If you came across Brooke Thomas with her family and friends “eating their way through Nashville,” as she describes it, you’d never know she was really there for cancer treatment at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. Thomas has metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, and admits that in the beginning she was often asking herself, “Why me?” But she […]
Brenda Bisson was 37 in 2004 when she found out she had acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a type of blood cancer. Her three children were 14, 8 and 16 months at the time. Her marriage was strained. Her prognosis was dire. Months after her diagnosis, she had an allogeneic stem cell transplant at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer […]
Living at the epicenter of the region with the nation’s highest lung cancer mortality rates, Sallie Sawyer of Gladeville, Tennessee, smoked for 50 years and has evaded death twice. She participated in a clinical trial for the early detection of lung cancer, which led to her first tumor being discovered when it was just a […]
SPORE may have been just an acronym, not a nod to the biological definition, when the National Cancer Institute (NCI) launched its Specialized Programs of Research Excellence in 1992. But the SPOREs are living up to their catchy name. They are behaving like biological spores: casting their funding “seeds” far and wide to germinate entirely […]
Betsy Williams has firsthand advice for parents on the fence about whether their adolescent children should be vaccinated for the common human papilloma virus (HPV), which can lead to six types of cancer. Don’t hesitate. Do it. Williams, 62, was diagnosed with an HPV-linked head and neck cancer in January 2018. After surgery to remove […]
Lara Ramsey wanted a second opinion about breast cancer treatment options, so she steeled herself for a two-hour drive from the forested hills of Dawson Springs, Kentucky, to the traffic mazes around Nashville. At Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC), she got answers to her questions, decided on a treatment plan and learned she could cut her […]
Ron Duncan kept Googling his cancer diagnosis and coming up with the same answer: death. Having just gotten the news from his primary care provider, he wanted to know what his options were with peritoneal carcinomatosis, a cancer that had originated in his appendix then spread throughout his abdominal cavity. His only inkling that […]
Medical oncologist and cancer geneticist Ben Ho Park, MD, PhD, has set his sights on a new era of breast cancer patient assessment, which, in turn, could usher in a new level of precision treatment. “I want to figure out whether liquid biopsy is as good as we think it is. Can we use it […]
Sharon Seibert is among the more than 5,000 patients who have received a stem cell transplant at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC), which has one of the best survival rates in the nation and is at the forefront of new cellular therapies. She considers herself blessed. As an African American, Seibert’s odds of matching with an […]
One hundred thousand. That’s the number of spots in a cell’s DNA that might be damaged every single day. Our DNA is under constant attack by the chemical products of normal cellular metabolism, ultraviolet radiation from the sun, chemicals in the environment, X-rays and other insults. One hundred thousand. That’s also the number of spots […]
