Overview
I am a medical oncologist who specializes in the care of patients with hematologic malignancies at Duke Cancer Institute. Specifically, I take of patients with acute and chronic leukemias, myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs), and other rare blood cancers, like blastic plasmacytoid dendritic neoplasms (BPDCNs).
My research investigates clinical strategies for putting acute myeloid leukemia (AML), acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), and myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) into remission and preventing relapse. Much of this research studies interventions that leverage the immune system to attack these blood cancers. While AML and MDS have been considered immunoglogically cold cancers due to suboptimal response rates to conventional immune checkpoint inhibitors, consolidative allogeneic stem cell transplant, which harnesses the power of alloreactive T cells, is considered the most powerful method to cure the majority of patients with these diseases. This paradox suggests that untested elements of the immune system may be effective in treating patients with myeloid cancers. Therefore, much of my research involves early and later phase clinical trials deploying novel, immune-based interventions against AML and MDS. This research often takes the form of the investigation of maintenance therapies and measurable residual disease-directed therapies administered after morphologic remission is achieved in order to prevent relapse. Given consolidative allogeneic stem cell transplant's powerful role in preventing relapse and its increasing safety and availability, I also investigate how contemporary transplant platforms alter the prognosis of patients with subsets of AML, ALL, and MDS and influence indications for transplant.