Just when you thought they had a full bench, apparently the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine has room for even more world-class researchers and practitioners.
That’s because they just brought on board a new chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology by the name of Dr. Nipun Merchant, M.D.
Formerly at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, he came here to be a part of the exciting work at UHealth.
“What truly impressed me was the trajectory that Sylvester was taking over here, the leadership of Dr. Livingstone and Dr. Nymer, and the direction they wanted to go in terms of building a world-class center. I was right on board,” he said on the show recently.
Sylvester, he said, is continually enhancing its clinical and research capabilities, the goal being to create more precise ways to treat people’s cancers.
For instance, researchers are getting a better understanding of the key “driver mutations” in cancer tumors, Merchant said.
Once the tumor is extracted, researchers can study an entire genome of the specimen.
In addition, they can take tumors from the patient and transplant them directly into mice. Then doctors can test various therapies on the different mice assigned to that patient.
“As we understand how these tumors behave better, then we can continue to enhance our therapies that are specific to individual patients instead of trying to treat every single person the same way. All tumors are very different,” he said.
Merchant’s specialty is pancreatic cancer, a terrifying form of the disease. Unfortunately, he said, there’s still no way to detect it early. By the time it’s identified, it’s already too advanced.
“Only 15 to 20 percent of people who come in with this diagnosis ever come to surgical resection,” he said.
Merchant said Sylvester is in the process of recruiting more world-class scientists to develop a pancreatic cancer institute at center.
Sylvester already employs a number of novel techniques to treat pancreatic cancer in an effort to get the patient to a point where surgery is an option.
Click here to listen to the full interview with Dr. Nipun Merchant of Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. The center can be reached by phone at 305-243-4902.