Recipients of ONS Foundation Funding

Jean Brown, PhD, RN, FAAN

Dr. Jean Brown is an ardent supporter of the important role nutrition plays in both physiological and psychological outcomes of cancer treatment. From her earliest ONS Foundation funding, food intake and its relationship to energy, activity, mood and overall quality of life in patients receiving radiation therapy have been primary concerns for this nurse researcher.

Dr. Brown is a professor and Acting Dean at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York. She holds joint appointments in the Schools of Nursing, Nutrition and Rehabilitation Science and thus has the ideal mix of disciplines to work with in the development of her research interests. She credits the ONS Foundation funding for progress on a trajectory of research regarding nutrition, saying that "the ONS Foundation (and ONS) was willing to fund nutritional work before other funding bodies were".

She has received both small and major grant funding from the ONS Foundation. The Cost of Cancer Malnutrition in Hospitalized Patients study was funded as one of the outcomes projects. Dr. Brown stated that the early funding provided by the ONS Foundation was needed to demonstrate her expertise and credibility in the field, which led to her current NCI grant examining the role of antioxidants during radiation therapy in prostate cancer.

Dr. Brown became involved in oncology nursing early in her career-in fact after her BSN, when she accepted a summer fellowship in cancer nursing offered and funded by a local organization. That experience led to her interest in oncology in a graduate program, and a master's thesis related to educating gynecologic oncology nurses in the management of patients with radioactive implants. She mentions that those small research projects "taught me about research, that I could do it, and that I liked doing it".

When asked about her most challenging research experience, she immediately stated "subject recruitment", as many of the researchers interviewed have said. She added that the current NCI study had a particular challenge in the preparation of vitamin and antioxidant capsules. In developing the study, she had found a research compounding pharmacy which she thought she could use in the study, and thought she had the preparation of the study drug arranged. Upon receipt of funding, while actually preparing the drug , the plans went awry. She found that commercial vendors weren't interested in such a small job, and while she was eventually able to make arrangements for obtaining the drug, she notes that it was a challenge and a good example of the multifaceted issues in design and conduct of a randomized control trial.

If she could begin again, Dr. Brown indicates she would still work in the nutrition area as she feels it is pivotal to cancer care and patient quality of life. She feels she would have been able to better develop her interests had she had oncology nurse researcher mentors earlier in her career. The basic scientists she worked with, however, were invaluable. She credits ONS and the ONS Foundation with providing a solution by helping her with the small funding, and by putting together researchers with similar interest in understudied problems, so that she was able to overcome the limitations of being in a certain place without the benefit of researchers working in a specialty area. Like many of us, she was tied to her geographic area with family responsibilities. But through ONS she worked with Dr. Ada Lindsey who gave advice about doctoral study, and Dr. Marylin Dodd who was her mentor for the ONS Foundation fellowship. She credits these strong nursing researchers with helping her develop her own research program, including the inclusion of biobehavioral perspectives in the research on nutritional outcomes. ONS Foundation funding has also been important for multi-site studies of lung cancer symptoms and quality of life that Dr. Brown has conducted in collaboration with Dr. Linda Sarna (PI), University of California Los Angeles; Dr. Mary Cooley, Dana Farber Cancer Institute; and Dr. Cynthia Chernecky, Medical College of Georgia.

Dr. Brown's research fits well within the ONS research priorities and research agenda. Symptom management has been high on the list of priority areas for the last several years. In addition, nutritional outcomes have been identified as an understudied area. She asserts that as a nurse, she brings a "different lens" to the research in nutrition-a more holistic view of the cancer patient's precancer characteristics and lifestyle issues (like tobacco use) that may influence nutritional response during treatment. She sees herself as someone on the "front line" in an area that is of the utmost importance to cancer patients and their families.