHealth Great Lakes Region and the new Crown Point facility in Northwest Indiana.
That growth is already off to a strong start, according to Kindler. A significant percentage of the health system’s cancer clinical trials enrollment is now occurring at network sites, including Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox and the system’s Orland Park location.
“We really want to have an imprint on the region and make sure that patients have access to good quality clinical trials closer to where they live,” she said.
She said her plans to build that infrastructure include engaging and training the faculty, making sure that the trials in the network are tailored to that patient population and to the faculty expertise, and hiring and training excellent staff.
Clinical research, however, takes a lot of resources and even with infrastructure in place to do this state-of-the-art research, UChicago relies on continuous funding from various sources, including government grants. Unfortunately, proposed cuts in federal funding for research have the potential to delay or limit clinical trials, the effects of which could be felt by patients.
“We know the impact of clinical research on the lives of our patients has been really tremendous, and we just hope that the current environment allows us to continue that and offer trials for all of our patients,” Kindler said.
For now, she is forging ahead in her new leadership role and is motivated by the fact that UChicago has all the building blocks to be a foremost leader in clinical research—not merely in cancer—but in many different areas.
“When people think clinical trials, they think University of Chicago—that's our goal.”
