Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center

Maryville, Tenn., tucked in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, has a population of just 27,000, but it seemed like every one of its residents rallied around 20-year-old Brently Mancini when he was diagnosed with a rare soft tissue cancer. Mancini was a football standout and 2008 graduate of Greenback High School who loved [...]

Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) has opened a new cancer outpatient clinic on the NorthCrest Medical Center campus in Springfield, Tenn., to bring high quality care to patients in Middle Tennessee and Southern Kentucky. Vanderbilt physicians, who are specialists in Medical Oncology and Hematology, will see patients in the new facility. The board-certified cancer specialists, led [...]

Smoking tobacco reduces lung function. African Americans have lower lung function compared to European Americans, but it is unclear if African ancestry modifies smoking’s impact on lung function. Melinda Aldrich, Ph.D., MPH, assistant professor of Thoracic Surgery, and colleagues evaluated lung function, tobacco smoking exposure and genetic ancestry in a large population of African Americans who [...]

Two proteins that act in opposing directions – one that promotes cancer and one that suppresses cancer — regulate the same set of genes in prostate cancer, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center researchers have found. The findings, reported recently in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, point toward potential drug targets and prognostic markers for prostate cancer. “We [...]

Carlos Arteaga, M.D., associate director for Clinical Research and director of the Breast Cancer Program at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC), has been named to the Scientific Advisory Board of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Komen is the one of the largest nonprofit organizations dedicated to funding breast cancer research [...]

Mohamed Hassanein, Ph.D., research instructor in Pulmonary Medicine, has received a Career Development Award from the LUNGevity Foundation to work on the development of noninvasive tests to help diagnose lung cancer. He will receive $300,000 over three years in support of his research efforts. Hassanein, who specializes in molecular biology and genetics, works in the [...]

Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center researchers have identified how one of the genes most commonly mutated in lung cancer may promote such tumors. The investigators found that the protein encoded by this gene, called EPHA3, normally inhibits tumor formation, and that loss or mutation of the gene – as often happens in lung cancer – diminishes this [...]

Nearly 15,000 people in the United States die each year from metastatic bladder cancer. Signaling pathways that cause bladder tumor recurrence and spread are not clear. David DeGraff, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow in Urologic Surgery, and a multi-disciplinary team of colleagues including basic scientists, clinical pathologists and urologic surgeons, examined the role of the transcription [...]

Prostate cancer cells metastasize mainly to bone, yet bone metastases are resistant to common therapies and are often fatal. A key receptor for the growth factor TGF-β (TβRII) is lost in the connective tissue (stroma) of most prostate cancers, but the effects of this loss on metastasis and bone lesion development are undefined. Recently in [...]

Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center has initiated tumor mutation testing for a limited number of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. This pilot project for colorectal cancer is part of VICC’s Personalized Cancer Medicine Initiative (PCMI), a program to identify genetic mutations in a patient’s tumor that may be useful in matching the appropriate therapy with each patient. [...]