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A jagged little protein appears to be a key to how cancer stem cells differentiate and enable metastasis, according to researchers at Duke Cancer Institute and Rice University.

Duke Surgery researchers are bridging the gap between basic research and clinical application, moving gene therapy from the bench to the bedside.

Three faculty members from the Duke Department of Surgery have been named among the most highly cited researchers of 2018 in a recent report from Clarivate Analytics. This year, the report recognized over 6,000 researchers as having the top 1% of citations in Web of Science. Highly cited articles indicate scientific excellence and exceptional research performance. Researchers with a high number of citations are considered significantly impactful in their field.

Gayathri Devi, PhD, Associate Professor of Surgery, Division of Surgical Sciences, was an invited speaker at the 2nd National Cancer Institute Symposium on Cancer Health Disparities held October 25-26, 2018, at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The goal of this symposium was to highlight recent advances in our understanding of the causes of cancer health disparities in the Unites States and globally.

Separate awards will advance genomic medicine and breast cancer research
 

In separate awards from the National Institutes of Health, Duke University School of Medicine researchers will advance genomic medicine initiatives and develop a model for how breast cancer tumors begin and grow.

The genome studies include two grants from the National Human Genome Research Institute, which is part of NIH, that will total about $9 million over five years. 

Congratulations to Yuting P. Chiang, MD, General Surgery Research Fellow, and mentor Dawn E. Bowles, PhD, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Division of Surgical Sciences, on receiving the Pfizer-NCBiotech Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship in Gene Therapy (Pfizer-GTF). Their proposal, entitled Evolving Inside the Box: A Novel Approach to Generate AAV Vector for Cardiac Gene Therapy Applications, will be funded in full.

Photo: An illustration depicts a genome editing tool bound to a DNA helix. New genome editing tools can substitute single “letters” in the DNA code without changing the surrounding DNA structure. (Credit: XVIVO Photo)

Photo: Dara Schoffner (Women of Spirit), Margie Scott (Cancer Survivor Support Ministry), Gayathri Devi (Duke), and Gwendolyn Villines (Women of Spirit)

Gayathri R. Devi, PhD, Associate Professor in Surgery, Division of Surgical Sciences, was a keynote speaker at the International Inflammatory Breast Cancer Meeting in Madrid, Spain. Dr. Devi is the Program Director for the Duke Consortium for Inflammatory Breast Cancer. The title of her talk was "Multi-Scale Modeling of the Unique Progression of Inflammatory Breast Cancer."

While the cause is not definitive, the health risks serve as a call for research and action

North Carolinians who live near large hog farms -- known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs -- have higher death rates from a variety of causes than comparable state residents who live further away from such facilities.