Remembering Professor Esteban Cvitkovic
Institute of Oncology Research
The Foundation of the IOR is deeply saddened by the loss of Professor Esteban Cvitkovic, member of the IOR Scientific Advisory Board, who passed away suddenly on June 20, 2025.
The IOR community is profoundly saddened by his sudden death. Dr. Cvitkovic has been, from the beginning of the IOR, an enthusiastic supporter of our institute and, until very recently, a highly active member of our Scientific Advisory Board. He contributed greatly to shaping our research program, mainly in the field of evaluation and development of new therapeutic avenues, his main area of expertise and personal interest.
Esteban was born in Argentina in 1950. Already as a boy, he impressed family and friends with his extraordinary intelligence, which permitted him to enroll in medical school and achieve his medical degree at the age of 19. This extraordinary achievement was typical for Esteban, who, during his entire life, always aimed and realized goals considered to be impossible by most mainstream scientists. He was a very unorthodox personality who never accepted to bend to rules that he did not feel useful to promote his life dream: to be able to cure as many cancer types considered to be uncurable. In order to do so, he felt that the usual methodology applied in screening for new drugs and planning for slowly implemented clinical trials was too dull, inefficacious, and, at the limit, unacceptable. It is not surprising that he was never accepted with open arms in the official oncologic societies. His life has been a succession of victories and defeats; it could not have been different for such an unorthodox personality. So, he received important appointments at the Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York and the Institut Villejuif in Paris. However, he never adapted his behavior to a plan that would have brought him to the top of these institutions, and he regularly decided to drop everything to open new and unexplored research avenues.
Esteban has played a very significant role in many of the most seminal discoveries in oncology during the last 50 years: e.g., he discovered that the limiting renal toxicity of cisplatin, a widely used anticancer drug, could be almost totally prevented by using forced diuresis. This single discovery was a seminal step in making cisplatin derivatives one of the most important drug classes in cancer treatment for various decades. He was also instrumental in the development of oxaliplatin and irinotecan, drugs that were by many researchers considered to be of no clinical utility. During the last 10 years, through the establishment of various research-minded CROs and biotech companies, he contributed to the successful development of various very innovative agents. Still, days before his death, he was in meetings and discussing at length with our group leader, Prof. Carlo Catapano, and his collaborators, who have been performing important laboratory studies for the development of a new, very promising drug-conjugated therapeutic antibody.
We will remember him as a very special person: an extremely brilliant physician and scientist whose acute mind and intelligence allowed him to follow paths that were unseen by most normal human beings. At the IOR, we have always enjoyed this very fruitful, unorthodox cooperation, which has helped many of us to pursue new ideas and develop very innovative research programs. Esteban was a warm and kind friend who always freely expressed his profound thoughts and feelings. We will never forget his contributions to our lives and the IOR in particular.
