Duke Cancer Institute is purpose-built to break down traditional barriers to rapid innovation and novel treatments. Our collaborations foster original discoveries and translate them into new treatments with unprecedented rapidity. But we are at a tipping point — the more we can do, the more we become a model for what is possible — a way to end cancer. Your combined contributions make an indelible mark against cancer.
With your help, we can give the world a re-imagined vision of how to defeat the most relentless enemy of our generation. Explore the many ways you can partner with us.
Please contact us if you'd like to host an event to raise funds and awareness for the Duke Cancer Institute.
Giving Opportunities
Create a Fundraising Event and Personal Fundraising Page
Whether you sing, race cars, ride motorcycles, make fabulous lemonade, cycle, or walk, you can make a difference when you unite your passion with your commitment to fund cancer research at Duke Cancer Institute. Create a personal fundraising page for your efforts, then encourage your friends and colleagues to join you in your quest to move research forward.
Attend a Charitable or Benefit Event
Duke Cancer Institute patients, caregivers, faculty, staff, and friends organize fun, inspirational events every year to increase awareness and raise funds for cancer research. Your support and participation can make a difference for all those with cancer. Here is a sampling of our annual events.
She Dunks on Cancer (February)
Caring House Benefit Gala January
Angels Among Us 5K (April)
Race for the Cure (April)
The V Foundation Victory Ride to Cure Cancer (May)
Survivorship Day (June)
Gail Parkins Ovarian Cancer Run (September)
Strike Out for Sarcoma
Lunge Forward 5k
Making Strides
Tackle Cancer Tailgate
Light the Night
Tree of Hope
Support the Duke Cancer Patient Support Program
The Center provides cancer support and survivorship services to patients and their families. Many of the services are offered at no cost to patients or their families, We want to ensure access to critical services for all who need them.
Gift Planning
You can leave a lasting legacy at the Duke Cancer Institute by making a planned gift through your will or retirement plan or a gift that provides income and tax savings. This is one of the most meaningful ways to make a substantial impact at the Duke Cancer Institute. Donors may make a planned gift to benefit the cancer clinician from whom they received care in the following ways:
For additional questions regarding giving opportunities to Duke Cancer Institute, please email us at dcidevelopment@duke.edu or call 919-385-3120.
Read BreakThroughs Magazine
Read the current and past issues of BreakThroughs Magazine.
Shingleton Society
The Shingleton Society honors the generosity of donors who have made a gift of $1,000 or more during our fiscal year, which runs July 1 through June 30. The impact of this philanthropy is significant as Duke Cancer Institute continues its quest to extend and improve the lives of all people with cancer.
How can I learn more about planned gifts (i.e., gifts through wills, life income gifts, IRAs, real estate, etc.)?
You can learn more at Duke Health Giving. If you need more information, please contact Suzanne Ferrero, Esq., Senior Executive Director of Planned Giving for Duke Health at 518-852-2339.
How do I set up an online giving page or a fundraising page for an event I am planning?
What language should I use in an obituary to direct memorial gifts?
Please use the following language in obituaries to direct memorial gifts:
In lieu of flowers, please send donations in memory of {NAME} to Duke Cancer Institute at 300 W. Morgan Street, Suite 1000 Durham, NC 27701
Where can I learn more about your Matching Gifts program?
Visit Giving to Duke to learn if your company has a matching gift relationship with Duke. For more information, contact Randall Byrd at 919-684-2338.
The Duke Cancer Institute Development Board of Advisors assists Duke Cancer Institute in its mission to harness breakthrough discoveries that drive global advances in treatments and cures. Board members support Duke Cancer Institute as knowledgeable advocates, passionate ambassadors, and generous donors.
Please contact the DCI Development Office at 919-385-3120 to learn about the Board of Advisors nomination process.
In 2016, when Pat Smith first felt a lump on her thigh, she didn't think much about it. But a “just-in-case” MRI led to a biopsy, and then her doctor told her it was a leiomyosarcoma — an aggressive, cancerous tumor.
Smith, who lives in Florida, had never heard of a leiomyosarcoma, and for good reason. They are rare, as are all sarcomas (soft tissue cancers). Leiomyosarcomas grow in the smooth muscles, which are in the hollow organs of the body, such as the intestines, stomach, bladder, and blood vessels.
Smith had gone to the appointment alone because she wasn’t expecting her biopsy results so soon. Stunned, she went home to tell her husband, Randy, and to call her three adult children. Her son impressed upon her that because leiomyosarcomas are so rare, she should get treatment at a center that sees a lot of these types of tumors. Then she remembered that her good friend Andrea Erwin is retired from Duke University and volunteers at Duke Cancer Center. Erwin arranged for someone from Duke to call her that same afternoon.
