Here we share feature stories of the department's efforts and achievements throughout the year, looking deep into the cutting-edge research, educational advancements, and patient care breakthroughs performed by Duke Surgery faculty, trainees, and staff.
From COVID-19 to HIV-1, Duke Surgical Sciences Blazes the Trail in Vaccine Immunology
The COVID-19 vaccines are one of the greatest discoveries of the past 100 years. Their success has set new standards for how future vaccines should be designed and manufactured: a well-documented safety record, an excellent efficacy rate (up to 95%), and an accelerated production timeline compared with traditional vaccines. The novel mRNA technology that brought about this success was based on decades of research, including seminal work in the Division of Surgical Sciences.
Bringing Smiles Back: Facial Reanimation Surgery at Duke
People connect to the world by their facial expressions. The ability to express emotions through a smile is a uniquely human response that evolved to enhance social interaction and connectedness. A smile can show a myriad of emotions from happiness to love that bond friends, family, and even strangers together.
A Century of Discovery: Celebrating Nearly 100 Years of Research in Duke Surgery
It’s Valentine’s Day, 1985, and Kent Weinhold, PhD, is in the lab of his mentor Dani Bolognesi, PhD, cycling a series of pharmaceutical compounds through a scintillation counter to measure their effect on retrovirus counts. The research team had just discovered the world’s first treatment for HIV. By July of 1985, just 5 months later after a rapid clinical trial, the first patients at Duke and at the clinical center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were receiving HIV treatment.