StoryCorps and Intermountain Healthcare partner to share conversations of hope and healing.
Oncologist Lincoln Nadauld, MD, helps lead Intermountain Healthcare's Precision Genomics quest to heal patients in Utah and around the globe. Tazia Taylor is a caregiver working with Dr. Nadauld at Dixie Regional Medical Center in St. George, Utah. Dr. Nadauld's vision: "In 10 years, I see us preventing cancers and identifying them much earlier. So instead of waiting until someone has a cancer, and then finding it on a CT scan, I could see us drawing blood on patients when they're in their 20s and 30s and 40s and detecting cancer before it's a problem."
Transcript
Tazia Taylor: What are you most excited about every time you come to work?
Lincoln Nadauld, MD: I honestly love what I do. I mean, it's like I wake up in the morning and I'm thrilled. And I think what I'm most excited about is thinking about the problems that these patients are facing and seeing if I can't take some core scientific principle and apply that to their situation to change their trajectory. I want to change people's futures.
Tazia: Tell me about a patient that inspires your work.
Dr. Nadauld: A patient that has constantly inspired me, she had just been informed that she had a stomach cancer, which is a totally devastating diagnosis. And we decided that we didn't want to take the usual approach for her.
Tazia: What is that usual approach?
Dr. Nadauld: Usual approach is combination of complicated chemotherapies and radiation and sometimes surgery. And it can work, but gastric cancer or stomach cancer is so aggressive and so difficult, that the success rates aren't very high. And so we mapped her genome, and that was one of the first patients in the United States that had had her genome entirely mapped. And surprisingly we found a drug that we felt was a silver bullet for her disease.
I remember calling her and I said, "Let’s start giving you this drug. This is a miracle, let's go for it." She said, "Okay, great. The timing is perfect, because I'm sitting in the emergency room right now as you call. I haven't been feeling well." And she passed away shortly thereafter in the hospital before we ever gave her that silver bullet medicine. And so she has inspired me because I realized we can find ways to treat patients in an individualized fashion based on their DNA in a way that we've never done before. But we have to do it faster, and we have to do it for more than just a patient here and there. We have to do it comprehensively, and that's actually why I'm doing what I'm doing now. Is to try to treat patients across entire populations with this kind of precision medicine approach.
Tazia: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
Dr. Nadauld: In 10 years, I see us using artificial intelligence to make treatment decisions. And we primarily are playing a role of confirming and individualizing treatment to a patient's specific situation. I see us preventing cancers and identifying them much earlier. So instead of waiting until someone has a cancer, and then finding it on a CT scan, I could see us drawing blood on patients when they're in their 20s and 30s and 40s and detecting cancer before it's a problem.
Tazia: And doing more preventative work?
Dr. Nadauld: More preventative treatment, absolutely. I think that's clearly where we're headed and it's thrilling. The cure for cancer won't be sophisticated medicines that kill advance stage cancer. The cure for cancer is going to be finding it when it's an early stage thing, it's small and it's easy to cure. That's the answer, finding it early.