Basnight Named ACNO, DCI Oncology Services, Wake County
Published
From the Duke Cancer Institute archives. Content may be out of date.
Ramona Basnight, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, has been appointed associate chief nursing officer for DCI Oncology Services, Wake County. She assumed her new role on July 18.
"Ramona is known to many of you, so it’s no surprise that she brings a wealth of oncology nursing leadership to the team, having previously served as interim associate chief nursing officer and clinical operations director for Ambulatory Care Services & Hospital-Based Clinics at Duke University Hospital; nurse manager of Operations for Duke Cancer Center Cary Radiation Oncology and Duke Cancer Center Cary; and nurse manager for women's cancers at Duke University Hospital," said Monica Cfarku, RN, MSN, BMTCN, CCM, NE-BC, assistant vice president and chief of Oncology Nursing Services, Duke Cancer Institute, in a written announcement to DCI faculty and staff welcoming Basnight.
Basnight obtained her Doctor of Nursing Practice from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is currently a post-doctorate scholar at Duke University School of Nursing. She is a certified Advanced Nurse Executive, a Master TeamSTEPPS Trainer, and Lean Six Sigma Green Belt. She has received multiple awards, most recently the 2022 Duke Friends of Nursing Award for Excellence in Nursing Leadership.
This video was posted in May 2022 by the Duke Friends of Nursing when Basnight received the Award for Excellence in Nursing Leadership. Nomination excerpts were posted along with the following message: "Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Ramona has been engaged in creating countless new processes and modifying existing ones. She has been instrumental in creating new places to deliver care that had never been necessary before, and ensuring that they were outfitted, supplied, staffed, and had everything needed for the mission they had been assigned. She did all this while ensuring all of the existing areas in her responsibility continued to function in a modified way to adapt to the threats to patient and staff safety that the pandemic created. Challenge after challenge presented itself and was overcome because of this nominee’s plasticity, critical thinking, and ability to use what she knew in different ways than had ever been necessary before."
Learn More about Ms. Basnight's Award for Excellence in Nursing Leadership
A Duke-led study published in iScience provides new insights into the tumor microenvironment of brain metastases, identifying distinct macrophage populations associated with patient survival and highlighting potential targets for future therapeutic intervention.Brain metastases remain a significant clinical challenge across multiple tumor types, including breast cancer, lung cancer, and melanoma. Despite advances in systemic therapies and local treatment approaches, outcomes remain poor for many patients, underscoring the need for a deeper understanding of the biological mechanisms driving disease progression.Using an integrated multi-omic approach, investigators analyzed 23 human brain metastasis specimens through single-nucleus RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomic profiling. The study leveraged these complementary technologies to characterize cellular heterogeneity within the tumor microenvironment and define spatial relationships between immune and tumor cell populations.The analysis revealed substantial macrophage heterogeneity and demonstrated that macrophage-associated transcriptional programs differ significantly between patients with favorable and unfavorable survival outcomes. Specifically, inflammatory macrophage populations localized at the tumor boundary were associated with improved survival, while macrophage populations characterized by extracellular matrix remodeling signatures and TGFβ1 expression were associated with poorer outcomes.These findings suggest that distinct macrophage subtypes may play context-dependent roles in brain metastatic progression, functioning as either tumor-restrictive or tumor-supportive components of the microenvironment. The results further emphasize the importance of spatial cellular organization in shaping disease biology and clinical outcomes.Importantly, the study extends current understanding of immune-tumor interactions in brain metastases by linking specific macrophage subtypes and locations within the tumor ecosystem to survival-associated phenotypes. The identification of these distinct cellular programs may provide a framework for the development of novel therapeutic strategies aimed at modulating macrophage function or disrupting protumor signaling networks within the metastatic niche.As the incidence of brain metastases continues to increase and therapeutic resistance remains a critical barrier to long-term disease control, these findings represent an important step toward the development of more precise, microenvironment-directed treatment approaches. Further investigation will be needed to validate these observations and assess their translational potential in prospective clinical studies.This work was a joint research collaboration among Duke Center for Brain and Spine Metastasis (DCBSM) members: Dr. Ann Marie Pendergast (Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology, Duke University School of Medicine), Dr. Carey Anders (Department of Medicine, Division of Medical Oncology), and Dr. Simon Gregory (Department of Neurosurgery, and Duke Molecular Physiology Institute), and first-author Dr. Aaditya Khatri (Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine).
A Duke-led study published in iScience provides new insights into the tumor microenvironment of brain metastases, identifying distinct macrophage populations associated with patient survival and highlighting potential targets for future therapeutic intervention.Brain metastases remain a significant clinical challenge across multiple tumor types, including breast cancer, lung cancer, and melanoma. Despite advances in systemic therapies and local treatment approaches, outcomes remain poor for many patients, underscoring the need for a deeper understanding of the biological mechanisms driving disease progression.Using an integrated multi-omic approach, investigators analyzed 23 human brain metastasis specimens through single-nucleus RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomic profiling. The study leveraged these complementary technologies to characterize cellular heterogeneity within the tumor microenvironment and define spatial relationships between immune and tumor cell populations.The analysis revealed substantial macrophage heterogeneity and demonstrated that macrophage-associated transcriptional programs differ significantly between patients with favorable and unfavorable survival outcomes. Specifically, inflammatory macrophage populations localized at the tumor boundary were associated with improved survival, while macrophage populations characterized by extracellular matrix remodeling signatures and TGFβ1 expression were associated with poorer outcomes.These findings suggest that distinct macrophage subtypes may play context-dependent roles in brain metastatic progression, functioning as either tumor-restrictive or tumor-supportive components of the microenvironment. The results further emphasize the importance of spatial cellular organization in shaping disease biology and clinical outcomes.Importantly, the study extends current understanding of immune-tumor interactions in brain metastases by linking specific macrophage subtypes and locations within the tumor ecosystem to survival-associated phenotypes. The identification of these distinct cellular programs may provide a framework for the development of novel therapeutic strategies aimed at modulating macrophage function or disrupting protumor signaling networks within the metastatic niche.As the incidence of brain metastases continues to increase and therapeutic resistance remains a critical barrier to long-term disease control, these findings represent an important step toward the development of more precise, microenvironment-directed treatment approaches. Further investigation will be needed to validate these observations and assess their translational potential in prospective clinical studies.This work was a joint research collaboration among Duke Center for Brain and Spine Metastasis (DCBSM) members: Dr. Ann Marie Pendergast (Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology, Duke University School of Medicine), Dr. Carey Anders (Department of Medicine, Division of Medical Oncology), and Dr. Simon Gregory (Department of Neurosurgery, and Duke Molecular Physiology Institute), and first-author Dr. Aaditya Khatri (Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine).
