A devastating car accident claimed Astra Adams’ right arm and shattered bones throughout her body. Five of her brachial nerve roots had been ripped from the spinal cord, causing uncontrollable misfires that sent pain signals to her brain day and night — an excruciating condition known as brachial plexus avulsion.

Surgery to reattach the nerves to her spine wasn’t an option, nor was seeking further treatment from members of her care team. There was simply nothing more they could do. Instead, they told her of an Emory specialist who might be able to help.

That doctor was Nicholas Boulis, a neurosurgeon and scientist at Emory University School of Medicine who holds the Al Lerner Chair in Neurosurgery. He performed a bold, high-risk procedure called dorsal root entry zone (DREZ) surgery. Boulis carefully created tiny lesions in this area of the spinal cord to block pain signals from getting through.

“The surgery carries high risk, because you are destroying damaged spinal cord cells located very close to healthy tissues that connect the brain to lower parts of the spinal cord,” Boulis says. “If you miss, you can cause permanent damage that leads to numbness or weakness.”

The procedure is often considered a last resort for pain management — performed when all other treatments have failed. To everyone’s elation, it succeeded, and the last resort became the first step toward a relatively pain-free life for Adams. “It felt like someone had unplugged my arm,” she says. “The intense shooting pain was gone. It was amazing.”

PIONEERING EMPATHETIC RESEARCH 

Bold action and a heart for healing define Adams’ story — and so many others at Emory, where breakthroughs in research, treatment and prevention become real healing in patients’ lives. Researcher Ned Waller is a case in point. For more than three decades, he has focused on a single goal: cure cancer.

A professor of hematology and medical oncology at Emory School of Medicine, Waller holds the Rein Saral Professorship in Cancer Medicine at Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute. As a physician-scientist, he also provides compassionate patient care, meeting people in their most vulnerable moments.

“Resiliency in the face of cancer is important, but connecting with patients and comforting them is even more important,” he says. “To go through life with a cancer diagnosis, we need the support of our family, colleagues and doctors. That can lighten the burden.”

As a researcher, Waller is exploring how to modify T cells to help the body recognize and destroy cancer cells. His translational lab has narrowed in on immunotherapy strategies that unmask cancer cells, which often evolve to hide in plain sight. His work is long and difficult, often marked by challenge, and for Waller, it’s deeply fulfilling.

Making this painstaking work worthwhile, Waller says, is the thrill of unearthing something new and sharing it with the world. He remembers the moment he realized his lab had developed a promising new drug for pancreatic cancer. The discovery came not with fanfare, but with silence — and darkness.

To test the drug, his team used a mouse model in which cancer cells carried a gene from fireflies. If the cancer was active, the mouse would glow in the dark. The team treated one group of mice with the drug; the other, a control group, received no treatment. In the darkened lab, Waller and his research assistants saw the telltale glow in the control mice, where cancer still raged. In the treated group, something remarkable had occurred: No spark of light appeared. The cancer was completely gone.

In many ways, Waller’s and Boulis’s successes are similar. In both cases, Emory’s expertise — and willingness to take on difficult challenges — led to outcomes that had seemed impossible. While Waller’s studies create strategies to attack hidden cancer cells, the DREZ surgery Boulis performed worked at the root of the nervous system, disrupting the misfiring signals from Adams’ severed arm and bringing her lasting relief.

TURNING THE IMPOSSIBLE INTO REALITY

Such successes aren’t isolated stories. At Winship Cancer Institute, clinical trials offer patients the chance to access tomorrow’s therapies today. For Tom Broyles, a patient facing a second bout with kidney cancer, a clinical trial brought hope where there had been only uncertainty. 

Under the care of Emory oncologist Mehmet Bilen, Broyles joined a trial that tested a combination of immunotherapies. After just five months, his scans showed no evidence of disease. “I thought maybe they had mixed up the scans,” he recalls. “But no, it was working. I felt like I was getting my life back.”

“We’re reimagining what cancer care looks like — not just in hospitals, but in communities... Every trial is a chance to bring hope to someone who needs it.”

