Charles L. Vogel, M.D., director of the Women’s Center at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at Deerfield Beach, received the AXA Advisors Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual Health Care Heroes Awards presented by the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce.
Dr. Vogel, who is also professor of medicine at the Miller School of Medicine, has devoted most of his 53 years in medical oncology to researching and treating breast cancer.
At the awards luncheon he thanked his colleagues, his wife and family, and a table of patients “who have become friends after a decade or more of working together battling cancer. They represent the 800 women and a few men who are currently entrusting their care to me at Sylvester.”
Dr. Vogel’s career began in Uganda while working with the National Cancer Institute’s Solid Tumor Service. Dr. Vogel became the world’s leading expert in Kaposi’s sarcoma. His early research also focused on the link between Hepatitis B and liver cancer, which eventually was recognized as the leading risk factor around the globe.
In 1975, Charles Gordon Zubrod, M.D., the found- ing director of what was then the University of Miami Cancer Center, recruited Dr. Vogel to head the Division of Breast Cancer. That was not his area of expertise; in fact, he had never treated anyone with this disease. Dr. Vogel embraced the challenge and is now internationally renowned for his work in breast cancer and considered a key opinion leader.
After 11 years at the cancer center, Dr. Vogel left to conduct clinical research in private practice in South Florida. Based on his findings, he championed the use of Herceptin in metastatic breast cancer and led trials for many other treatments that have received FDA approval.
Dr. Vogel has been back at Sylvester since 2010. And while he has been published in a multitude of medical journals and involved in the development of medications that have advanced the treatment of breast cancer, those are not what he considers his greatest accomplishments.
“I am most proud of how I deal with patients. I am considered a warm, caring physician who will do anything to make his patients more comfortable physically and emotionally,” Dr. Vogel said after learning that he would receive the award.
Dr. Vogel, now 80 years old, has no intention of retiring and is committed to continue working to improve people’s lives.
