Dr. Megan Melody’s path to medicine started at a young age under unfortunate circumstances.
While she was in kindergarten, her father was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer affecting the body’s immune system. Chemotherapy lulled him into remission, but he later became sick with treatment-related acute myeloid leukemia — a blood cancer caused by his previous cancer treatments. He died from the disease when Melody was 11.
Melody, the youngest of four children, spent copious time in New Hampshire hospitals throughout her father’s cancer journey. Amid the hardship, she fondly remembers one of the fellows on her dad’s treatment team who would patiently sit, chat and play video games with her after his rounds.
“It was actually his impact on my life that (made me) really realize that, despite the fact that my father passed away, treating cancer isn’t just about curing a patient. It’s being able to offer a patient’s family support during a really difficult journey,” says Melody, who is now 37. “I knew from that age that that was what I wanted to do.”
She proudly proclaimed she wanted to be a “malignant hematologist” when she grew up. Every step of her life since has followed that childhood dream.
After earning her bachelor’s degree in 2010, she completed a one-year master’s program at the University of South Florida before earning her medical degree in 2018 from the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine.
Once she finished a residency at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville in 2021, Melody moved to Chicago for a three-year fellowship in hematology and medical oncology at the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University. There, she ran into Dr. Eduardo Sotomayor, a former colleague from her time in Florida. By then, he was the vice president and executive director of the Cancer Institute at Tampa General Hospital that launched in April 2021.
When Sotomayor asked when Melody would return to work for him again, she laughed. But he wasn’t joking — and in August 2024, she joined the TGH Cancer Institute’s Cellular Therapy team.
Ever since, she has been growing their chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy program for treating lymphomas. Her research focuses on mitigating toxicities from treatment for lymphoma — a specialty inspired by her father. CAR T-cell therapy is an FDA-approved treatment for lymphomas, multiple myelomas and leukemias that have relapsed or not responded to initial treatments. It involves extracting T-cells — a type of white blood cell that helps the immune system fight germs — from a patient. Those cells are trained to fight cancer by inducing them to express a protein that targets lymphoma cells. Then, the strengthened cells are infused back into the body.
Over the course of her career, Melody has authored more than 20 papers examining real-world outcomes for CAR T-cell therapy and has given several presentations at major conferences. She is helping expand the therapy’s uses to non-cancerous diseases, like autoimmune and neurologic conditions, and is actively involved in clinical research.
She has also helped bolster cross-institutional exchanges of CAR T-cell therapy data. TGH is now the newest member of a consortium of research institutions that contribute real-world data points for patient outcomes after CAR T-cell therapy.
“I need to know how this drug will work in my grandpa or in my great uncle. So, real-world data is a really great way to get insight into how this is actually working in our real patient population.”
“Real-world data is really important, because we can utilize clinical trial data to say this is how we think it will work,” Melody says. “I need to know how this drug will work in my grandpa or in my great uncle. So, real-world data is a really great way to get insight into how this is actually working in our real patient population.”
Her goal, she says, is to expand access to this therapy and other cancer treatments to save more lives. As of press time, she was working on a grant application to examine barriers to CAR T-cell therapy in the state, which include socioeconomic disparities and proximity to treatment centers.