—Ajay Nooka

Clinical trials are central to reshaping how care is delivered. “We’re reimagining what cancer care looks like — not just in hospitals, but in communities,” says Ajay Nooka, associate director of clinical research at Winship. “Every trial is a chance to bring hope to someone who needs it.”

Emory’s approach to care unites cutting-edge science with real-world impact, from precision surgeries that restore function to research breakthroughs that give patients new hope. And behind every advance is a person driven by compassion as much as curiosity — someone willing to take risks, reimagine possibility and meet patients where they are.

WHERE COURAGE MEETS COMPASSION

That spirit runs through every corner of Emory. Tying it all together is not simply Emory’s capacity for high-level research or advanced procedures. It’s the people. People like Hunter Jonus, an assistant professor of pediatrics and member of the Cancer Immunology Research Program at Winship. She is working to use the immune system’s natural defenses to help children survive aggressive cancers.

Supported by the Rally Foundation for Childhood Cancer Research, Jonus helped develop a promising therapy for neuroblastoma, an aggressive cancer that primarily affects infants and young children. Her work focuses on a special kind of immune cell, the gamma delta T cell, which can be taken from healthy donors, multiplied in a lab, and infused into young patients to help their immune systems recognize and destroy cancer. 

Over several years, Jonus helped refine and test these cells, ensuring they were both safe and effective. Her research led to FDA approval for a first-of-its-kind clinical trial at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, bringing the therapy from concept to patient care. “I was lucky to witness the whole journey, from the lab bench to the first child receiving treatment,” Jonus says. On her desk are photos of the children whose courage inspires her — routine reminders of the purpose driving her work.

HARNESSING THE POWER OF PREVENTION

Healing isn’t confined to the hospital and clinic. Emory faculty members are extending care into homes, schools and neighborhoods, redefining what it means to heal by pairing science with compassion. That philosophy takes tangible form at the Integrated Memory Care (IMC) program, a joint venture of Emory Healthcare and the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. Founded and directed by Carolyn Clevenger, a clinical professor at the School of Nursing, the IMC combines primary care and dementia support under one roof. 

“This model shows that integrated care for patients and caregivers can significantly improve outcomes and quality of life,” Clevenger says.

The first program of its kind in the nation, the IMC provides services on Emory’s Brookhaven campus and in 24 senior living communities in the Atlanta area. Led by advanced practice nurses, the IMC team helps patients live independently for longer while reducing hospitalizations. Families receive medical guidance along with emotional and logistical support that eases the strain of caregiving.

The IMC’s impact recently earned national recognition from the American Academy of Nursing, which named it an Edge Runner model for transforming health care through nursing innovation.

“More important, this recognition highlights the superpower of nurses: our ability to understand the whole person and family, create innovative solutions and lead meaningful change in health care.”

—Carolyn Clevenger

That same commitment to whole-person care defines the work of Stephen Patrick, the O. Wayne Rollins Distinguished Professor and Chair of Health Policy and Management at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health. A pediatrician by training, Patrick investigates how policy decisions — such as Medicaid coverage and parental leave — ripple through the lives of children and families. He is particularly focused on improving outcomes for infants born to mothers with substance use disorders, as well as tackling structural inequities. “Kids are a quarter of our population, and it should be incumbent upon us all to help them thrive and be successful,” Patrick says. “But we have just not done that.” 

His work underscores how gaps in policy translate directly into suffering. Prevention, not just treatment, is the path forward. “We’ve built systems that respond when children are already in crisis rather than preventing those crises in the first place,” he says. 

While Patrick tackles the system itself, Kelli Komro turns science into action at the community level. A professor of behavioral, social and health education sciences at Rollins, she co-leads Connect for Prevention. A partnership with the Cherokee Nation Behavioral Health, this program has achieved remarkable results: cutting alcohol, cannabis and opioid use among rural high-school students by nearly 50%. 

“Prevention is key to reducing teen substance use and all the negative outcomes from that,” Komro says. “If we invest in prevention today, we not only save precious young lives, we promote lifelong well-being.” 

Photos by Rowland Jordan, Stephen Nowland, Ben Knisely and courtesy of School of Nursing and Stephen Patrick.