Leo Furcht: A rich legacy in the science and practice of medicine
The SUNY Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse is just a few blocks away from Erie Boulevard, the road atop the filled-in Erie Canal that passed through the city’s downtown when the canal opened 200 years ago last year. By the time New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley uttered his famous line “Go West, young man” just after the Civil War, many thousands of Americans had already employed the canal to do just that. To head west.
Leo Furcht, having just earned his MD. in Syracuse, continued his own journey westward, a journey that began on Long Island, proceeded to Manhattan where he earned a B.A. degree from Columbia University, and then on to medical school in Syracuse. It was 1972. Furcht’s next destination was well to the west, the University of Minnesota. What lured him was its leading profile in the field of laboratory medicine, his chosen specialty.
Furcht has stepped down as head of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology after 36 years in that role, one of the longest in the history of academic pathology in the U.S. He arrived on campus as an intern and resident in clinical pathology just before his predecessor as department head, Ellis S. Benson, realized the vision of his own mentor Gerald T. Evans by merging the department of laboratory medicine with the department of pathology. In the half-century since the merger and Furcht’s joining the department as an assistant professor in 1975, Laboratory Medicine and Pathology has undertaken its own journey. It has established itself as a national leader in, among other disciplines, anatomic pathology and laboratory medicine, infectious disease, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, immunology, transfusion medicine and blood banking, neuroscience, HLA / transplantation, and laboratory informatics.
The physician scientist
Furcht has physician science in his DNA, as did Gerald Evans before him. It is no accident that he founded the Medical School’s MD/PhD program as principal investigator of an NIH Medical Science Training Program a decade after joining the department. His own research program commenced with cancer viruses but soon shifted to cancer metastasis.
At the time, it was becoming clear that extracellular matrix, the structural protein scaffold of cells, was not a backwater fishing expedition but a fundamental information system for cellular mobility, adhesion, wound healing, and disease including cancer. The structural protein that caught his eye was the newly discovered molecule fibronectin. Furcht made major contributions to understanding fibronectin’s role in coordinating cellular behavior, cell signaling and migration in cancer, diabetes, new blood vessel formation, and tissue repair, all executed through fibronectin peptides, short chains of amino acids that recognize cell-surface receptors. With support from the National Institutes of Health including a Research Career Development Award and a National Cancer Institute Merit Award, over the next 15 years Furcht formed and led a research group devoted to detailing the molecular intricacies of cellular adhesion and migration in health and disease.
Upon succeeding Ellis Benson as department head in 1990, Furcht was in a position to spur interdisciplinary research. He understood that it is at the boundaries of disciplines that advances are often made.
As founding director of the Biomedical Engineering Center just before becoming department head, he sought to bring biology more fully into that world by embracing the emerging fields of biomaterials, biocompatibility, and tissue engineering, drawing on his own research insights into extracellular matrix. Furcht saw progress in these fields as critical for the future of medical implants and Minnesota’s medical device industry. Today, the field is represented by the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Science and Engineering (CSE) and the Institute for Engineering in Medicine based in both the Medical School and the CSE.
In the 1950s and 60s, the University had earned an international reputation for breakthroughs in heart surgery and organ transplantation. Pathologist, immunologist, and pediatrician Robert Good had performed the first successful bone marrow transplant not involving identical twins in 1968. But by the 1990s, immune system research expertise on campus was fragmented. Furcht proposed consolidating it in an interdisciplinary center and led the effort to create a University-wide Center for Immunology, recruiting core faculty for the new center, its first director among them. Today, immunology is in a period of unprecedented expansion. It has greatly deepened our understanding of the immune system’s fundamental role in health and disease.
When the Center for Immunology was founded in 1995, the Masonic Cancer Center (MCC), then the University of Minnesota Cancer Center, was four years old. LMP professor John Kersey, a pioneer in bone marrow transplantation and childhood leukemia research, was its founding director. The new department head Furcht was also a key figure in its creation, bringing to bear his own research interest in extracelluar matrix, tumor metastasis, and the tumor microenvironment. Today, the MCC is recognized as an “outstanding” National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center, one of 57 in the U.S.
Furcht was honored in 1995 by being invited to give a talk at the centennial symposium of the William Pepper Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania: "The Clinical Laboratory in the Future of Medicine." Established in 1894, the Pepper Laboratory was the first clinical laboratory in the U.S., building on the historic legacy of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, the nation’s first medical school established in 1765. Furcht’s talk included references to advances in cellular and molecular biology, blood-forming stem cells, bioengineering, and the Human Genome Project, which was launched in 1990. It also featured a sound clip of the fibronectin protein sequence set to music, which was well received.
