Dr. Ann Partridge’s extraordinary career in breast cancer research

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A read through Dr. Ann Partridge’s remarkable public biography begs an obvious question — how does she do it? 

As a decorated breast cancer researcher at Dana-Farber, she conducts important clinical studies and publications that have had a true impact on the ever-evolving study of the disease. Her tireless work earned her a Champion of Change award from the White House, one of many public acknowledgements of her efforts.

She is also a professor at Harvard Medical School, serves on a dizzying array of important boards and committees, sees patients, mentors young medical minds and serves as Dana-Farber’s chief clinical strategy officer as well as vice chair of medical oncology.

And her keystone achievement in a crowded field of them might just be her work founding and directing the Young and Strong program for young people battling an unexpected breast cancer diagnosis.

One important piece of information is missing from the bio, because it has absolutely nothing to do with her work: she also happens to be the wife of New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell.

It’s a role that she takes seriously, even if she has to squeeze it in amongst more pressing responsibilities.

“Sometimes I feel badly. I’m so busy with my own work that I probably haven’t been as involved as a ‘first lady’ as some people might have been,” she said. “But I know he respects that.”

Respect is something Dr. Partridge has in very high supply. Her warmth, intelligence and toughness shine through as she talks about her work, which she refers to as “a privilege.”

It’s a challenge, to put it mildly, and when you’re fighting battles on so many different fronts, it can surely be overwhelming.

“When the paper gets rejected, or the grant doesn’t get funded — and everybody has those experiences, even though I’ve done well over the years — it’s tough. We all have those disappointments.

“But then I can go to the clinic and realize I’m doing something that’s valuable for the person sitting in front of me. I’m grateful for that.”

New Bedford Light: I was going to ask what an average day might be like for you, but I imagine there probably isn’t an average day. Generally, what time do you start? What time do you finish? How long is your day?

Ann Partridge: It definitely varies, but it seems over the years I’ve learned that highly effective, efficient, well-rested people try to get up at the same time every morning. So I tend to be an early riser, in part out of necessity.

It does vary a bit depending on whether I need to be in really early or whether it’s a weekend. But on a typical workday, I leave home at 4:50 in the morning because I want to beat the traffic — or at least some of it.

If I leave at 4:50, I can get to Boston, where I work, by 6. Then I exercise before work and shower up here. That’s how I make it work from both a sanity standpoint and an efficiency standpoint because, like most people, I don’t love traffic. It hasn’t gotten any better.

It was quite nice during the pandemic, I’m sure, but obviously that changed and went back to worse than normal.

So I’m an early riser, and I do work long days because I typically also avoid traffic on the way home. I don’t tend to leave the office until 6 or later, depending on what I have to do that night. Sometimes I stay up here, and I travel a bit for work as well, so it also depends on my travel schedule.

I tend to work long days, and I guess I’m fortunate in that I function well as long as I get good sleep. It’s efficient sleep. I tend to pack it in.

NBL: You wear a lot of different hats. You’re a physician, a teacher, a researcher, an administrator. There’s a lot happening. How does it break down for you? Do you just kind of go from one role to the next? Is there a main focus for you right now in your career?

AP: I am a clinician at heart. I love taking care of my patients.

That’s grown into helping others take better care of their patients. It also grew into doing research so we could all take better care of all of our patients, whether they’re at Dana-Farber or elsewhere in the world.

So I do both clinical care and see patients, and I do that about a day a week, although it kind of spreads out because patients don’t necessarily follow my clinic schedule. They have issues in between visits, or we fit people in.

When I’m taking care of patients, I’m always either using research or incorporating them into research opportunities.

Then I spend, on average, a day or two a week doing research. As I’ve grown in my career, I also spend a lot of time mentoring trainees and junior faculty in both research and clinical care.

My research is all clinically oriented. I work with groups locally, nationally and internationally to conduct clinical trials to improve the care of patients, typically those with breast cancer.

I also wear an administrative hat, helping the department and the institution manage faculty and staff, mostly around both the academic and clinical aspects of our work.

So I do all those things.

From a teaching standpoint — which is part of what we do as faculty at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber — we give a lot of lectures, both within and outside our institution, nationally and internationally, to share our research and how we integrate it into clinical care.

Then there’s also a lot of collaboration.

Every day I read an email from a referring doctor I’ve known, or a physician who says, “I have this problem. Can you help me with this case?”

People do that for me as well. I don’t know all the answers either. I focus on one area. So there’s a lot of back-and-forth because most of us don’t know all the answers, right?

We’re always doing team clinical care and team science, trying to help one patient or design the best study for patients around the world.

NBL: How did you choose to focus on breast cancer, and specifically breast cancer in younger women?

AP: There were really two major reasons.

The first was breast cancer itself.

