Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center

New chair of Cell and Developmental Biology named Ian Macara, Ph.D., recently joined the faculty as the new chair of the Vanderbilt Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. Macara, who was also named the Louise B. McGavock Professor, succeeds Susan Wente, Ph.D., associate vice chancellor for Health Affairs and senior associate dean for Biomedical Sciences, [...]

Do you know which physical traits you inherited from your parents and grandparents? I’m fairly tall and so are my parents, so I can surmise that my tall stature was linked to an inherited trait. Each of us inherits cells with a set of chromosomes containing the genetic information passed down from our parents. Genes [...]

Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center is committed to conducting innovative, high-impact, basic, translational and clinical research with the greatest potential for making a difference for cancer patients, today and in the future. Here’s a sampling of work published in peer-reviewed journals by Cancer Center investigators in 2012: New clues to treating melanoma New therapies for melanoma, like [...]

When Kate McReynolds, MSC, MSN, ANP-BC, teaches cancer genetics to nursing students, she uses the analogy of a library. A human cell’s nucleus is the physical building, filled with shelves we call chromosomes. On each shelf are hundreds of books called genes. Each book, or gene, contains a recipe for a protein, and together those [...]

With her husband stationed overseas in Korea and an active 1-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter in tow, Erin Allmon decided she was way too busy to have any further complications in life. So when she went to be tested for a familial gene mutation that might cause pancreatic cancer, she was determined that there was [...]

  Family photos tell the tale of genetics, providing visual evidence of hereditary patterns in a family tree. The same features are seen again and again in the faces and bodies of successive generations, physical traits passed down from one branch to the next that help explain why a toddler looks “just like her grandmother.” [...]

  Dell Hancock remembers the day 40 years ago that the idea for the A.B. Hancock Jr. Memorial Laboratory for Cancer Research at Vanderbilt took form. Her father, Arthur Boyd “Bull” Hancock Jr., had recently died from pancreatic cancer. The family planned for memorial donations to go to a national cancer foundation, but one particularly [...]

Twelve months after James Bradford Jr.’s, initial diagnosis of melanoma, his tumor had spread to other organs. While the 75-year-old Nashville banking magnate died 13 days later, his legacy lives on. Early on in his disease course, Bradford’s cancer tissue had been tested for the most common melanoma-associated mutations. These mutations – in genes called [...]

The phrase “breast cancer” has been part of my lexicon for as far back as I can remember. As a young child, I heard the phrase when my mom told stories about my great-grandmother. I remember hearing that Mama Jacobs “nursed with only one breast.” I gleaned from the adults around me that “nursing with [...]

One person in the United States dies every 10 minutes from a blood cancer – leukemia, lymphoma or myeloma. This year more than 140,000 people in the United States will be diagnosed and more than 53,000 will die from these blood cancers, according to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The good news is the overall [...]