Smith was told that his burns couldn’t be fully treated locally so he would be airlifted to either the Vanderbilt Burn Center in Nashville or the University of Louisville.

A Tennessee native, C. Leon Partain is celebrated for being instrumental in bringing the first MRI and PET/CT machines to the Medical Center.

Treatment options are limited for the more than 500,000 people in the U.S. who are diagnosed annually with C. diff infections, but researchers are working on potential vaccines, therapeutic antibodies and — most recently — nanobodies, to prevent and treat C. diff infections.

New study represents a major step forward for vaccine development for C. diff, the leading cause of health care- and antibiotic-associated infection.

The highly personalized treatment is currently approved for patients with advanced stages of melanoma whose tumors have grown despite immunotherapies and/or targeted therapies.

Three decades later, CPPA is a cornerstone of health care culture transformation, around the U.S. and the world reaching hundreds of thousands of clinicians.

There currently are no approved treatments or vaccines to protect against the infection, which can cause internal bleeding, organ failure, and in roughly 50% of cases, death.