News: Departments

Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center is a leader in advancements and quality outcomes for stem cell transplants. Having performed more than 5,000 transplants, our team has achieved one of the best survivorship rates in the nation for our patients who receive allogeneic transplants from unrelated donors. We are also among the select cancer centers pioneering and partnering […]

Kathryn Edwards, MD, the Sarah H. Sell and Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Medicine, is one of the nation’s top vaccine experts. A member of the National Academy of Medicine, she focuses on the evaluation of vaccines for the prevention of infectious diseases in adults and children. Q: Are there any vaccines that can prevent cancer? […]

Cancer prevention drug also disables H. pylori bacterium A medicine currently being tested as a chemoprevention agent for multiple types of cancer has more than one trick in its bag when it comes to preventing stomach cancer. Keith Wilson, MD, and J. Carolina Sierra, PhD, reported in the March 12 issue of Proceedings of the […]

­ 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 […]

People ask, “What’s it like to be an identical twin?” In my case, it feels normal to have someone who looks and sounds like me, has the same mannerisms, clothing and shoe size. But, it is a bit freaky when my twin sister, Randy, leaves a voice message and I think it’s me on the […]

Small but tenacious, the remnants of the tumor in Ronnie Smith’s body had defied multiple rounds of chemotherapy and radiation. “They were the cockroaches of cancer cells,” Smith said. An elementary school custodian from East Tennessee, he was diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma in November 2016 just after turning 67. A year later, his […]

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 […]

It’s a quandary people often ponder: Is it better to know or not about a predisposition to disease? Cindy Betz decided to confront her unknown health risks. The 63-year-old Bardstown, Kentucky, woman gave a blood sample for a genetic screening study at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). The decision may have saved her life. The […]

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 […]