A friend of Duke Health understands firsthand the struggle of being overweight. “Being overweight comes with a myriad of medical, physical, and emotional problems,” said the anonymous donor, of Rye Brook, New York. “For me, it was about my own self-esteem and wanting to improve my health.” 

A Duke Children's clinic finds the perfect match in a supporter with a passion for helping those who need it most.

Duke Health, in partnership with the Durham County Department of Public Health, has been awarded a grant totaling $750,000 from The Duke Endowment.

The choice to become a Duke Children's donor launched George Grody down a path of giving that recently topped $1 million.

Diego Bohórquez, PhD, associate professor in medicine, has become known as a “gut-brain neuroscientist.” His team has shown that neuropod cells, a type of sensor cell in the gut, communicate with the brain and help influence decision making about food. This work opens up the possibility of targeting the gut to treat mental health disorders and has been recognized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the New Yorker, and more.

For patients who find themselves slowly beginning to lose vision, today’s doctors have gene replacement therapy as a treatment option. However, there’s a small window of time when the therapy will work best, meaning if a patient isn’t seen soon enough, vision cannot be restored.

Finding a way to slow or even stop Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most difficult challenges facing medicine today. Many research and clinical trials have led to promising results over the years, while others have produced disappointing findings. But what if there were a way to get more out of these trials—even the ones with less-than-promising results? What if there were a better way to determine if a drug is hitting its intended target?

To improve the survival of patients with brain tumors, Vidya Chandramohan, PhD, focuses on developing bacterial toxin-based therapies for glioblastoma.

In 2021, a baby boy named Easton Sinnamon was the first person in the world to receive a combination heart transplant and allogeneic processed thymus tissue implantation. Six months later, a video showed Easton smiling and playing in a high chair, and tests indicated that the processed thymus tissue was working: building the T cells needed for a well-functioning immune system.

In 2008, Cynthia Toth, MD, set out to develop optical coherence tomography (OCT), a technology that bounces light waves off different parts of the eye, providing a finely detailed look inside the eye’s tissues for pediatric use. She is now recognized as the founder of pediatric OCT. For infants and children.