Closer to Care

On a spring day in 2026, Daniel Cressy lay in his hospital bed knowing it was the first day of his new life.

Cressy, a 23-year-old from Metairie, Louisiana, had been born with sickle cell disease, a painful blood disorder once thought incurable. The condition had shaped his life from infancy and eventually put his dream of becoming a commercial airline pilot on hold after the Federal Aviation Administration rejected his application for a medical certification.

That rejection letter sat framed in the hospital room as Benjamin Watkins, section chief of pediatrics hematology/oncology at Tulane School of Medicine, infused Cressy with stem cells that had been taken from Cressy’s body and genetically edited to prevent sickling in his bloodstream.

“I did not think I’d get this far — my life is changing forever as we speak,” Cressy said at the time. “Thank you, Dr. Watkins, so much.”

Exactly 100 days after the infusion, Cressy returned to Manning Family Children’s to celebrate becoming the first person in the Gulf South — and one of only dozens nationwide — to be functionally cured of sickle cell disease since the treatment was approved by the FDA in 2023.

And the success of his treatment is already ensuring he won’t be the last.

“I like to say there’s before Daniel and there’s after Daniel,” Watkins said. “When we became an authorized treatment center for gene therapy in 2024, we saw interest out the gate from people across Louisiana, from New Orleans to Shreveport. Daniel was our first patient. After Daniel’s story went viral, we’ve received interest in consultations from across the region, across the country and even places as far away as Barbados, Nigeria, Kenya and Australia.

“Across the world, people are calling and emailing, interested in learning more about these options.”

Cressy’s treatment represents a significant milestone for the academic healthcare partnership between Tulane, LCMC Health and its network of hospitals, including Manning Family Children’s, where Watkins directs the Stem Cell Transplant, Cell and Gene Therapy Program.

Announced in 2022, the Tulane-LCMC Health partnership combines the research and discovery of academic medicine with the care and clinical infrastructure of a large health system. The result is lifesaving specialty care options that patients from Louisiana and other southern states have previously had to travel to Houston or Atlanta to find.

And the success of Cressy’s sickle cell treatment was only one in a year of “firsts” that have helped position Tulane and LCMC Health as a destination healthcare option for the region and beyond.

At East Jefferson General Hospital, Tulane ophthalmic oncologist Paul Finger began using a novel radiation system he invented to treat certain eye tumors in minutes instead of days — bringing a treatment offered at only four other U.S. health systems to the Gulf South. Meanwhile, Tulane thoracic surgeon Wassim Abi Jaoude performed the first single-port robotic lung cancer surgery in Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi.

These are just a few examples from a year of medical advances at Tulane that also included Louisiana’s first gene therapy for hemophilia as well as regional breakthroughs in urology and another novel lung cancer treatment that uses microwaves to kill tumor cells.

“This is destination healthcare at its best,” Tulane University President Michael A. Fitts said. “It is providing lifesaving, life-improving treatments and cures — among the most advanced anywhere — to the residents of our city, state and the entire Gulf South. It is fulfilling, through the latest discoveries and breakthroughs, the founding mission of Tulane to heal our city and region.”

Greg Feirn, CEO of LCMC Health, said these “medical firsts” underscore the power of what he calls a “transformational partnership” with Tulane, a leader in academic medicine and patient care.

“We can do more for our patients, communities and region together than would be possible as separate organizations,” Feirn said.

The future of eye cancer treatment

Paul T. Finger (M ’82) came to New Orleans to create something that did not yet exist.

When Finger joined Tulane as a professor of ophthalmology at Tulane University School of Medicine and director of the Ocular Tumor Service in 2025, he recognized a regional need for eye cancer treatment options, particularly for choroidal melanoma, the most common form of eye cancer in adults.

“Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are basically unserved states,” said Finger, one of the world’s preeminent authorities on ophthalmic oncology and a 1982 graduate of Tulane School of Medicine. “There’s a deficit of care for eye cancer. People were traveling to Houston, Memphis and sometimes Atlanta to get their care, or if they couldn’t travel, people were unnecessarily losing their eyes and sight because they got eye cancer.”

Earlier this year, Finger, Tulane and LCMC Health launched Louisiana’s first comprehensive ophthalmic plaque brachytherapy program at East Jefferson.

The treatment uses a small plaque containing radioactive seeds that is positioned on the outside of the eye to deliver radiation directly to the tumor. Traditionally, the procedure requires two surgeries: one to attach the plaque over the tumor and another, several days later, to remove it.

In March 2026, a patient who lives more than an hour from New Orleans became one of the first in Louisiana to receive the treatment after a routine eye appointment revealed a tumor. Following this success, the program quickly saw a surge of interest from beyond the New Orleans area.

“The service is growing exponentially,” Finger said. “We did an analysis, and approximately 70% of the patients coming to us have never been to Tulane-LCMC Health before. Many of them are from Mississippi and northern Louisiana. I think we’ve had a few from Alabama, and there is also no eye cancer center in the Florida Panhandle.”

Months after pioneering the first use of the treatment in the state, Finger is already referring to ophthalmic plaque brachytherapy as “the old way.”

He and his team have begun treating patients with a device he invented to deliver a form of radiation therapy available at only a handful of health systems nationally — and, Finger said, nowhere else in the South.

