Stephanie Halene, MD, is chief of hematology at Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital, and says she enjoys the close relationships she forms with patients and the detective work that is often involved in her clinical care and research.
“Hematology has two aspects: malignant disorders, such as leukemia and lymphoma, and what we call benign or classical hematologic disorders,” Dr. Halene says. “Either way, patients can be very sick, and it takes a lot of piecing clues together and working with other specialists to understand what is going on.”
Dr. Halene is a physician-scientist who studies hematopoiesis (formation of new blood cells) and myelopoiesis (production of bone marrow or bone marrow cells) and how RNA modifications contribute to leukemia and myelodysplastic syndromes (conditions caused by blood-forming cells in the bone marrow that become abnormal).
“My research is broad. Whereas some scientists go after a pathway or a certain approach, everything I do comes back to understanding hematopoiesis and that malignant transformation,” she says. “My work is also very collaborative as we can harness our scientific findings to advance our understanding and care of myelodysplastic syndromes.”
Dr. Halene says the field of hematology is ripe for continued advances. “I don’t think the speed of new discoveries has ever been better than it is now. There have been many incredible advances in technology to better understand the mechanisms of disease and several new agents to treat disease,” she says.
She is also director of the DeLuca Center for Innovation in Hematology Research, which has established a comprehensive biospecimen bank and awarded grant funding to advance discoveries in hematologic malignancies and classical hematologic disorders.
