Karen Winkfield, MD, PhD, Ingram Professor of Cancer Research, has been named associate director for Community Outreach and Engagement at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.

Ongoing research by Eunyoung Choi, PhD, into how cells transform into abnormal versions of themselves that are the precursors to stomach cancer has received support from the American Association for Cancer Research.

Excessive consumption of dietary sodium likely was responsible for up to 30% of cardiovascular disease-related deaths among mostly low-income participants in a large cohort study conducted by Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

While immune checkpoint inhibitors that target the PD-1 molecule on T-cells have proven to be effective with many cancers, these immunotherapies have not worked for acute myeloid leukemia (AML), but new research has identified a “cousin” molecule as a potential therapeutic target for AML. 

The Food and Drug Administration first granted marketing approval for the DigniCap system for patients with breast cancer in 2015, then in 2017 the FDA expanded the authorization, making it the first cooling cap cleared for use in cancer patients with solid tumors, such as breast cancer, ovarian cancer and colorectal cancer.

The results from a research partnership between GE HealthCare and Vanderbilt University Medical Center utilizing artificial intelligence to enable safer and more precise cancer immunotherapies show that the models they developed predict patient responses with 70% to 80% accuracy.

Vanderbilt research indicates that adding liquid biopsy testing for circulating tumor DNA mutations increases targetable mutation detection rates.