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cancer headlines
GET TO THE ROOT OF IT
If there’s one piece of advice Chengguo “Chris” Xing, Ph.D., would give you, it’s “to stress less.”
Xing, the Frank A. Duckworth Eminent Scholar Chair, a professor of medicinal chemistry in the University of Florida College of Pharmacy and a UF Health Cancer Center member, sees stress as the culprit in various health conditions: insomnia, anxiety, tobacco cravings — even cancer. He’s been evaluating a natural product for its potential to help manage all of these. It’s called piper methysticum, which is better known as kava. READ MORE
‘Teach-back’ communication may lower patients’ risk for diabetes complications, hospitalizations
A simple doctor-patient communication technique known as “teach-back” may lower the risk of health complications, hospitalizations and health care costs for patients with diabetes, according to a new University of Florida study published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.
In the new study, the UF team focused on how teach-back may affect outcomes for patients with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, conditions that require active patient self-management and continuous care by health care providers to prevent other health complications, such as heart disease and some cancers. READ MORE
Knuckles
“Knuckles,” a timely and thoughtful essay by UF Health Cancer Center member Kathryn Hitchcock, M.D., Ph.D., published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. This article looks at bias and tolerance through the lens of the physician-patient relationship. READ MORE
CELEBRATING DIVERSITY AT THE COLLEGE OF NURSING
Debra Lyon, Ph.D., R.N., FNP-BC, FNAP, FAAN, the college’s executive associate dean and the Thomas M. and Irene B. Kirbo endowed chair, believes that education — and especially nursing education — cannot succeed without mentorship.
She is passionate about expanding the pipeline of minority students who will form the researchers and clinicians of the future and help eliminate health disparities in cancer. READ MORE
COVID-19 News
Coronavirus and COVID-19: What People With Cancer Need to Know
Written by Merry Jennifer Markham, M.D., FACP, FASCO
Experts agree that the COVID-19 vaccine may be recommended for people with cancer, cancer survivors, and those currently on cancer treatment, including chemotherapy and immunotherapy. READ MORE
ASH-ASTCT COVID-19 and Vaccines: Frequently Asked Questions
John Wingard, M.D., deputy director of the UF Health Cancer Center, is on the COVID vaccine guidelines committee for ASH and ASTCT. The recommendations are published on the ASH and ASTCT websites and regularly updated: READ MORE
Cancer in the Time of Coronavirus: The COVID-19 Vaccine
On Jan. 8, the Florida Cancer Control and Research Advisory Council (CCRAB), North Central Florida Cancer Control Collaborative (NCFCCC), and UF Health Cancer Center hosted Cancer in the Time of Coronavirus: The COVID-19 Vaccine webinar on Zoom. In this webinar, speakers Christopher Cogle, M.D., and Amar Kelkar, M.D., provided information for cancer patients, survivors, caregivers and providers on the COVID-19 vaccine. The webinar had 247 attendees. READ MORE
Dr. Folakemi Odedina Coordinates COVID-19 Research Collaboration in Florida
Folakemi Odedina, Ph.D., UF joint professor in radiation oncology, pharmacotherapy and translational research, is director of the CaRE2 Health Equity Center, which will coordinate COVID-19 outreach efforts in some of the hardest-hit communities in northern and central Florida. These areas include Alachua, Duval, Lake, Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties. READ MORE
Announcements
UFHCC Biostatistics and Quantitative Sciences Shared Resource invests in HiPerGator
The UF Health Cancer Center Biostatistics and Quantitative Sciences Shared Resource (BQS-SR) in the Division of Quantitative Sciences (DQS) has made an investment in UF’s Research Computing high performance compute cluster, HiPerGator. This newly updated compute cluster consists of over 66,000 processing cores and over four petabytes of ultra-high-performance storage.
The UF Health Cancer Center BQS-SR has purchased 32 processing cores (with 128 GB RAM). This also allows us access to 288 cores and 1.1 TB RAM for compute jobs with run times up to 96 hours. We have also purchased five TB of ‘blue’ storage and 20 TB of ‘orange’ storage. Blue storage is high-performance storage designed to handle large groups of independent tasks performing read and write operations simultaneously. This is primarily used for intensive analyses of large datasets. Orange storage is designed for long-term storage of large files which require regular read/write access. UF Health Cancer Center members are encouraged to reach out to Drs. Ji-Hyun Lee (Director) and Jason Brant (Unit Leader of Bioinformatics) regarding research collaborations utilizing this resource.