Dr. Khadijah Mitchell
Predicting Drug Response, Radon Exposure, and Lung Cancer: What’s Race Got To Do With It?
University of Pittsburgh, BS in Biology, 2003 Duquesne University, MS in Biology, 2006 Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, PhD in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology, 2014
Graduate Certificate, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Health Disparities and Health Inequalities
Specialty: Lung Cancer Health Disparities and specifically why African Americans get lung cancer more even though they smoke less
Previously worked at the National Cancer Institute, where she studied the biology of different populations with lung cancer.
Link to Flyer: Khadijah Mitchell
Dr. Khadijah Mitchell studies the causes and consequences of lung cancer health disparities in African Americans. Her main goal is to try to figure out why African Americans specifically get, and die from, lung cancer more than any other ethnic group in the United States. She began her talk by defining what a health disparity is and presented us with some of the statistics regarding different cancer disparities that have been identified. One of these included lung cancer between Eastern Americans and African Americans. African Americans have the highest incidence of lung cancer, along with the highest level of mortalities. This is interesting because the number one cause of lung cancer is smoking, but statistics show that African Americans actually smoke less than Eastern Americans. This is referred to as the African American Smoking Paradox.
When trying to explain why this disparity occurs, many people suggest that African Americans have less access to proper healthcare, along with other environmental factors. However, Dr. Mitchell believes that there may be biological factors that may cause this disparity and in her lab is trying to create different experiments to test this hypothesis. She is looking at both genetic and epigenetic factors that may play a role. One of the main epigenetic factors that she studies is DNA methylation. Dr. Mitchell has identified 500+ genes that have been connected to lung cancer, so she specially looks at this subset of genes in her research. It has been found that African Americans have more DNA methylation on these genes, which silences them. It may be possible to create immunotherapies specific to these genes and in her lab Dr. Mitchell uses gene expression profiles and compares existing cell lines to see if there are specific drugs that can be tailored specifically to African American gene profiles.