I have spent my career caring for patients with head and neck cancer. For years, the disease was taught as a consequence of tobacco and alcohol. Then Maura Gillison showed us that a large share of these cancers – especially in the oropharynx – were driven by HPV. That discovery did not stay in a journal. It entered my clinic, my operating room, and every tumor board I sit on. It changed the dialogue with patients, how we stage, and what I tell patients about prevention and treatment. So I want to add my voice to the tributes.
Maura L. Gillison, MD, PhD, professor of medicine in thoracic, head and neck medical oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, died June 21 at 61 from small bowel cancer. She was a medical oncologist and molecular epidemiologist whose work redefined head and neck cancer.
As a postdoctoral fellow, she showed that a subset of pharyngeal, tonsillar, and base-of-tongue cancers was HPV-driven. In 2000, her seminal paper found HPV in metastases as well as primary tumors, overturning the idea that HPV in these tumors was laboratory contamination. A 2007 New England Journal of Medicine prospective case-control study confirmed HPV’s causal role in oropharyngeal cancer.
Today, HPV causes about 70% of U.S. oropharyngeal cancers, with rising rates in men. HPV status is the strongest prognostic factor: HPV-positive disease has better outcomes. Her findings drove new diagnostic tests, staging criteria, treatment guidelines, and trials of less-intensive therapy. RTOG 0129 identified patients eligible for de-escalation. RTOG 1016 showed cetuximab was inferior to cisplatin, preventing a widespread shift to a less effective therapy. She was also a senior investigator on trials that led to checkpoint inhibitor approvals in head and neck cancer.
Her prevention work was equally important. She led studies showing the HPV vaccine may reduce oral HPV infections in young adults by as much as 88%, with no infections detected in vaccinated men in one analysis. This helped support the Food and Drug Administration expanded approval in 2020 of the vaccine for the prevention of oropharyngeal and other head and neck cancers.
She received ASCO’s David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award in 2021 and shared the VinFuture Grand Prize in 2025. She continued leading lab meetings until the week before her death. She is survived by her husband, daughters, parents, siblings, and extended family.
Maura Gillison was fearless, brilliant, and compassionate. She was, as colleagues said, perhaps the most impactful head and neck medical oncologist in history. For those of us who treat these cancers, her legacy is not abstract. It is in every HPV-positive patient who can be treated less harshly, accurate staging, every prevention and treatment conversation. I never had the privilege of working beside her, but I worked with her evidence every day. That is a rare kind of influence. We owe it to her to keep asking better questions and to keep pushing prevention.
Rest in peace, Dr. Gillison.
