Denver doctor sees the impact of St. Jude research on local children

DENVER (KDVR) — From the research labs on St. Jude’s campus to the oncology floor at Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children, there’s a common purpose in the pediatric field of medicine to give kids healthy futures.

“It’s so gratifying to treat children because there’s so much life to be lived,” Dr. John Van Doorninck, a hematologist and oncologist at Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children, said. “I mean, if we encounter a 2-year-old with leukemia and you can eradicate that disease, that can be 70 years of living. And not only is it living, but it’s it’s it’s an entire life story that has yet to be told. What are they going to give to the world and its future generations that they will give to the world.”

Van Doorninck has been fighting to save kids from cancer for two decades at Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children.

“When I started, I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, some of the medicines we’re giving are really harsh and it’s my hope that, by the end of my career, that we have replaced some of these medicines for medicines that have fewer side effects and offer higher potential for cure.’ And, in fact, that’s already happening,” Van Doorninck said.

Van Doornick told FOX31 about the impact St. Jude is having on helping kids worldwide.

“Some of that involves the laboratory,” Doorninck said. “You think of people with the pipettes and mixing things on the laboratory bench, but a lot of their research also is more clinically oriented in that they’re trying new medicines to see if there will be improvements in survival with certain medicines and it’s been highly influential.”

He remembers a case four years ago where he saw the benefits from St. Jude’s research, firsthand in Colorado.

“I had a beautiful young lady, about 16, and she had a cancer that wasn’t responding, a lymphoma,” Van Doornick said. “I was just so worried about whether or not she’d graduate high school or not. But there was a new medicine that was made available. It was an immunotherapy medicine, and we gave her two cycles of that immunotherapy medicine. And we repeated her scans. And my jaw dropped. We looked and we couldn’t see anything. And I was just amazed. It is it is one of the CT scans and one of the moments in my career that I’ll never forget.”

There are 25,000 total tickets for the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway with a mission of raising $2.5 million for St. Jude.

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