When I was a fellow — meaning right after residency, when you do additional training in medical oncology and hematology — I very quickly gravitated toward a particular mentor.

I was open to studying any type of cancer, really, but one of the leaders in the breast oncology group was a guy named Eric Winer, who’s now the director of the Yale Cancer Center. He’s a fantastic person — a phenomenal doctor, mentor, teacher and researcher.

I connected with him and felt that he would be a great supporter and, ultimately, sponsor for me. He was my mentor, and now we’re close colleagues and friends.

He and I really hit it off. The kind of research I was interested in was exactly what he was doing, and he was the right person to mentor me and support me, both professionally and personally.

It wasn’t that I thought, “I need to take care of people with breast cancer.” It was more that I wanted to be like someone like him.

Obviously, I wanted to make my own path, but I found a role model who was willing to take me in and help shape me as a clinician, researcher and administrator.

NBL: And when did your focus shift to the challenges young women with breast cancer face?

AP: We just knew so much less about this group of patients. There was so much need, both medically and from a psychosocial and emotional standpoint.

Then, at almost exactly the same time — I think I was a second-year fellow — my best friend from high school got breast cancer. 

We were young, and now I had a close friend who was dealing with it. I saw it through her eyes as a friend and loved one.

I saw so many unanswered questions that weren’t the kinds of things doctors typically thought about, but that were incredibly important to the patient.

How do you stay whole after a mastectomy, literally and figuratively? How do you think about your future when you also have to go through breast cancer treatment? How do you think about having a family?

I saw how hard it was, and it became a bit of a crusade for me, along with a whole team of people over the years, to make that experience better for individual patients.

NBL: It must be gratifying to see how much progress has been made. For younger patients, and overall. If breast cancer is caught early, the success rate is so much higher now, and there’s a greater focus on caring for the whole person. How has treatment changed since you started?

AP: It’s extraordinarily gratifying.

In fact, I was just talking to a new mentee who reached out to me. I told her she’s where I was when I started, which is 28 years ago this month. Things have changed dramatically, especially in breast cancer, but across so many other cancers. We’re seeing breakthroughs. More people are being cured, and more people are living long lives even when they’re not cured.

Don’t get me wrong — we still have a long way to go. People with breast cancer still die from breast cancer. But the vast majority of patients, whether they’re young or old, will live through and beyond their breast cancer.

When I started, survival was enough.

I think we’ve increasingly recognized — especially in breast cancer, where five-year survival is around 95 percent overall — that surviving isn’t enough.

We want people to thrive. We don’t want to overtreat people. We want to tailor treatment to the disease while considering the whole person and helping them make the best choices for themselves.

What’s the right balance for them? How do we optimize the way they want to live their lives while also keeping the cancer at bay?

NBL: Is that balance hard to achieve?

AP: It’s a tightrope.

We can’t simply tell people not to worry about treatment because that wouldn’t get them where they want to be.

At the same time, we’re doing a tremendous amount of research into what we call de-escalating therapy.

Fortunately, our technology and our tools have become much better at identifying who truly benefits from treatment and who doesn’t.

We’re getting more and more powerful tools that allow us to say, “This person’s cancer isn’t the type that’s going to benefit from chemotherapy.” So let’s spare them chemotherapy and direct them toward something more beneficial.

There is a study we conducted looking at whether women with early-stage breast cancer could safely pause hormonal therapy to have a baby and then resume treatment.

We showed that it was safe. We first showed that at about three and a half years, and now we’ve shown it’s still safe at five years. We’ll continue following those patients for 10 years because it’s such an important issue.

Many young women haven’t completed their families — or even started them — when they’re diagnosed. Many are diagnosed right in the middle of trying to become pregnant.

So how do we help them survive breast cancer, receive the best treatment possible and still have the opportunity to build the lives they envisioned?

We’ve made real progress, even over the past few years, particularly around pregnancy.

It’s incredibly gratifying as a clinician to be able to use data that we’ve helped generate to guide those conversations with patients.

NBL: I know this is mentally, emotionally and physically demanding work. It’s such an important role that you’re playing. Does your motivation come from knowing that you’re making a difference? Do you ever stop and reflect on it all, or do you just kind of take it one day at a time?

AP: I’m like anybody else, right?

I think we all have those moments where we ask ourselves, What is this all about? Is this worth my time? Especially when you’re tired.

I do think it’s a privilege. Very much a privilege. Whenever I have one of those moments, my clinic is very grounding.

It’s actually not that hard for me to reflect on what it’s all about because the meaning is right there. That’s one of the reasons I love being a doctor.

When the paper gets rejected, or the grant doesn’t get funded — and everybody has those experiences, even though I’ve done well over the years — it’s tough. We all have those disappointments.

But then I can go to the clinic and realize I’m doing something that’s valuable for the person sitting in front of me.

