Division News

After taking care of pediatric cancer patients in Tanzania, Kristin Schroeder, MD, MPH, and Nelson Chao, MD, MBA, established the International Cancer Care and Research Excellence Foundation (iCCARE) in 2014, a nonprofit whose mission is to give any child diagnosed with cancer the same chance of a cure regardless of where they live. Funded primarily through individual donations, iCCARE covers treatment costs for BMC pediatric cancer patients and provides other resources and support, including a hostel where they and their families can stay while receiving treatment.

Jennifer Frith, nurse manager, operations of Adult Blood and Marrow Transplant Clinic is Duke Today's Blue Devil of the week.

Anthony Sung, MD, assistant professor of medicine (Hematologic Malignancies and Cellular Therapy), and Lawrence David, PhD, assistant professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, have received a 2018 Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation.

Duke study, led by Keith Sullivan, MD, shows stem cell transplant is better than drug therapy for scleroderma. The research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Jan. 4.

7 faculty from the Department of Medicine will participate in the School of Medicine's LEADER program.

Dorothy Sipkins, MD, PhD, is a hematologist-oncologist who studies cancer. But to understand the cleverness of her work, it’s helpful to think of her as an ecologist—a cell ecologist.

Sipkins identifies very specific biological habitats and interactions that allow malignant cells to move, proliferate and survive chemical attacks, traits that too often produce fatal disease.

“I love thinking about what is on the outside of the cell. What the cell is seeing. What the cell is interacting with, the 3-D environment it interacts with,” says Sipkins.

For the last 20 years, Duke Bone Marrow Transplant program patients have been holding annual reunions. The first reunion, held in 1996, was attended by 20 attendees. This year's celebration, held in September, was attended by 400.

An international research effort led by Duke Cancer Institute scientists has been working to better understand the genetic underpinnings of diffuse large B cell lymphoma and how those genes might play a role in patients’ responses to therapies. The findings were published this week in the journal Cell.

To better understand blood cancers, Sandeep Davé, MD, MBA, MS, hunts down variation in the DNA sequences important to those cancers. One international project he launched is deploying comparative genetics to better classify the more than 100 blood cancers.

But the research never stops there.

Stefanie Sarantopoulos, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine (Hematologic Malignancies and Cellular Therapy), will present her research at the Department's Research Seminar Series on Friday, Sept. 29, 2017.