Leukemia specialist, amateur painter finds meaningful connection between art and medicine

Hagop Kantarjian, M.D., isn’t just the head of Leukemia at MD Anderson; he’s also a prolific artist.

Since 1992, the leukemia specialist estimates he’s painted more than 500 canvasses in his spare time. About 50 of those brightly colored, Fauvist-style pieces currently grace the halls of the Leukemia department. He averages about one new painting each week and sometimes gives them away to patients or colleagues.

“I’ll never be a professional artist,” Kantarjian insists. “I’m really not that disciplined about it. I don’t paint unless I feel the urge. But people who are deeply involved in their professions need to have some outlet where they can step outside of their normal roles and just enjoy life. Art and exercise are what take up most of my time outside of MD Anderson.”

The thread connecting art and medicine: innovation

Kantarjian sees a clear thread running between art and medicine. 

“In both of those areas,” he notes, “you always want to innovate and create something that did not exist before.” 

Kantarjian discovered his own passion for innovation in 1978, when he came to MD Anderson as a medical student from Lebanon. 

“Back then, we didn’t really know much about cancer or how to treat it, but I always knew that I wanted to be an oncologist,” he says. “My time at MD Anderson changed my perspective of life completely. Here, I found people to be both innovators and discoverers, whereas my training in Lebanon was all about absorbing knowledge. I wanted to be where the innovators were.”

What gives our leukemia patients hope today

Kantarjian returned to MD Anderson as an oncology fellow in 1981 after finishing medical school and joined the Leukemia faculty in 1983. He became the chair of that department in 1995. And, over the years, he has both seen and been a part of some of the most dramatic advances in the treatment of leukemia.

“In 1981, patients with acute leukemias (ALL, AML) had a cure rate of only 20-30% with intensive chemotherapy. Chronic leukemias (CLL, CML) were not curable, and patients only had about a 20% chance of survival at 10 years post-diagnosis,” he explains. “Now, that figure is well over 90%, and both CML and CLL are functionally curable. And patients with ALL have a 5-year survival rate of 70+%, while patients with AML have 3-to-5-year survival rates above 50-60%.”

Those statistics are just part of what gives hope to today’s leukemia patients — and that’s a feeling Kantarjian is eager to foster.

“If you think about leukemia from a patient’s point of view,” he muses, “a month ago, they were totally normal. Then, they’re suddenly faced with a serious cancer diagnosis. In the 1980s, we didn’t have much to offer them. Now, we do. So, how can you not care and try to do the very best you can for them?”

Why where you go first matters

Even today, Kantarjian notes, some patients don’t respond as well as we’d like to conventional therapies. So, it’s critical to seek care at a place like MD Anderson, where cutting-edge treatments and a robust clinical trials program can keep both our patients and their hopes alive.

“Where you go first really does matter,” he says, “especially when it comes to rare diseases. Leukemias are already very rare, so it’s important to be treated by experts. We have 40 faculty members on staff here who specialize in this disease alone. And they are all driven to offer our patients the best possible treatment at any given time.” 

“That’s why, when you look at a list of the top 15 leukemia experts in the world, 10 of them work here at MD Anderson,” he adds. “And that’s why we continue to see improvement year after year in the outcomes of every leukemia we’re treating.” 

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