With that, his fate was sealed. Dr. van Berkel discovered
transplants were his passion. He pursued a surgical residency at
Massachusetts General Hospital from 2003 to 2008. As it turns
out, he quickly found himself comfortable in the operating room.
“Someone told me, ‘Not everyone can be Tiger Woods, but everyone
can learn to play golf.’ Every surgeon can be safe, do a good operation
and make sure the patient is cared for.”
Following residency, Dr. van Berkel returned to St. Louis for a
three-year fellowship in cardiothoracic vascular surgery at Barnes-
Jewish Hospital. Vowing not to live somewhere cold, he and Dr.
Guillory moved to Louisville where a job offer in thoracic surgery
awaited. Their son, Dexter, arrived soon after. “We moved in August,
Dexter was born in October,” Dr. van Berkel said. “So, he’s a Kentucky
kid through and through.”
That year was a major one for the couple. A new baby, new city,
new jobs, new house, even new car. “It was a wild time,” Dr. van
Berkel remembered. “To be honest, I didn’t expect to make this a
long stop. A thoracic surgeon here, Dr. Michael Bousamra, recruited
me. He told me that the UofL group is doing lung transplants, about
five a year, but they want to do more. I took the position and have
been working to build the transplant program into something bigger
ever since. We’re currently doing about 20 transplants per year, and
we’re trying to get up to 30.”
that way. For our program to be effective, it takes a good ICU, a
good surgical team, psychiatry, social work, etc. It’s a marker of a
good academic environment to be able to pull these disparate fields
together to take care of one person,” Dr. van Berkel said.
In addition to his work in the operating room, Dr. van Berkel
is collaborating with Dr. Bousamra and several others developing
a new company known as Breath Diagnostics Inc. Simply put, the
organization is researching ways in which a patient’s breath can be
analyzed to reveal lung cancer.
“The big problem with lung cancer is that there aren’t symptoms,”
he explained. “My dad died from lung cancer. One day, he dropped
his hammer and couldn’t pick it up. He thought he was having a
stroke, but it was a metastasis in his brain from a lung mass. He died
a few months later. These stories are incredibly common, so can we
discover when someone has stage I lung cancer?”
The genesis of the company came in 2011 when a study was
completed regarding computerized tomography (CT) scans. 50,000
people were involved; half were given x-rays and the other half were
given CT scans. “The CT group had a 20 percent reduction in death.
A 20 percent reduction in preventative medicine is an immense
finding. That’s better than colonoscopies, better than pap smears,”
Dr. van Berkel said.
To Dr. van Berkel, what has changed in those eight years is
a commitment to team building and a commitment to finding
common paths forward via a variety of different specialists and
teams. So, of the 25,000 people who were given a CT scan, 12,000
nodules or potential cancers were found. However, only 600 of
those 12,000 were actually lung cancer. This means a false positive
occurred in 19 out of every 20 cases. Suddenly, a great opportunity
seemed like a potentially large waste of time and resources.
“The appeal of surgery for some people is the conquering aspect
of it. ‘That person has cancer. I’m going to cut it out.’ Or ‘That’s a
problem. I can fix that problem.’ But, transplant surgery can’t be While details of the project are under wraps, Breath Diagnostics,
Inc. hopes to build off the CT scan study by analyzing the breath
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