Duke Health

Jessica Clarke was pregnant with her second child when she noticed a small lump in her breast. It grew larger while she waited a month for an ultrasound. After a surgical biopsy confirmed it was a malignant phyllodes tumor, Clarke and her family moved temporarily to Durham so she could have comprehensive cancer treatment and her baby at Duke Health. Today, Clarke is back home in Dallas, her prognosis is good, and her risk of local recurrence is low. “We made it through that,” she said. “We’ll make it through whatever comes next.”

When Bob Blake went to Duke Health for a kidney transplant evaluation, experts discovered blockages in his coronary arteries that put him at risk for a heart attack. Instead of traditional heart bypass surgery, Blake underwent minimally invasive coronary artery bypass grafting. After a quick recovery, Blake got his transplant. “We probably cut off months of delay that could have prevented him from being a kidney transplant candidate,” said Duke kidney transplant specialist Matthew Ellis, MD. “The sooner we get someone transplanted, the better they do.”

Multi-cancer early detection tests–MCEDs for short–are being touted as game-changers with the potential to change cancer screening and detection within the next 5 to 7 years.

In our ongoing Conversations in Cancer series, Diane Reidy-Lagunes, MD, a medical oncologist at Duke Health, talks to Kevin Oeffinger, MD, founding Director of the Duke Cancer Institute's Center for Onco-Primary Care, and Co-Director of the DCI's Supportive Care and Survivorship Center. He is also the principal investigator at Duke for Pathfinder 2, a large-scale, multi-center clinical trial that has been studying how well these blood tests can detect cancers. 

Learn how these tests work, the benefits and concerns, and who should get tested.