Helen Ross M.D.

Bio

With more than 23 years experience in the medical field and affiliations with one of the nation's leading hospitals, Helen J Ross, M.D., has become a prominent internist and medical oncologist. Highly esteemed by her peers and patients, she was named one of America's Top Doctors by Castle Connolly, indicating a combination of professionalism and medical skill.

Ross specializes in treating thoracic malignancies, including lung cancer and mesothelioma. Her practice is based at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, a facility that was ranked 26th out of 5,200 hospitals by US News and World Report.

In addition to her specialties in lung cancer and asbestos-related cancers such as mesothelioma, Ross also specializes in chest wall tumors, esophageal cancers and immune system disorders. Her treatment approach often incorporates multimodal treatment, which combines two or more types of therapy.

Ross' clinical practice is heavily influenced by her research in the fields of tumor biology and molecular biology. She is primarily interested in the growth factors that enable cancers such as mesothelioma to resist treatment and continue to grow, even when exposed to chemotherapeutic drugs or radiation.

She has contributed to three studies and correlating articles about mesothelioma: a phase 3B study of treatment combinations that incorporated the drug pemetrexed; a single-arm study of pemetrexed plus cisplatin for patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma; and an extended study of pemetrexed with or without cisplatin for peritoneal mesothelioma patients.

Ross is board certified in medical oncology and hematology by the American Board of Internal Medicine. She completed a fellowship in both of these specialties at the University of California, Los Angeles after finishing her internal medicine residency at the same facility.

Publications

As a program investigator, Ross has co-authored three articles discussing results of access programs for mesothelioma. These trials have explored the combinations of pemetrexed and cisplatin (chemotherapy drugs traditionally used to treat mesothelioma) and were published in Lung Cancer, Clinical Lung Cancer and the Journal of Thoracic Oncology.