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HCC's endowed chair to help recruit top cellular
therapy researcher
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MUSC's
Hollings Cancer Center (HCC) has established the Robert Stuart, M.D.,
Distinguished Endowed Chair in Hematology/Oncology. The chair will
reside in Hollings’ Center of Economic Excellence (CoEE) for Cancer
Stem Cell Biology & Therapy.
The focus of CoEE’s research is dual. It will identify ways to use the
body’s cancer stem cells found in bone marrow or adult organs as
treatment targets for cancer therapy; and it will develop and market
the bioengineering aspects of cancer stem cell collection and
utilization for clinical applications.
HCC is one of only a few cancer centers in the United States—and the
only center in South Carolina—with a “clean cell” laboratory. This
allows a cancer patient’s healthy immune cells to be taken from their
body, grown in the lab, and then infused into the patient’s blood to
prompt the immune system to fight the cancer.
“Looking for clues to how cancer behaves through the prism of cancer
stem cells is a frontier in research, and I am excited to be a part of
it,” said Stuart. “It’s a huge honor to have an endowed chair in my
name.”
Establishing the
chair
The Stuart chair was established with a gift from William H. Barnwell
II, M.D., a patient of Stuart’s who died in early 2009 of acute myeloid
leukemia (AML), and his wife, Virginia Sands Barnwell.
“During my husband’s 20 months of treatment, he found the care he
received from Dr. Stuart and the entire department to be exceptional.
He trusted his medical team professionally and personally,” Barnwell
said. “My family—Billy and Beth Barnwell, John Barnwell, and Ginny and
Tom Murphy—and I greatly appreciate the efforts of all the doctors and
caregivers at Hollings Cancer Center. We are pleased to be a part of my
husband’s wish to make this gift in honor of Dr. Stuart and the
compassion he shows his patients.”
Barnwell also expressed gratitude to MUSC’s Donald Fox, M.D., who
discovered Barnwell’s cancer through a routine physical.
Friday, June 11, 2010
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