Cancer is a peripatetic world traveler that doesn’t recognize geographic barriers or halt at national borders. It is among the leading causes of death worldwide. There were 14 million new cancer cases in 2012 and 8.2 million deaths, and the number of new cancer cases is expected to surge to 22 million within the […]
Luke Simons and James C. “Jimmy” Bradford Jr. worked alongside one another for decades at J.C. Bradford & Co., an investment banking and brokerage firm, but it wasn’t until six years after Bradford’s death that the full prospectus of their journeys became clear. Simons, who was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma in July 2016, has a […]
Women A skin exam should be part of your annual checkup, and you should regularly self-monitor all moles on your skin and report any changes to your physician. The National Breast Cancer Foundation recommends that all adult women do a monthly breast self-exam. Ages 21-29 Clinical breast exam every one to three years to […]
Before they became collaborators, they were competitors. On a Saturday in November 2015, Javid Moslehi, M.D., and Justin Balko, Pharm.D., Ph.D., met for the first time. They were competing for Discovery Grants funded by the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) Ambassadors, a group of young professionals who support groundbreaking cancer research. VICC Ambassadors provide “seed funding” […]
Genotyping a tumor to identify DNA mutations is an expensive workup, one that health insurance policies won’t always cover. Philanthropic support is helping fill that gap. Under the volunteer leadership of Orrin H. Ingram II, chair of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) Board of Overseers, his brother John Ingram and Board of Overseers member Ronnie […]
A clinical trial that gives drugs for one type of cancer to patients with another type of cancer may seem like a mix-and-match approach, but it’s actually a highly focused precision medicine initiative. The NCI-Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice (NCI-MATCH) trial assigns drugs according to the genetic abnormalities of cancer cells instead of the […]
C-H-O-L-A-N-G-I-O-C-A-R-C-I-N-O-M-A. Anne Wolfe asked the doctor to spell it out. She had come to see Kamran Idrees, M.D., a surgical oncologist at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) knowing that she had a malignancy in her liver, but she didn’t know the type of cancer that had secretly invaded the organ. “He looked at me and said […]
Social worker Cindy Tinker Hancock, LMSW, imagines the internal monologues that pass through the minds of people she encounters at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC). “Wait a minute—how did this happen?” she wonders aloud, slipping into a patient’s shoes, “I have a stage IV diagnosis and I can’t work. “I need to apply for disability or […]
Preventing cancer, pioneering new cancer treatments and safeguarding patients from harm are missions that require community commitment. Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) is taking actions on all those fronts, but we can’t do it alone. The articles in this issue of Momentum highlight the importance of primary care providers, philanthropic supporters, empowered patients and emergency department […]
When Carol Eck, R.N., MBA, began her nursing career in 1976, she never envisioned she would serve in a leadership role at one of the top cancer centers in the nation. “I thought I would always be a bedside nurse, and I never thought I would work in oncology. But I can’t imagine being anywhere […]
