Meet Physicians and Scientists

Did you know that one in five new cancers is caused by infection? Meira Epplein, PhD, a co-leader for Duke Cancer Institute’s Cancer Control and Population Sciences Research Program, is working to get the word out about testing and treatment for a common stomach bacterium called h pylori.

Learn why Paul Rudershausen is cycling across North America to raise funds for the research of Jason Somarelli, PhD, at Duke Cancer Institute. Somarelli studies the genes that promote cancer spread in both humans and dogs.

Outside, it is a Friday afternoon in early March: cold, bright, windy. Inside- in a small room on the first floor of the Duke Clinic – it is after dinner and Count Ilyick Rostov has downed another ryumka of vodka in the bar of Moscow’s Hotel Metropol.

In 2005, Fumiko Chino, MD’14, thought she had her future planned out. She was engaged to be married and was working in her dream job as an art director for a video animation company in Houston, Texas. “I got paid to watch cartoons for a living,” she says. “It was fun.”

Georgia Beasley was a student-athlete at Duke when she met Sara, an 11-year-old girl, who was sitting on the bleachers at Cameron Indoor Stadium. The young girl was waiting for her father, who was late to pick her up from a Duke basketball summer camp. Beasley asked her to catch rebounds for her, and Sara happily agreed. Later, her father introduced himself as none other than Henry Friedman, MD, deputy director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke.

Tucker Roussin is a four-year-old healthy boy. When his mother, Katie, was 20 weeks pregnant, he was diagnosed with a pericardial teratoma, an extremely rare tumor that grows on the lining surrounding the heart. The tumor was almost as large as his tiny heart, and it was growing quickly. Clinicians at the Center for Fetal Diagnosis and Treatment at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) recommended an open fetal surgery to remove the tumor.

Samuel L. Katz, MD, described himself as merely a “young, enthusiastic, and naïve pediatrician” who “came along at the right time, in the right laboratory, with the right colleagues.” This is a remarkably humble reframing of the accomplishments of the pioneering virologist, pediatrician, and chairman emeritus and Wilburt C. Davison Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics at Duke University School of Medicine.

The push to develop treatments for Alzheimer’s disease has been a promising and disappointing endeavor over the past two decades, yielding a greater understanding of the disease yet still failing to generate successful new drugs.

“One day, patients will have access to regenerative medicine treatments that will circumvent the complications of organ donation,” says Sharlini Sankaran, PhD, executive director of Duke’s Regeneration Next Initiative. “We will be able to use our bodies’ own innate repair mechanisms to eliminate the wait time, cost, and limited supply of organ transplantation. Instead of transplanting organs, we will know how to repair our own.”