A Duke University School of Medicine study shows the potential of new imaging technology to change the landscape of breast cancer surgery.
Shelley Hwang, MD, MPH, a surgical oncologist at Duke Cancer Institute, led the study of fluorescence-guided lumpectomy that illuminates cancer cells to help breast cancer surgeons see and remove them.
Monica Bodd thinks a lot about the patient experience and how to make it better — both through research and clinical practice. While earning her MD and her Masters of Theological Studies degrees at Duke, she learned from some of the best, including Thomas LeBlanc, MD, MA, MHS, Dan Rocke, MD, JD, and Walter Lee, MD, MHS, from Duke Cancer Institute, and from the Duke Divinity School, Warren Kinghorn MD, ThD, Sarah Barton OT, ThD,Susan Eastman, MDiv, PhD, and Kate Bowler, PhD. Patient experience research in oncology is an investigation of common issues faced by people with cancer, including symptom burden, quality of life, and psychological distress, as well as how patients understand their prognosis and make decisions about their treatment through the various stages of their disease. “The way I explain it to my friends or to my family, it’s about asking patients how they live and work through their diagnoses on a day-to-day basis, centering their perspective over the perspective of a medical record or a diagnosis or a doctor's words,” said Bodd. “There are validated and quantitative aspects to it, but it’s more about what we wouldn't necessarily capture with our big data and metrics… I believe it’s the redeeming hope for a lot of medicine.” As Bodd was leaving Duke to begin her residency in Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery at Stanford Medicine this past spring, she spoke with DCI about some of the unique projects she got to work on and co-lead as a medical student and theology student — and the wisdom and practices she’s carrying forward in her medical career from both disciplines.
The Cooperative Human Tissue Network was created by the National Cancer Institute in 1987 to support a coordinated national effort to collect and distribute high-quality, pathologist-validated human tissues for cancer research. Since then, the network has expanded to provide different types of tissue samples, blood and body fluid samples, immunohistologic and molecular sample preparations, tissue microarrays, and clinical datasets inclusive of biomarkers and molecular testing. From inception through the end of 2021, the network has distributed 1,375,041 bio-specimens. It served 889 active investigators in 2021. In a new article in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, CHTN Southern Division leader Shannon McCall, MD (corresponding author), together with the other 5 CHTN Division leaders and NCI staff, breaks down the advances of the past 15 years, including the shift from molecular biomarker testing of individual genes to panels of hundreds of genes to the increased use of whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing, and steps they are taking to optimize the representation of diverse communities among the distributed biospecimens. Duke has been the CHTN Southern Division Headquarters since 2019. This division encompasses the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico. Operational and scientific highlights of the CHTN Southern Division (page 7 of the review) include: the Frameshift Molecular Registry of Tumors and leading-edge technologies like whole-slide imaging, nucleic acid extraction, digital spatial profiling/transcriptomics via the NanoString GeoMx platform, multiplexed IHC stains for standard immune markers, and more. READ THE REVIEW IN FULL