Yu Shyr

A new data portal called Cancer-Immu established by a team of Vanderbilt University Medical Center biostatisticians can help cancer clinicians and researchers predict which patients will respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors have transformed cancer care to the point where the popular Cox proportional-hazards model provides misleading estimates of the treatment effect, according to a new study published April 15 in JAMA Oncology.

People with cancer sickened by COVID-19 have a crude death rate of 13%, according to the largest series of data released thus far from a multinational perspective. The data on more than 900 patients, published May 28 in The Lancet and simultaneously presented at ASCO20 Virtual, also revealed cancer-specific factors associated with increased mortality.

The NCI program project grant is supporting multiple projects that aim to define fundamental biological principles about extracellular RNA signaling and the development and aggressiveness of colorectal cancer, the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States.

Clinical trials expert Roger Lewis, MD, PhD, right, poses with Vanderbilt’s Yu Shyr, MD, following his recent Discovery Lecture. Lewis is chair of Emergency Medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Yu Shyr, Ph.D., Harold L. Moses Professor of Cancer Research and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Quantitative Sciences, has been named chair of Vanderbilt’s Department of Biostatistics. He will assume the post Sept. 1.

Nine Vanderbilt University faculty members have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science this year.