Rexburg local wins prestigious award for high-tech cancer research
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REXBURG — Dinner table conversations were never dull at Dr. Daniel Jones’ childhood home.
Growing up in Rexburg, and going to Madison High School, Jones says he would often get home to eat dinner, excited to listen to his family discuss their day, which was normally in what other people might consider a different language – medical terms.
“From a young age, every conversation at the dinner table was medical-related,” says Jones, who is currently doing his residency at MountainView Hospital in Las Vegas.
Jones’ grandpa is a pediatrician in California. His dad, Dr. Thomas Jones, is a physician in Rexburg. And two of his uncles, Dr. Brian Jones and Nate Boyle, NP, both practice medicine in Idaho Falls.
For Daniel, he didn’t have a hard time deciding what his passion in life was.
“I was there throughout my dad’s training and residency, so it just became a part of me when I was really young,” says Jones. “My parents tell me that I decided I wanted to become a physician when I was about six or seven years old, and that goal really never changed.”
After serving an Latter-day Saint mission in Nebraska, Jones attended Utah State University, later completing a Master of Health Science degree and going to medical school at Touro University Nevada.
Recently, he completed his Master of Business Administration at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and, on top of his current residency, is pursuing a master’s degree in medicine at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
For Jones, his interest in cancer research is personal.
“My grandma had breast cancer from a very young age, in her mid-30s,” says Jones. “I saw how advances in breast cancer treatment allowed her to live for many years afterward. That gave me an early appreciation for how dramatically cancer research and new therapies can change a person’s life.”
During medical school, Jones decided he wanted to research cancer therapies and try to help lengthen other patients’ lives, as his grandmother’s had been.
“During medical school, I actively looked for an oncology research mentor and was fortunate to begin working with Dr. Kyaw Zin Thein at Comprehensive Cancer Centers of Nevada,” says Jones. “He kind of took me under his wing and showed me how to do research. I’ve been with him for six years now, and we’ve produced over 300 publications in the top cancer journals.”
With Dr. Thein, Jones has been working vigorously on a project to improve oncology research.
“Basically over the last 100 years, we’ve been tracking all of this health data, every hospitalization, the outcomes, what diseases they have, and we’re finally at the point where computers are powerful enough that we can analyze hundreds of thousands of patient encounters to try to find associations to help us find what’s causing the cancer,” says Jones.
Instead of going home at night and lying on the couch to eat Cheetos as most of us do, Jones hops on the computer to continue researching, saying the work fulfills him in a way that is hard to explain.
“I go home at night, and instead of watching TV, I just hop on the computer and see what more I can find,” says Jones.
Jones’ current research involves taking all the data they’ve gathered and feeding it into a super-powered computer to try to pick out any needles in the haystack that could clue doctors in on the mysteries of cancer.
“This project specifically took around a month to do, and back in the day, before we had powerful computers, this project would’ve taken months of computer runtime,” says Jones.
Not long ago, Jones submitted his research to an American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting for presentation.
Recently, he found out that, through that process, he had won a Conquer Cancer Merit Award, which provided him with funding to continue his research.
“It was very exciting. In oncology research, it’s a team effort,” says Jones. “There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and I have a really good research team that I’m a part of.”
In June, Jones will travel to Chicago to present his research at the ASCO Annual Meeting.
For now, Jones says he is focusing on the exciting new advancements in cancer treatment, hoping that one day he can help develop personalized therapies.
“We’re able to make custom cancer therapies for specific people’s cancer. It’s a new type of cancer therapy, and it’s in trials right now, that’s what I really want to get into,” says Jones. “If I (were to) make a drug that becomes standard therapy for a specific cancer, I think that’s what I would be like, ‘Okay, I made it!”
Other than his astounding cancer research, Jones says he is proud of his beginnings, and hopes to inspire other young east Idahoans to reach for the stars.
“My path has taken me from Madison High School in Rexburg to Utah State, Touro University Nevada, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and residency training in Las Vegas,” says Jones. “I am grateful for those opportunities, but Rexburg will always be home. I hope younger students in east Idaho can see that where you grow up does not limit how far you can go in medicine, science, or research.”