Scott was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in December 2012 after suffering through terrible bone and back pain for more than a year. Scott immediately sought a second opinion from Dana-Farber. Patients’ reviews and research indicated that Dr. Anderson is the “best in the business” and that Dana-Farber is a leader in multiple myeloma. At Dana-Farber, Scott was put on an aggressive combination of 3 different chemotherapy medications before he became a self-donor for a stem cell transplant. His body responded well to the transplant and he is now in remission with monitoring and maintenance therapy. Scott has been married for almost 20 years to his wife Tina and they have 2 girls, Cady, 14 and Sophia, 11. He said that at the time of his diagnosis, his girls were 6 and 9 years old, respectively, so this was an incredibly devastating and emotional diagnosis for such a young family. As he thinks of how overwhelming those first days were, he is now very grateful that he found Dana-Farber. He wants listeners to know that “you don’t need a miracle to do really well with multiple myeloma but we do need more therapies because it’s still a really challenging disease. Give Dr. Anderson and Dana-Farber the tools they need to continue making progress!” Scott works in IT for a bank in Connecticut and enjoys playing the guitar, watching movies, and spending quality time with his family.

Dr. Anderson graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School, trained in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and completed hematology, medical oncology, and tumor immunology training at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He serves as chief of the Division of Hematologic Neoplasia, director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center, and vice chair of the Joint Program in Transfusion Medicine at Dana-Farber. In his four decades of practice and research, including 32 years at Dana-Farber, Anderson has played a central role in transforming myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, from a near immediate death sentence to, in many cases, a chronic, manageable illness. From the 1970s through the ‘90s, not a single new myeloma drug made it into clinical practice. But during the last decade, Anderson has helped shepherd multiple new drugs from laboratory bench through regulatory approval and to the patient bedside. He is both encouraged and inspired by Scott’s commitment to personal health and advocacy for future advancement within the field of multiple myeloma.