Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center

The long-term forecast for the fight against cancer is indeed gloomy if a predicted shortage of oncologists comes to pass. The impending shortage, predicted recently by a study commissioned by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), could result in a shortage of as many as 4,000 oncologists by 2020, causing cancer patients to travel [...]

Breast cancer survivor Adrien MacKenzie isn’t satisfied with simply being a cancer “survivor.” She wants to be a “thriver.” “It’s going to be a while before I get over that ‘I just got over chemotherapy’ look,” she acknowledges, “but I don’t want to always identify as ‘the cancer patient’ or ‘cancer survivor’ in the room.” [...]

More than 350 cancer survivors, caregivers, advocates and health professionals gathered at the Vanderbilt Student Life Center last Saturday (June 18, 2011) to learn, connect and celebrate. Cancer GPS: Navigating Your Journey included remarks from keynote speaker Linda Armstrong Kelly (author and mother of champion cyclist and survivor Lance Armstrong), music and stories from survivor, [...]

For years, the standard treatment for some early lung cancers was to remove the entire affected lobe. The recurrence of cancer was low, but the procedure was invasive and unnecessarily removed normal lung tissue not affected by the tumors. Vanderbilt’s Department of Thoracic Surgery and the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center have joined a National Cancer Institute [...]

Tabula Rasa, the School of Medicine’s journal of medical humanities, is now accepting submissions for its 2010-2011 issue. The theme of this year’s journal is “Transformation: How Illness and Healing Change Us.” All submissions that meet the criteria (see below) will be featured on the Tabula Rasa website, and many of the selected submissions will [...]

Update as of Thursday, Jan. 6: Call Center staff have been relocated to temporary locations, with phones and computers, so our service has been restored. Thanks to everyone for their patience while we addressed this unexpected situation. Kudos to our team for their dedication to finding a way to get back on line for our [...]

Editor’s note: Cynthia Floyd Manley, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center’s associate director for communications, will appear on Lifetime Television’s The Balancing Act on Monday, Jan. 3, to discuss social networking for cancer survivors and caregivers. Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center has joined with the national CancerConnect.com initiative to launch a new online community for people impacted by cancer. As [...]

Cousins with melanoma caused by the same genetic mutation enroll in a randomized clinical trial of a promising experimental drug that targets the mutation. Randomly assigned to different groups, one young man gets the new drug, experiences dramatic shrinkage of his tumors and is alive nine months later, while his cousin receives current therapy — [...]

Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center’s Oncology Clinic in Cool Springs makes patient care its priority, and provides a strong example of why the Medical Center is deserving of a second Magnet designation. Though the clinic is 16 miles from the main Vanderbilt University Medical Center campus, the culture of this suburban clinic embodies the VUMC Nursing philosophy [...]

Vanderbilt University Medical Center has joined the International Blood-Brain Barrier Consortium, a group that is combining research and comprehensive patient care to develop protocols and guidelines for opening the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier is a system of tight junctions in the circulatory system around the brain that protects the central nervous system from unsafe [...]