Eugene Vaios, MD, MBA, was one of five Duke University School of Medicine faculty members selected to receive a 2026 Physician-Scientist Strong Start Award. The awards program, funded with a gift from the Nanaline H. Duke Fund, supports promising early career physician-scientists at Duke as they develop independent research programs. Dr. Vaios will receive $120,000 annually for three years to support his research program.
Due to their location, brain tumors are rarely amenable to repeated tissue sampling to guide initial therapy or treatment response assessment. The absence of non-invasive strategies for longitudinal monitoring of brain tumor molecular evolution during cancer therapy is a barrier to development of precision medicine approaches.
Dr. Vaios aims to address this by detecting tumor-specific genomic and epigenomic patterns in peripheral blood to enable non-invasive diagnosis and treatment response assessment.
The Strong Start Award will accelerate this work and build on findings from his National Cancer Institute (NCI) K38 award, "Cell-Free DNA Methylation Patterns as a Biomarker for Tumor Biology and Clinical Outcomes for Glioblastoma Patients." Biospecimens for this research are sourced from the department's biobanking study (NCT05480644), which has accrued nearly 100 patients to date.
Dr. Vaios was also awarded a $74,796 supplement from the NCI to advance work related to his K38 award. Funds will support the effort of a graduate student and bioinformatician as Dr. Vaios validates his findings using an independent cohort of annotated clinical data, MR images and plasma biospecimens from the biobanking study.