Tatiana Michelle Prowell is an American medical oncologist specializing in breast cancer. She is an Associate Professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Breast Cancer Scientific Liaison at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.
Early life and education
Growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, Prowell wished to pursue a career in literature and writing stating she "had no intention of going to medical school." Her father was a federal employee working for the U.S. Geological Survey and her mother a homemaker. She attended Parkview High School for her secondary school education. While completing her Bachelor of Arts degree in literature at Bard College, she was encouraged by her academic advisor, Clark Rodewald, to pursue a medical career. Although she was scheduled to attend a semester abroad at the Charles University in Prague during her junior year, she canceled her plans and worked with the science department to complete the various courses needed for her MCAT and medical school applications. She studied alongside Rodewald and translator William Weaver to complete her literature thesis, a translation from French to English of Gerard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient. Prowell later reflected that her mother's lymphoma diagnosis shortly after she left for college contributed to her pursuit of a career in oncology. After a year working with Nobel laureate D. Carleton Gajdusek in his NIH Laboratory of Central Nervous System Studies, where she conducted basic science research in spongiform encephalopathies and served as the editor of several years of Gajdusek's personal diaries housed in the National Library of Medicine, she was accepted into the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She graduated in 1999 with a medical degree and election to the Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha honor societies. During her final year of residency, she married Dr. Todd Gleeson, an HIV specialist. They had their first of three children together in 2004. Prowell was the recipient of an American Society of Clinical Oncology Young Investigator Award and two Pearl M. Stetler awards for women in medicine.
Career
Prowell was hired by Richard Pazdur in 2006 to join the faculty of oncology at Johns Hopkins University and serve as a medical officer and breast cancer scientific liaison to the Oncology Center of Excellence at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. In order to balance her joint appointments, Prowell worked part-time for the FDA while continuing to serve patients at Johns Hopkins. She later played an important role in developing FDA’s policy on accelerated approval using pathological complete response as a novel regulatory endpoint in the neoadjuvant high-risk breast cancer setting. The two articles were Residual Disease after Neoadjuvant Therapy — Developing Drugs for High-Risk Early Breast Cancer and Pathological Complete Response and Accelerated Drug Approval in Early Breast Cancer. By 2012, Prowell and Pazdur co-published new FDA guidelines which would allow non-approved drugs to be tested on highly aggressive types of breast cancer before women underwent surgery, with the disappearance of all cancer after treatment in the pathological specimen, known as pathological compete response, to be used as a potential basis for regulatory approval. In 2016, she was appointed by Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee to the Biden Cancer Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel Cancer Immunology Working Group. Prowell has been an advocate for respectful language in medicine. She and Don Dizon called upon the field of medicine to abandon language that dehumanizes patients. She stated the aim of the language changes was to remind colleagues that patients and trial participants should be considered partners in research and clinical care, and to demonstrate respect to patients: "if we believe that we are making some exceptional allowance to not hurt patients' feelings, well, we should." While serving as Chair of the American Society of Clinical Oncology's 2020 Annual Meeting Education Committee, Prowell co-authored The Language of Respect document intended to address these issues as well as mitigate unconscious gender and racial bias in speaker introductions at conferences. In 2019, she received the John and Samuel Bard Award in Science or Medicine for her contributions to the field of oncology. Prowell rose to prominence on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic as a reliable source of medical news and public health commentary. In March 2020, she tweeted a call to action seeking a convalescent plasma donor for her brother-in-law’s father, a physician who was critically ill with COVID-19. The tweet led to an outpouring of messages from thousands of prospective convalescent plasma donors, as well as others also seeking plasma for their own family members. Prowell worked to connect potential donors and recipients to donation centers throughout the U.S. before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the American Red Cross set up a convalescent plasma donation program. By April 10, 2020, The Atlantic journalist Sarah Zhang reported that 20,000 potential donors reached out to Mount Sinai Hospital. Her tweet and subsequent efforts earned her a Webby Special Achievement in May 2020 for "her use of the Internet to organize a blood drive and to inspire COVID-19 survivors to donate their plasma to those still in the fight to recover."