As it turned out, Duke has a team of 25 specialists focused on sarcomas. Smith had an appointment scheduled in two weeks with David Kirsch, MD, Barbara Levine University Distinguished Professor, and Brian Brigman, MD, professor of orthopaedic surgery, and other providers.
“The greatest thing is that when I met each one of them, no one rushed me,” Smith said. “And they all said, ‘What do you know about your particular type of tumor?’ And they all explained it, and it was like they had all the time in the world,” Smith said.
When she was first diagnosed, she remembers thinking “Why me?” Then she prayed about it. “I said to myself, ‘Pat, God has this. You’ve found a great place to go, and they’re going to take care of you, and you’re going to have a positive attitude.’”
Smith started keeping a “blessings list,” naming all the positive things about her cancer experience. “You really can meet a lot of great people,” Smith said. “I’m originally from North Carolina, and I have connected with old friends.”
Smith had radiation every day for several weeks, staying with her friend Andrea. A month later, she had surgery.
She is now considered cancer free, though doctors at Duke watch her closely. Every three months, she has a CT scan of her lungs, because that’s where this tumor tends to spread. She also has a yearly MRI of her leg. Smith prefers to come to Duke for those screenings.
“I chose to come back to Duke because this is the best place to take care of me,” she said during a visit to Duke Cancer Center. “I walk in that front door down there, and I feel this peace wash over me.”
Since her diagnosis, Smith has welcomed two grandchildren, and she enjoys taking them to the beach. In November 2022, she and her husband, Randy, will celebrate 40 years of marriage.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most challenging types because it is most often diagnosed in the late stages, when surgery isn’t possible. In 2022, the five-year survival rate for the disease is 11%, a slight increase from last year, according to the American Cancer Society.
To make outcomes better, researchers around the world are trying to find a marker from blood or some other bodily fluid that would reliably diagnose pancreatic cancer in its early stages, said Jim Abbruzzese, MD, Duke Cancer Institute Distinguished Professor of Medical Oncology. Abbruzzese sees promise in a test that has been studied in the lab of Chris Counter, PhD, George Barth Geller Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology. Abbruzzese and hematology/oncology fellow Ryne Ramaker, MD, PhD, are beginning work to translate it to patients.
Counter’s lab tries to capture the moment when a normal cell progresses to a tumor, then study it. Even in a cancer with lots of successful treatment options, like melanoma, the best bet is still finding the disease early, said Counter, whose mother-in-law Linda Woolfenden died of melanoma. It’s even more important in a challenging disease like pancreatic cancer.
Siqi Li, PhD, now a Damon Runyan fellow at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, was a PhD student in Counter’s lab when she became intrigued by a method called maximum-depth sequencing, which was developed by researchers in the lab of Evgeny Nudler, PhD, at New York University to detect mutations that lead to antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
“Siqi saw the parallels between bacteria and cancer, and she was very interested in using this assay in mammals,” Counter said. “So she adapted this assay with the help of the lab of Dr. David McAlpine here at Duke for the mammalian genome to capture mutations causing cancer.”
Counter’s team found that this technology captures mutations that are too few and far between to be detected by traditional next-generation gene sequencing. “The assay was so sensitive, that Siqi was able to detect a cancer-causing mutation a week after mice were exposed to an environmental carcinogen,” Counter said. The team published results of this work in 2020 in the journal Nature Communications and in 2022 in the journal eLife. The studies were supported in part by a Duke Cancer Institute pilot grant, a program sustained by donor funds.
The test holds promise not only because of its sensitivity, but also because it’s specific to KRAS, a gene commonly mutated in pancreatic cancer, Abruzzese said.
Duke Cancer Institute Blog
(from left to right) Brian Brigman, MD, PhD; Kate Ericson, NP; Nicole Mouser, Nurse Clinician; Colleen Forbes, Nurse Clinician; Sarcoma survivor Sharon Alston; Pam Pennigar, NP; and Ms. Alston’s son Cason. (photo courtesy of Sharon Alston)
When Congress declared the "war on cancer” in 1971, there were no mammograms, colonoscopies, or prostate specific antigen tests. Chemotherapy was in its early days, there were no minimally invasive surgeries, and radiation therapy was imprecise.
In 2022, as Duke Cancer Institute (DCI) begins celebrating 50 years of research, breakthrough treatments, and exceptional cancer care and support services, please join us in marveling at how far cancer prevention and care have come.