“The old way, you sew the plaque onto an eyeball and leave it there for five to seven days, because that’s how long it took for the radiation to get out of the seeds and into the tumor,” Finger said. “I invented a device that delivers the same amount of radiation needed to kill the tumor in 10 or 15 minutes.”

Instead of two surgeries, only one is required. Days of treatment are reduced to minutes. And the plaque only needs to be held onto the eye — no stitches required.

The device is the first-ever light-guided, light-defined brachytherapy radiation delivery system in the world. Finger’s key innovation was to apply four lights around the disc. During treatment, the lights allow physicians to look through the pupil and see exactly where the radiation is being delivered.

By August, Finger had successfully treated a handful of patients with the cutting-edge device. He expects the reach of the program to continue growing.

“We are bringing people in from across the South, but eventually I think we will bring in people from across the country,” Finger said.

The next frontier in robotic surgery

In another operating room in East Jefferson, Wassim Abi Jaoude set out this year to perform a lobectomy with a standard goal: to remove a portion of a patient’s lung containing cancer.

The way he performed the procedure was anything but standard.

Using the da Vinci Single-Port robotic system, Abi Jaoude, assistant professor of surgery at the School of Medicine, performed the first single-port robotic lung cancer surgery in Louisiana, Arkansas or Mississippi.

Lobectomies have long been a standard surgical treatment for patients with operable early-stage lung cancer, and surgeons have performed them robotically for years. But conventional robotic surgery typically requires multiple ports, or points of entry into the body. This means multiple small incisions are made between the ribs to accommodate a camera and surgical instruments.

The single-port system changes that approach, placing the camera and multiple articulated instruments through one opening below the rib cage. Once inside the chest, the camera and other instruments spread apart to give the surgeon room to operate.

That difference can translate into an easier recovery for patients.

“Less trauma means less pain,” Abi Jaoude said. “That means less inflammation. That means less drainage. That means the tube can come out earlier, and the patient can go home earlier.”

The FDA cleared the single-port robotic system for thoracic procedures in 2024. After joining Tulane in August 2025, Abi Jaoude immediately began working to get credentialed to use a single-port robot for lobectomies after discovering East Jefferson already had the technology.

“I saw the opportunity to bring this technique to this area because nobody’s doing it,” Abi Jaoude said. “There are only two single-port robots in the entire state of Louisiana. We have one, and I believe the other is in Lafayette being primarily used for colorectal cancer. This is a rarity,  and it brings cutting-edge technology to an area that needs it.”

In May, 77-year-old Dennis O’Neil became Abi Jaoude’s — and the region’s — first single-port robotic lobectomy patient. At a postoperative visit a week later, O’Neil said he felt no pain.

“I don’t know how I could have gotten better care than I received here,” O’Neil said.

By the end of the summer, Abi Jaoude had performed two more of the procedures. He said his patients have experienced noticeably less postoperative pain compared to what he often sees following multiport operations.

Single-port lobectomies remain a new offering, and not every patient is a candidate. A patient’s height and anatomy, for example, can determine whether the instruments can safely reach the necessary areas of the chest.

Still, Abi Jaoude said being the first to embrace new medical procedures is emblematic of how academic-clinical partnerships can result in regional impact and pave the way for more skilled healthcare professionals in the future.

“It’s critical to be early adopters when technology progresses, and I’m sure we will be getting referrals specifically for this surgery,” Abi Jaoude said. “Our residents will also be able to graduate with training on the single-port, which is so important for us as we train the next generation of surgeons.”

Building beyond the breakthrough

Months after Cressy celebrated the completion of his therapy and a chance to live a normal life, Watkins reflected on the shift that’s occurred in just a few short years since he joined Tulane and Manning Family Children’s in 2023.

For generations, treatment for sickle cell was largely centered on managing symptoms, preventing complications and controlling pain.

Now, there’s a functional cure. Now, there’s hope.

Nowhere is that hope needed more than in the South, which sees the highest prevalence of sickle cell disease in the U.S. An estimated 3,000 people live with the condition in Louisiana.

“No one else is able to deliver gene therapy right now in Louisiana or Mississippi or large parts of the South,” Watkins said. “We’re excited that it’s time for Louisiana to lead the way and not just follow.”   

While the treatment is difficult and not for everybody, given its requirement for chemotherapy and a weekslong hospital stay, Watkins is already hard at work delivering the therapy to new patients: a 15-year-old boy from Alexandria, Louisiana, and a 14-year-old girl from Slidell, Louisiana.

“We’re perfectly situated here to meet this moment, and we have a population that is both interested and in need,” Watkins said. “But we also benefit from the buy-in by both Tulane and our hospital administration to prioritize this and make sure there’s visibility around gene therapy.”

The program’s reach is also beginning to extend beyond sickle cell disease.

Watkins said he will soon see two patients from Florida who chose to come to New Orleans to receive treatment for thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder in which the body makes an abnormal or reduced amount of hemoglobin, resulting in anemia and potential developmental issues.

If their treatments proceed as expected, Watkins said, these patients could become the first in Louisiana to receive gene therapy for the condition.

“They shopped around, looked at other centers and ended up choosing us as their authorized treatment center,” Watkins said. “This is the result of a partnership with a shared mission of expanding access to lifesaving therapies for all patients, not just the ones who can afford it or the ones who live in our backyard.

“This is not the endpoint. This is the starting point.”