Carrying Forward the Work of a Chemotherapy Trailblazer
From Early Screening to Lasting Support for Language Development
The inaugural chairholder, Gretchen Domek, MD, MPhil, embodies that forward momentum. For more than a decade, she has developed innovative, low-cost approaches to strengthen early brain and language development by empowering parents and caregivers. Her PUPPETalk program uses simple finger puppets to spark language-rich interactions between caregivers and infants— an approach shown to improve early language development, cognitive stimulation and maternal mental health.
Dr. Gretchen Domek
With support from the endowed chair, Dr. Domek will expand this work and pursue new research, building on ideas first championed by Dr. Frankenburg. Her longtime mentor, Bonnie Camp, MD, PhD, worked closely with Dr. Frankenburg, making the continuity behind this work both professional and deeply personal.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE
Thanks to a generous gift from the Toy Foundation— which unites the collective philanthropy of the toy industry to benefit children worldwide— Dr. Domek’ s program is receiving funding to provide finger and hand puppets to families. These tools help caregivers engage babies in early communication and ensure children are supported developmentally from the very beginning.
Carrying Forward the Work of a Chemotherapy Trailblazer
Decades earlier, the same forward-looking spirit led another physician, Joseph H. Burchenal, MD, to imagine a radically different future for children facing devastating cancer diagnoses, planting seeds that would change medicine forever.
Born in 1912, Dr. Burchenal became one of the pioneers of chemotherapy at a time when cancer was considered largely untreatable. His life’ s work was shaped early by personal loss: the death of his mother from osteogenic sarcoma while he was an undergraduate. Determined to change outcomes for patients like her, he devoted his career to the idea that cancer could be treated, not merely endured.
Beginning in the 1930s, Dr. Burchenal turned his attention to childhood leukemia. Inspired by the success of antibiotics in combating infectious disease, he wondered whether chemistry could be harnessed to fight cancer.
In the late 1940s, working alongside other pioneers, Dr. Burchenal helped develop 6-Mercaptopurine, the first chemotherapy drug shown to produce long-term remission in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. In 1953, he and his colleagues published results demonstrating unprecedented survival outcomes.
James, a Patient Ambassador, participates in a groundbreaking immunotherapy treatment, which uses his own immune system to fight cancer. The medicine, called blinatumomab, helps his T-cells( the body’ s defenders) find and destroy the cancerous B-cells that cause leukemia.
BURCHENAL continues on page 16.
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