Duke was one of the first eight National Cancer Institute (NCI) designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers in the United States, following the passage of the National Cancer Act of 1971, and it has maintained this NCI designation, uninterrupted, for 50 years.
This achievement is something that all of us at DCI are very proud of, and I hope that you — our donors and friends — share in this pride. Thank you for the role you play in helping us maintain this designation. We could not do it without you.
In fiscal year 2021, we took care of more cancer patients than at any other time in the history of Duke Health system — more than 66,000 patients. And we are now ranked as the No. 1 cancer program in the Carolinas and beyond by U.S. News & World Report.
Looking ahead to the next half century, we will continue to expand our transformative discoveries to lead in finding better ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer. And we are dedicated to making sure everyone has an equal opportunity to survive cancer by strengthening partnerships with the communities we serve and working to eliminate barriers to accessing care and meeting patient’s needs.
Stacey Phipps and her daughter, Kerry, lit the virtual Tree of Hope at the Duke Cancer Patient Support Programʼs 31st annual Tree of Hope Lighting Ceremony. The December 2021 virtual event kicked off Duke Cancer Instituteʼs celebration of the 50th anniversary of its designation as a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
When Phipps was diagnosed with breast cancer in fall 2020, she went to several treatment centers for second and third opinions, but the personal treatment she received at Duke stood out.
“In some places I just felt like I was a patient, but at Duke I felt like I was a person,” she said. For instance, her Duke Raleigh oncologist, Vijay G. Paryani, MD, asked about her husband and daughter by name, and he asked about her career. “He was really interested in my life outside of cancer, and I could feel that,” Phipps said.
When Joseph O. Moore, MD, came to Duke as a fellow in 1975, he and his mentors treated chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) with a chemotherapy regimen that was like a “wet blanket.” It suppressed the cancer for a few years. “But it didn’t change the trajectory of the disease,” Moore said. Patients developed acute leukemia, which was almost always fatal.
By the early 1990s, younger patients could achieve a cure with a bone marrow transplant, though complications were common. By 1999, Moore was the Duke investigator for a national study of a targeted drug, imatinib, which stops leukemia cells from growing by shutting down a key protein.
When imatinib was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2001, it transformed CML into a disease easily treated by taking a pill.
When Moore retired from clinical practice in 2019, he was involved in a study following people with CML who had been taking imatinib long term, which showed they could safely stop therapy.
The CML example provides a snapshot of just how far cancer treatment has come in the last 50 years. For many patients, “There’s an expectation of success and people living normal lives,” said Moore, professor emeritus of medicine.
Much of that progress can be traced to research funded by the “war on cancer,” which launched in 1971 when congress passed the National Cancer Act. The act gave the National Cancer Institute (NCI) the authority and funds to create a national cancer program. The backbone is a network of comprehensive cancer centers that provide patient care and conduct rigorous research to find new and better ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer.
The color blue and butterflies always make Jamie Cooper Moales think of her late sister, Sara Elizabeth Cooper.
She tears up talking about her. “You would think after 21 years, it would be easier. But it isn't always,” Moales said. “Sara was super friendly and wanted to make everybody feel special.”
They were both into softball and volleyball and played instruments in the marching band. “She was outgoing and everyone's best friend. I was the studious and nerdy one,” Moales said.
In 1999, when Sara was 16, she came to Duke for a biopsy and was diagnosed Jamie Cooper pullquotewith non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. After responding well to the first round of treatments, her cancer soon relapsed. Additional chemotherapy failed, so she had a stem cell transplant at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, where she spent her 17th birthday.
Black men tend to be diagnosed with prostate cancer at a later stage compared to white men, and they are twice as likely to die from the disease.
A program accelerated by donor support aims to reduce that disparity by increasing the number of men who receive screening, education, and follow-up care to find the disease earlier, when it’s more curable.
Current national guidelines recommend that each man decide individually whether or not to be screened via a prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood test. An elevated PSA may be a sign of prostate cancer, but not in every case, said Dan George, MD, a medical oncologist and co-leader of the Duke Cancer Institute (DCI) Prostate & Urologic Cancer Center.
At Duke, since 2017, the electronic medical record has included a health maintenance check to discuss prostate cancer risk and an algorithm to guide screening developed by a team of doctors from the Duke Departments of Primary Care, Family Medicine, Radiology, Urology, and Medical Oncology, George said. The algorithm requires that doctors in the Duke Primary Care Network have conversations with men about whether to have their PSA checked. Since 2017, Duke Primary Care has seen an increase in prostate cancer screening, from 50% of men to 75%.
