A profile of the research and clinical work of Dustin Deming, MD, assistant professor, Hematology, Medical Oncology and Palliative Care, was featured by the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research.

The story traced Dr. Deming's early interest in cancer research as a medical student at UW School of Medicine and Public Health when he worked in the laboratory of former faculty member Kyle Holen, MD.

"From that experience alone, I knew that for the rest of my career I wanted to be both a clinician seeing patients directly and also a researcher trying to develop the next, newest, greatest treatment options patients with cancer," said Dr. Deming.

The profile summarizes the three main areas of research in the Deming laboratory: precision medicine, sensitivity testing, and immunotherapy. Precision medicine tailors a treatment plan to the DNA of a patient's cancer cells. Sensitivity testing involves growing a patient's cancer cells in the laboratory and testing effectiveness of drugs on those cells before administering them to the patient. And immunotherapy involves training a patient's own immune system to attack their cancer cells.

“The relationship between basic and clinical research is absolutely critical,” Deming says. “You can’t do good clinical research without solid translational research, and you can’t do solid translational research without great foundational research.”

Resources:

• "McArdle Scientist Dusty Deming is Impacting the Lives of Patients in both the Clinic and the Lab," McArdle Laboratory, April 2018