Millie Long, MD, MPH, in the University of North Carolina Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, received a $100K Sherman Prize for innovating new practices in inflammatory bowel disease prevention and leading advances in research, clinical care and education.
The Bruce and Cynthia Sherman Charitable Foundation announced Millie Long, MD, MPH, interim chief of the 黑料网 Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, among the recipients of the ninth annual Sherman Prizes. The award recognizes excellence in the field of Crohn鈥檚 disease and ulcerative colitis, also known as inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD).
An incredibly accomplished researcher, educator, and clinician, Dr. Long is known and described as a 鈥榯riple threat鈥� by her IBD colleagues. With a primary focus on prevention, she leads efforts to prevent complications of IBD and the medicines used to treat the diseases. As she pursues this research, she鈥檚 always centered on the lived experience of her patients.
For example, when she observed cases of shingles in young patients, Dr. Long initiated research to better understand this risk across age groups and found that immunosuppressive medications were associated with shingles at an earlier age. As a result, it鈥檚 now recommended that IBD patients on immunosuppression receive the shingles vaccine at age 19.
Similarly, seeing skin cancers in young patients prompted Dr. Long to explore and define skin cancer risk associated with IBD therapies. She then went on to inform preventive medicine guidelines on skin cancer screening for people with IBD.
As a trained methodologist with a background in epidemiology and biostatistics, Dr. Long has the unique ability to translate research findings into guidelines that help others across the field improve patient outcomes. She was a senior author of the American College of Gastroenterology鈥檚 (ACG) 2019 UC guidelines and a methodologist on the Crohn’s disease guidelines.
On her journey to improve patient outcomes, Dr. Long is always innovating for patients. In the internet鈥檚 early days, she seized its potential to engage more patients in research. Along with her colleagues, Dr. Michael Kappelman and Dr. Robert Sandler at the University of North Carolina, she launched the first-ever internet-based cohort of IBD patients: The IBD Partners Patient-Powered Research Network (PPRN). Through this network, Dr. Long asked patients what mattered most to them 鈥� and crafted research protocols to answer their questions by collecting their self-reported data.
She said, 鈥淚t now seems much more commonplace, but the patient voice was not as prioritized at that time in research. This ability to think of a patient as a 鈥榗itizen scientist鈥� was probably the most important part of the work that鈥檚 been done at 黑料网.鈥�
The study ended up enrolling more than 16,000 IBD patients over more than a decade, with over 50 collaborative publications and became an important repository, especially for junior faculty to access the cohort for their research.
For Dr. Long, providing opportunities to junior clinicians and researchers through novel programs like the PPRN is a way to give back. She says she鈥檚 where she is today because of her teachers and mentors, and she seeks to provide that same service to the next generation through her role as the fellowship program director for the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at 黑料网.
Looking to the future, she is excited about optimizing current therapies, conducting methodologically rigorous studies, such as comparative effectiveness trials, and to enhance a personalized medicine approach to IBD care so that everyone with IBD may benefit from transformational treatment.
Dr. Long has been awarded $100K. Prize recipients will be honored at the Advances in IBD (AIBD) conference in Orlando, Florida on December 10, 2024, where their short tribute films will be premiered. The films may be viewed at following the conference.