On the national stage
In 2000, President Bill Clinton announced the completion of a "working draft" of the human genome, a major milestone achieved by the international Human Genome Project. That year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released guidelines allowing federal funding for research on certain human embryonic stem cells, which had been first isolated two years earlier. Furcht recognized these advances would have a profound impact on the future of laboratory medicine and pathology, a vision reinforced by his active role in the Rockville, MD-based Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology. FASEB is the leading federation for biomedical and biological professional associations with 20 member associations representing more than 80,000 members in 2006-2007. Those were the years Furcht served as FASEB vice president for science policy and then FASEB president and appeared regularly to testify before Congressional committees about federal research funding, workforce and conflict of interest issues, and regulatory affairs. In that role, he consulted with leadership at the National Institutes of Health and other federal funding agencies and with patient advocacy groups such as the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
From early in his career, Furcht demonstrated an unusual capacity to see what’s coming. That’s what lured him to academic administration after 15 years as a successful investigator running his own laboratory. His capacity for foresight was established in the 1990s with his advocacy for key interdisciplinary research centers. It was reinforced in the early 2000s in the aftermath of the isolation of pluripotent human embryonic stem cells in 1998 and the release of the NIH stem cell research guidelines in 2000. President George W. Bush announced in 2001 that federal research support would be restricted to some two dozen stem cell lines already created but not to new lines created through the destruction of additional embryos donated from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics. Furcht saw the importance of pluripotent stem cell research for the emerging field of regenerative medicine and felt that the public needed to know more about stem cells and the therapeutic potential of the field. He and I researched and wrote The Stem Cell Dilemma, published by Arcade in 2008 with a second edition in 2011. The book earned a starred review for excellence by Kirkus Reviews. It was highlighted by a C-Span Book TV broadcast of the authors reading from the book and taking questions at the University of Minnesota Bookstore. Furcht followed that effort as coauthor of The Biologist's Imagination: Innovation in the Biosciences, published by Oxford University Press in 2014. The book traces the history and current state of innovation and entrepreneurship in the biological and biomedical sciences around the world.
Meanwhile, from 2004-2014, Furcht served as Chairman of the Board of Directors for University of Minnesota Physicians (UMP), the Medical School practice plan with some 700 physicians at the time. In remarks to UMP employees at St. Paul’s Union Depot in 2014, Furcht reflected on the legacy of James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railroad. “These are different times, collaborative times when successful organizations are dynamic, participatory, and responsive rather than hierarchical. That’s how you build a railroad today.”
Moving pathology forward
The need to build a clinical genomics capability in the department entered Furcht’s vision early on. DNA sequencing technologies had grown in speed and accuracy and dropped in cost so dramatically in the years following the announced completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 that genomic diagnostic testing began to enter the clinical arena. With Furcht’s support, the department’s Advanced Research and Diagnostic Laboratory (ARDL) implemented next-generation DNA sequencing, as did the M Health-Fairview Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory (MDL), established in 2015. MDL, which was housed in the department, developed gene panels that served as predictive biomarkers giving clinicians guidance in making their decision on how cancer patients should be treated. In 2017, Furcht launched the department’s Division of Molecular Pathology and Genomics (MPG) with LMP professor Bharat Thyagarajan its founding director and now his successor as department head. Its vision was to be “a world-class division of LMP that provides department, collegiate and national leadership in the pursuit of excellence in molecular pathology and genomic research, education and clinical service.” In recent years, an MPG initiative in the emerging field spatial omics seeks to join molecular sequencing and imaging with advances in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence (AI). This approach gives researchers the ability to track the spatial activity of biomolecules such as RNA, DNA, and proteins directly in tissue microenvironments, where cancer, inflammation, tissue repair, and drug resistance typically originate.
In 2017, Furcht launched the department’s Division of Computational Pathology to bring advances in computer science and data analytics to bear more fully in pathology research and clinical decision-making. The rise of digital pathology and AI pressured pathology departments around the U.S. to grapple with a set of powerful yet expensive technologies that promised to transform the field from basic and translational research to clinical workflow to the final pathology report. Recognizing the challenge, Furcht launched a digital pathology and AI initiative in 2024, funding three pilot project teams to address cancer pathogenesis, diagnostics, and response to immunotherapies. These groups are using cutting-edge software analysis of whole slide image scans, combining image features and ‘omics results, and developing deep-learning models trained on large datasets with the overall goal bringing the tumor microenvironment into sharp relief for targeted therapies. The mysteries of cell migration, adhesion, and extracellular matrix in cancer that captured Furcht’s imagination a half-century ago -- – the mysteries of how cancer spreads – are no longer complete mysteries. Pathway blueprints are being updated every day.
As he noted in a departmental Legends in Pathology video in 2021, Furcht sees a day “in the not too distant future” when pathologists and clinicians will have not only the tissue sections indicating the type of cancer but will also be able to track the pathways tumor cells take that will in turn serve to guide the best possible therapy for the patient. He has witnessed the enormous expansion, capability, and accuracy of laboratory testing firsthand over five decades, an expansion at the heart of advances in medicine and public health. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Furcht’s faculty were key to developing molecular and antibody tests for the coronavirus. ARDL was transformed into a state testing resource with more than a million Minnesotans having their samples processed in the facility.
If there was a moment for Furcht that crystallized in his mind that medicine was the correct career calling, it occurred when he was on one of his rotations as a third-year medical student. He cared for a six-month-old child with a central-nervous-system leukemia. When taking an elective some months later, he conducted an autopsy on the child, an experience that affected him deeply. He became convinced that focused and coordinated research on diseases such as childhood leukemia could potentially save or at least extend the lives of patients like the one he cared for, and that pathology was the right discipline for him to help make it happen.
In the ensuing half-century, survival rates for pediatric leukemia have made it one of the most remarkable success stories in cancer care, thanks to the focused efforts of basic scientists, pathologists, clinicians, and others working together. What Furcht envisioned as a medical student, he exercised as an investigator and embodied as an academic leader. A rich legacy in the science and practice of medicine is its consequence.
Furcht pictured in November 2025 with Jean Kurata (l), his former
executive assistant, and Linda Kenny, his former departmental
administrator.
