Family history, personal adversity fuel MCG student's pursuit of breast cancer research

Kelli Clemons drew the most inspiration from the cancer patient she visited in the hospital who, while dying quickly, never wavered.

"You could tell she was getting weaker but she would say, 'I’m here and I am blessed,' "  said Clemons, a fourth-year student at Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. "She was looking forward to another day. She wouldn’t let anything bring her down."

For Clemons, this kind of patient interaction sustains her  while she simultaneouslypursues her love of science and research. Clemons will get to do both next month after receiving the American Society of Clinical Oncology Conquer Cancer Medical Student Rotation Award for Underrepresented Populations. She will do a four-week clinical research stint at Johns Hopkins University, where a mentor will help her pursue her project looking at "the socioeconomic and geographic contributions to breast cancer disparities."

There has long been evidence that Black and Hispanic women suffer worse outcomes from breast cancer, often exacerbated by where they live. A 2018 study by Dr. Justin X, Moore of AU and colleagues found 119 counties were "hot spots" with much higher death rates for Black women, mostly in the South, and 83 counties with higher death rates for Hispanic women in the Southwest and south Florida. Those counties were more likely to have higher rates of poverty, uninsured patients and greater barriers to care.

Despite improvements in recent years, Black women have a 9-10% lower survival rate from breast cancer than white women, according to the American Cancer Society's Cancer Facts and Figures 2021.

Cancer is personal for Clemons, whose family has suffered a wide variety of cancers and seen wildly different outcomes. For instance, an aunt has survived Stage IV pancreatic cancer for more than 10 years. That's rare, as only 10% of patients make it five years.

"You wouldn’t expect her to live, just based on statistics," Clemons said. "There are other cancers you have treatments for, and those people just die quickly. That’s kind of how I got into the disparities and the research portion of my career.”

Much of the difference is probably lack of access or lack of comfort with the medical system in general, she said.

"So even if there was access, was there trust?" she said.

Science has always fascinated her, even in elementary school, and it is a passion she pursued throughout. In high school in Clayton County, she won a statewide science fair but then found out she couldn't compete in the international fair because her county had neglected to register for it, apparently thinking none of its students would qualify to go. Her high school also suffered an embarrassment after the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges stripped away its accreditation in 2008 when the school board failed to meet its standards. The school was on probation when Clemons was a senior and that haunted her as she applied to Georgia colleges and was turned down.

"Despite my scores, despite my grades, just because of where I come from, my zip code, they wanted me to prove myself," she said. Bur after getting into Louisiana State University, when she started taking a Biology course, she could tell she was behind.

"It just seemed that everybody was just so far ahead. Like, did they come to summer school?" said Clemons, who can laugh about it now. "What happened? It’s just the education I received. I didn’t get that knowledge growing up. So I had to play catch up there."

She would work in a lab at Vanderbilt University after college for two years before finally getting into MCG. But even in Augusta, it feels harder for her than for classmates, many of whom are the sons or daughters of physicians or have family members who could give them an early exposure to medicine.

"Which is great, but that’s just something I didn’t know about growing up, exposure I didn't have," Clemons said. " And I feel like if I did it would have been easier for me."

That need to face adversity head-on is one of the reasons why she enjoys leading the Sisters Informing, Healing, Living and Empowering Augusta, a group that pairs mentors at MCG with teen mothers and young women in Augusta. Clemons took over the group from its founder, her friend and her mentor Dr. Bria Peacock. The MCG students can share their experiences and advise the young women on making good decisions, safe sex and relationships, what it takes to be successful in life. But it is not a one-way street, Clemons said.

"They teach us so much about perseverance, about courage, because they have to go out into the world as a teenage mom," she said. "They’re vulnerable and open enough to share their stories with us and the other girls."

Like the upcoming rotation at Johns Hopkins, Clemons wants to keep one foot in the lab and one foot in the clinic as she pursues her dual passions.

"I don’t see my career without either one," Clemons said. "Hopefully, this physician-scientist thing will work out for me because I really equally love both."