I’m grateful for that because I think, again, it’s a privilege.

I also love the research because that’s how you spread that impact beyond yourself and beyond your own colleagues. You move the field forward, especially in a disease like cancer, where the status quo is unacceptable.

You have to help families through incredibly difficult situations, and that’s hard. Trying to make those situations as good as they possibly can be gives me hope.

And seeing the progress we’ve made through research gives me hope, too.

NBL: You and your husband both have jobs that are about as demanding and all-consuming as you can imagine. How do you make that work when there’s so much demand on both of you all the time?

AP: Are you married?

NBL: I am.

AP: Then you know. (Laughs)

I think one fundamental principle we’ve always lived by — and we actually said this when we got married — comes from a quote we included in our wedding program.

Basically it was that love isn’t just about looking at each other. It’s about looking outward together.

I think that’s who we are.

Of course we look at each other and take care of each other, but I think we both respect that we’re deeply committed to our own passions and to trying to make the world a little better through service.

We support that in each other.

I tolerate when he’s busy, and he tolerates when I’m busy.

We support each other whenever the other has the bandwidth to pursue something important.

He’s been extraordinarily supportive of me.

Sometimes I feel badly, I’m so busy with my own work that I probably haven’t been as involved as a ‘first lady’ as some people might have been.

But I know he respects that.

Obviously, we’ve also raised three wonderful kids … raised by wolves, you know? (laughs) We’ve had a lot of help, too.

Part of what’s special about New Bedford is the community. Jon grew up there. His parents are there. And we’ve built this beautiful community of friends and family around us.

NBL: What does New Bedford mean to you now? You came to the city without much connection to it, and obviously it’s become a huge part of your life.

AP: Huge. Huge. I feel so blessed.

Jon already had a community there, and I became part of it. Over the years I’ve also created my own friendships and my own networks.

Even though I’m busy, I feel like I’m part of the community — not just because he’s the mayor.

We have a neighborhood group. We have a book club that gets together whenever we can. We all have families and busy lives, so sometimes months go by. But when we get together, it’s like we were together yesterday. It’s old friends who just get each other and can be themselves together. I have that group and so many other friends.

For me, it’s been such an enlightening experience.

I didn’t fully realize how much it mattered to me to be part of something like that until I became part of New Bedford.

We’ll stay in New Bedford, on some level, for the rest of our lives. That’s where our friends are. Our children grew up there. Our lives are there.

Of course, people move away. People get older.

But that’s life, right?

Your heart has a home. I think that’s a real gift.

NBL: It seems like part of your foundation as a couple is that you share the same outlook on what life is about and support each other in that.

AP: I think that’s true.

Although sometimes when we’re on vacation I have to say, “OK, no hard stuff.” (laughs)

NBL: Do you get to take vacations? I hope you do!

AP: We absolutely do.

Our youngest is still in college, but the other two are out on their own. We have a baby dog now, so she gets a lot of attention. We’re empty nesters all of a sudden.

The risk for us is that we’ll just keep working all the time. We know we can’t let that happen. So we’re very deliberate about it. We make sure we spend time together. We make sure we plan vacations. We make sure we’re not working all the time.

It’s easy to fall into that because we both genuinely like our work. We’re both deeply committed to it.

But we also know you can’t do that forever.

You have to make time for each other. And I know we will.

NBL: You must take a lot of pride in what Jon has accomplished. He jokes about being the second banana and defers to you — which he probably should — but you must be proud of the work he’s done.

AP: I’m so proud of him. I’m a fangirl.

It’s been wonderful to watch the progress of the city. Of course there have been ups and downs. It’s also been wonderful to watch him grow as a mayor and to appreciate just how deeply committed he is.

I’d like to think most public servants are committed to what they do, even though what we sometimes see in the press or on social media may not always reflect that.

There are always going to be people who support you and people who don’t. That’s the nature of public life. But I think he’s a remarkable public servant. 

His heart is really in it, and I also think he’s willing to do hard things.

When he first became mayor, people told him, “Don’t touch the schools. They’re the third rail.” And he basically said, “How can I not touch the schools? How can I not try to make them better?”

He believed improving the schools had to be a central part of his mission. It’s been a hard battle — public education is underfunded, there are tremendous needs.

But I think a lot of people, both within the school system and outside it, have worked incredibly hard, and the city has moved in the right direction.

There are still problems. There always will be. But tackling difficult problems is part of who he is. 

Maybe that’s one of the ways we’re alike. I always joke, “Bring on the cancer.”  Because I didn’t want to spend my career taking care of well babies. I wanted to work with people facing something really hard, and that’s essentially what he’s doing as well.

And I think that’s something we will always share.

Jonathan Comey is a decorated newspaper editor and columnist and a contributor to The New Bedford Light. Please send emails to him at jcomey@newbedfordlight.org.