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Doctors, nurses, and other health care practitioners are there at some of the best and worst moments of our lives — when babies are born, when pain is relieved, when we learn our loved ones are gravely ill or have died. We place our physical and mental burdens into their care. We place our trust in them and give them our hopes and fears. And this is why, for a quarter century, MBJ has honored these medical professionals in our annual Health Care Heroes awards.
Here are the finalists in the Health Care Innovations category of the 2023 Health Care Heroes.
Dr. Kenneth Ataga
Plough Foundation Endowed Chair in Sickle Cell Disease and director, Center for Sickle Cell Disease, UTHSC
Growing up in Nigeria, where there was substantial poverty and widespread disease but few medical doctors, Dr. Kenneth Ataga knew that he wanted to go into medicine. With renowned hematologist Dr. Eugene Orringer as his long-time mentor, Ataga chose to specialize in hematology, with a sickle cell focus.
Realizing the substantial disparities in the care for sickle cell patients, Ataga not only treats those with hematologic conditions, he also conducts research to better understand sickle cell disease and develop new treatments. He was the lead principal investigator for the phase 2 trial of the sickle cell drug crizanlizumab, which was approved by the FDA in in 2019.
“It’s satisfying to diagnose and treat complex blood disorders,” Ataga said about the job he loves. “Further, as many blood disorders are chronic problems, I am able to form long-term bonds and relationships with many of my patients.”
Ataga said one of the things he’d change if he could would be increasing the number of available hematologists; another would be improving access to hematology services.
He’s doing his part by being a visible role model and actively training future hematologists.
What is a memorable or career-defining moment you’ve had? The most career-defining moment has to be my scientific presentation at the Plenary Session of the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology in 2016 (in front of more than 15,000 of my colleagues) on an effective new drug therapy, crizanlizumab, for individuals with sickle cell disease. In a multicenter clinical trial, we demonstrated that treatment with crizanlizumab resulted in less frequent painful episodes compared with placebo.
Dr. John Bissler
Division chief, Pediatric Nephrology, and director, Tuberous Sclerosis Center of Excellence, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital; professor of Pediatrics, UTHSC; medical director, Nephrology, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Seeing his mother suffer through breast cancer treatment when he was 7, Dr. John Bissler discovered that he wanted to help others. His pediatrics rotation in medical school was the best fit for him; nephrology was appealing because of the mentorship he got and the complexity of the specialty; and he became a physician-researcher because he wanted to combine research and clinical work.
“One of the things I like about my job is I never have a typical day!” he said. “I work in different hospitals, different clinics, as well as in a laboratory. I also work in a telehealth clinic with patients from everywhere in the world. … I love that I’ve significantly improved the lives of patients with a rare disease.”
Bissler also loves teaching graduate and medical students, residents, fellows, and physicians in other countries, as he strongly believes that part of his commitment to his patients is to train others who’ll eventually take over.
Tell us about your recent innovation. We’ve developed a promising new treatment to preserve kidney function for patients with tuberous sclerosis complex. This new therapy reduces the renal cystic burden. … Until our efforts, the only approach for patients with this type of disease was to treat the symptoms. When the kidneys failed, dialysis or transplantation were the only options to prolong life. … Our new approach improves the blood flow in the kidney and reduces the strain on the kidney filters, thereby slowing the disease process. We are altering the physiology to greatly prolong kidney function. … This approach has never been done before for patients with tuberous sclerosis complex and … it provides great hope.
Dr. Terri Finkel
Associate chair, Clinical Affairs, and chief, Rheumatology, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital; professor and associate chair, Pediatrics, UTHSC
Dr. Terri Finkel’s busy workday involves patient care, research, teaching, administration, community outreach, coaching/mentoring — and learning from her own mentees. She especially loves seeing the special child-parent/family relationship.
“My job is to turn the doctor-patient relationship into a joint effort to heal,” Finkel said.
If she could change one thing about her field, she’d eliminate the hoops doctors must jump through to get well-proven, standard-of-care treatments for children.
The renowned researcher studies the mechanisms of autoimmune and infectious diseases, such as “the interplay between genetics, infection, and immune response.” Finkel’s work has produced more than 200 publications and 10 patents.
What advice would you give someone entering your field? Listen to parents — they know their children best. Be resilient and optimistic. Stay humble, but act like you’re in charge. Bring good reasons and data; nothing works better than data to drive change.
What is a memorable or career-defining moment you have had? Defending my Ph.D. thesis. Amongst the judges were Nobel laureates, including Dr. Arthur Kornberg, recipient of a Nobel Prize for his seminal research on the inner workings of DNA.
I was a graduate student in Dr. Kornberg’s Department of Biochemistry, but he had never said two words to me. At the end of my presentation, he came up to me, shook my hand, and pronounced “You, Dr. Helman (my maiden name), are a biochemist!”
An equally memorable moment of that afternoon was when I asked my graduate advisor, Dale Kaiser, how I could ever thank him. Dr. Kaiser answered, “Just do good work.” I’ve tried my best to “just do good work” throughout my career.
Elekta Unity
Methodist Cancer Institute, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare
Elekta Unity pairs MRI and radiation to deliver targeted radiation to cancerous tumors and tumor beds, allowing clinicians to adjust treatment in real time. Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare is one of only 10 cancer centers in the U.S., and the only center in the Mid-South, to offer oncology patients this groundbreaking and revolutionary therapy treatment system for soft tissue cancers.
Nearly 50% of all cancer patients receive radiation during the course of their treatment. Patients treated on the Elekta Unity system can experience minimal treatment-related side effects and a reduced overall treatment schedule.
The single-bed equipment pairs magnetic resonance imaging with a linear accelerator, offering clinicians flexibility to monitor and track a dose of radiation to tumors and tumor beds in real time.
The minute-by-minute image clarity and treatment precision gives clinicians the ability to deliver high-dose radiation, knowing exactly where the tumor and healthy organs are inside the body and as the patient moves during treatment.
The Swedish company Elekta developed Unity. Methodist Le Bonheur acquired the technology in 2020 and began installing the system and training staff on its use. The first local patients were treated in late 2022.
St. Jude Cloud
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
The goal of St. Jude Cloud is to share the vast amount of data and analysis tools produced at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as openly and effectively as possible. To do so, St. Jude has leveraged cloud computing technology to allow data analysis in the cloud. The heavier or “raw” genomics data can be analyzed in the cloud genomics ecosystem, DNAnexus, without needing to download a copy of the data to local servers.
And, through Microsoft’s strategic partnership, St. Jude provides access to a copy of the cloud data for free to any researcher who requests it. That enables many researchers — who may not have the infrastructure at their institution to store and analyze about 1.75 petabytes of genomics data — to do so in the cloud for minimal cost. To explore curated data, multiple sites are provided without requiring a login, making the most updated information available and easily accessible.
Before St. Jude Cloud, “it would regularly take external researchers longer to request access to and download our data (about nine months) than it would to actually analyze the data itself. This was a major problem with respect to the agility that is needed when working in science,” said Clay McLeod, St. Jude Cloud director of product development and engineering.
“We decided to create an innovation that drastically cut down the request time — less than one week, on average — and immediately made the data available for analysis in the cloud. The browsing of open access data in the web browser quickly followed,” he continued. “Ultimately, this is about democratizing access to a large cohort of pediatric cancer data for researchers around the world.”
Finalists for MBJ's 2023 Health Care Heroes awards