How well patients survive cancer is affected by many factors, such as race, access to care, socioeconomic factors, and insurance status. Even curable cancers like some types of lymphoma kill patients who don’t access care soon enough, typically Black and Hispanic patients.
Now a cancer physician-scientist is applying his skills in medicine and data science to study disparities in lymphoma in Texas. Dr. Christopher Flowers, M.D., was recruited in 2019 to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Research Center from Emory University School of Medicine, where he was professor of hematology & medical oncology. He was recruited with the help of an Established Investigator Award from CPRIT.
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How well patients survive cancer is affected by many factors, such as race, access to care, socioeconomic factors, and insurance status. Even curable cancers like some types of lymphoma kill patients who don’t access care soon enough, typically Black and Hispanic patients.
Now a cancer physician-scientist is applying his skills in medicine and data science to study disparities in lymphoma in Texas. Dr. Christopher Flowers, M.D., was recruited in 2019 to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Research Center from Emory University School of Medicine, where he was professor of hematology & medical oncology. He was recruited with the help of an Established Investigator Award from CPRIT.
Dr. Flowers’ research focuses on population level factors, looking at where there are disparities in outcomes from lymphoma treatment by race, gender, ethnicity, rural vs. urban residence, and differences in insurance status. He is investigating how often those disparities occur; how frequently by different factors, such as genetic, environmental, or socioeconomic; and how those translate into differences in outcomes, or survival.
“I’m also trying to look on the biological level at how genetic differences that lead to disparities can ultimately lead to therapies or approaches to overcome these disparities,” he says. “These might be at the biological level, for genetic differences, but they might also be at the sociological level in terms of access to care or access to clinical trials.”
Dr. Flowers has studied the factors leading to disparities in lymphoma survival both on a national scale and at the state level, in Georgia. But the goal of his CPRIT proposal is not only to find disparities but also to recommend specific interventions that address and overcome them.
“Because we have access to tissue samples at MD Anderson, we can look simultaneously at race, socioeconomic status and the biology of the lymphoma,” he says. “That is unique to the CPRIT grant—no one has ever looked directly at the biological level in combination with these other factors.”
He says the information researchers are able to discern at the biological level for lymphoma is exploding. “Genomic profiling finds thousands of mutations and you can start to cluster those into groups of mutations that interact with others,” he says. Gene expression, epigenetics, and proteins add even more dimensions. “The ability to access that amount of data means you need large integrated data sets.”
He says he’s uniquely positioned to take on the task of analyzing these data. “I am probably one of the few oncologists in the country who is trained both in health outcomes research and in medical informatics,” he says. He adds that CPRIT provides a rich source for team science. “It means that the deep understanding of biology that comes from my colleagues across MD Anderson can be applied to the problem of outcome disparities,” he says, “which provide an opportunity to do something that has not existed anywhere else in the world.”
Dr. Flowers received his undergraduate education in human biology and humanities, and his master’s degree in medical informatics from Stanford University, and his M.D. from Stanford University Medical School. He also received a master’s degree in pharmaceutical outcomes research & policy program at the University of Washington. He completed an internship, residency and fellowship at the University of Washington and a fellowship in medical oncology at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He began his career at Emory as an assistant professor of hematology & medical oncology in 2003, and became a full professor in 2017.
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