As a result, at Duke Health system, more than 60,000 men have their PSA checked each year. Out of those, thousands need further follow-up, George said. “This is where the one-to-one conversations with our patient navigators are so vital.”
A fund established by DCI Board of Advisors member Donna Bernstein allows the center to dedicate a patient navigator to have those conversations with Black men at greatest risk of having aggressive prostate cancer: those with a screening PSA level above 10 ng/ml. The Prostate Cancer Fund Honoring Coach Clifford Ray is named for Bernstein’s lifelong friend, a former National Basketball Association player and coach and two-time cancer survivor.
“It can be difficult to have somebody come in for cancer screenings, get treatment, and see a specialist when they feel fine,” said Angelo Moore, PhD, RN, NE-BC, assistant director of community outreach, engagement, and equity for DCI. “Some people are just afraid that they’re going to get bad news. They think about being a burden on their family,” said Moore, an Army veteran who has had three aunts die from cancer.
“So we have to overcome all those issues before they’re able to come for a referral.”
When Tomi Akinyemiju, PhD, came from Nigeria to Michigan for college in 2001, she realized that she had drastically underestimated the cold. “It was the first snowstorm of the winter,” she said. “I arrived in Michigan wearing a cute little hoodie, thinking I was all bundled up.” Her brother, who had been living in the state for a while, brought her a winter jacket.
Another culture shock — when she applied for a part-time job, the application asked her to check a box to indicate her race. In Nigeria, where she had lived since she was three years old, she had never had to think about it.
“Why does it matter what race I am?” she thought.
It matters a lot. “The more time I spent in the United States, the more I understood that there are complex historical, structural, and systemic factors that shape everyday interactions,” she said. “The moment you step outside your door, one of the first things people notice is your race.
And with that comes a series of unspoken and complex social cues to negotiate and navigate any preconceived assumption and implicit association, and to get to present your true self. Sometimes it is an uphill battle.
Race, and how people are treated differently because of it, leads to major differences in health outcomes. As a bit of an outsider, Akinyemiju (pronounced Ah-keen-yah-MEE-jew) saw this aspect of culture and health as something to be examined and dissected. She has built her career doing that.
She meticulously studies what drives cancer outcomes, trying to understand why some groups of people fare worse than others, and what can be done to erase those disparities.
Duke Cancer Institute Blog
Janel (to the right of the groom) and Troy Keaton (to the left of the bride) gathered with their family for their son TJ’s wedding on February 25, 2022
Janel Keaton has been able to travel for weddings and grandbabies and to enjoy mountain hikes and coastal cycling as a stage 4 breast cancer patient, thanks, in part, to the expert care team at the Duke Center for Brain and Spine Metastasis who have her back — from nurse navigation to interventional radiology, pain management, palliative care, radiation oncology, and medical oncology.
Duke Cancer Institute Blog
Duke patient navigator Lasonia Barnett looks on as fellow navigator Nadia Aguilera-Funez hugs Vennice Roberts, a breast cancer survivor.
When 60-year-old Vennice Roberts visited the emergency room in December 2020, X-rays showed a spot on her lung. Doctors suspected cancer, so she was connected with Nadia Aguilera-Funez, a community-facing navigator with Duke Cancer Institute (DCI).
The spot turned out to be a blood clot caused by COVID-19.
But Aguilera-Funez stayed in touch. She and LaSonia Barnett, DCI community-facing navigator lead, got Roberts approved for a program that provided medication free of charge.
Then they helped her get cancer screenings. She had never had a colonoscopy, and she hadn’t had a mammogram for several years.
The mammogram showed that she had stage 1 breast cancer.
Roberts lost her job, then her health insurance. Since 1989, she had worked as a cook supervisor at a nursing facility. “I loved to cook for the residents, watching people enjoy my meal,” she said.
The team connected Roberts with a program that provides treatment free of charge, and they have been with her every step of the way.
“Together, we wanted to show her there was hope even as things were crumbling down,” Aguilera-Funez said. “We held her by the hand and didn’t let go.”
“All I have to do is call them,” Roberts said. “They have been a blessing in my life.”
Roberts is used to taking care of others, and it has been hard to accept that she can’t return to work because of effects from COVID-19 and a slipped disk in her back.
“Sometimes we have to go on a journey that we don’t want to go on,” Roberts said. “But I’m getting better. And I met a lot of people going through cancer who were worse than I was.”