Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center

Robert Matusik, Ph.D., right, director of the Vanderbilt Prostate Cancer Center, gets a trim from Doug Strand, Ph.D., as part of “Movember,” where men grow facial hair during November to promote prostate cancer awareness and raise funds for men’s cancer research. To learn more, go to http://www.movember.com and search for the Vanderbilt PCC link.

As a veteran meteorologist for WKRN Channel 2 in Nashville, Davis Nolan is an expert at diagnosing weather patterns that can create violent winds and thunderous storms. But he had no hints about the potentially deadly storms that were brewing inside his own body until a routine visit to his primary care physician led to [...]

While September is a special month as it marks the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it is also a time to raise awareness about leukemia, lymphoma, childhood cancers, prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, thyroid cancer and liver cancer. Leukemia and lymphoma affect children and adults. Leukemia is a type of cancer of the blood [...]

Kort Nygard opted to wait until his prostate cancer needed treatment. Then he decided to have open surgery. Jim Davidson chose radiation therapy, the external beam type. Sam Dick selected robotic surgery. Three different patients with prostate cancer, three different treatment choices. The decision that faces a man diagnosed with localized prostate cancer is daunting. [...]

Sam Dick, 54, a television news anchor in Lexington, Ky., had just watched his father die from prostate cancer when he got the news last fall that he had the disease. He and his wife wanted a cure and decided that surgery was the best option. They learned from online research and conversations with physicians [...]

Kort Nygard, Ph.D., 69, a clinical psychologist, considers himself a “skilled practitioner in the art of denial.” He was happy to defer treatment when his first biopsy showed he had prostate cancer. On a second biopsy though, his cancer had spread. His physician, David Penson, M.D., said it was time to treat and laid out [...]

Jim Davidson, Ph.D., 68, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt, talked to a couple of friends and colleagues after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. One had radiation therapy in the 1970s; the other had surgery about 15 years ago. “So from my huge statistical sampling of two, I had a [...]

About a third of patients who are treated for localized prostate cancer will have a recurrence, says David Penson, M.D., MPH. A small percentage of patients already have metastatic prostate cancer – cancer that has spread beyond the prostate gland – when they are first diagnosed. “Metastatic prostate cancer is a tiger that’s out of [...]

Metastatic prostate cancer – cancer that has spread beyond the prostate gland – can be treated, but not cured. To understand how prostate cancer cells degrade tissue barriers to break free of the prostate, Vito Quaranta, M.D., and colleagues, are exploring the actions of a protein called matriptase. Matriptase, a sort of molecular scissors that [...]

When cancer metastasizes, the tumor cells break their bonds with neighboring cells and the extracellular matrix (ECM) to enter the circulation. Cell surface molecules called integrins, which are involved in cell-cell and cell-ECM attachment, play an important role in metastasis. Much research has focused on β1 integrin alone, but since integrins exist normally as a [...]