On a sunny June day, Olivia Leow was driving her sons to a friend’s swimming pool when she briefly lost her peripheral vision. Later that afternoon, while watching them splash about in the water, her right hand temporarily went numb. After some online research that evening with her husband, she figured she had experienced an […]
A true allergy to a medication is not that common, and when it happens, there’s often a work-around, like substituting a drug in another class. But what if you’re a patient with cancer and the drug you’re allergic to is a chemotherapy agent that offers the best, and sometimes only, chance of saving your life? […]
Lily Hensiek doesn’t remember much about the first time she was diagnosed with pre-B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) when she was 7 years old. “The big thing was the back pain that radiated down my legs. I could barely walk,” she said. “I mainly remember being shocked and confused. It was a big learning […]
In October 2023 the Food and Drug Administration approved a groundbreaking treatment for patients with liver cancer or liver metastases that uses focused ultrasound waves to destroy tumors. With philanthropic assistance, Vanderbilt University Medical Center will begin to offer this innovative therapy, known as histotripsy, in early 2025. Unlike surgery and other localized but invasive ablation […]
Eighty-year-old Lois Taylor is getting a big kick out of telling everyone she knows that she’s a celebrity. And she’s not wrong. Lois is the first person at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) to undergo a fully robot-assisted, minimally invasive colon and liver resection to remove cancer performed by two surgeons under a single anesthesia. […]
It’s a quiet March day on the hematology/oncology floor at Vanderbilt University Hospital (VUH), and the calming sounds from an acoustic guitar are trickling out of Kayla Kidney’s room. Inside the room, Kidney, a Nashville, Tennessee, nurse who was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in February, sat cross-legged on her hospital bed. Tori Langham, […]
The children of E. Bronson Ingram II and Martha Rivers Ingram have continued their legacy of giving with the establishment of the Ingram Cancer Innovation Fund. This gift will propel treatment improvements for gastrointestinal oncology and sustain Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center’s internationally respected leadership in cancers of the digestive system. The fund will also support research […]
Gail Kraemer did what she wanted, how she wanted, when she wanted to do it. In her early years, she traveled through Africa and Mongolia big game hunting. Later in life, she got her pilot’s license and became an avid golfer. Whether she was jet skiing around Tellico Lake or hosting a dinner party, Kraemer […]
The challenge to accomplish “practice-changing, paradigm-shifting, policy-creating” research is one that scientists and clinicians at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center have often heard from Jennifer Pietenpol, PhD. Those words are like a mantra for Pietenpol, Executive Vice President for Research, chief scientific and strategy officer for Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and holder of the Brock Family […]
J.D. Anderson, a 64-year-old cattle producer from Arapahoe, Nebraska, who has been battling stage 4 colon cancer since 2012, has made the 28-hour round trip to Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, often monthly, over the past four years. For the past three years, 5-year-old Jackson Simpson of Charlotte, North Carolina, has been receiving treatment for hepatoblastoma, a […]
