ATLANTA — Thirteen years before Jovita Moore lost her life to an aggressive brain cancer known as glioblastoma, the same cancer took the life of one of her friends.
Chanda Taylor was a producer at WSB and a friend to many at the station, including Jovita.
In 2008, Taylor had just taken a job at CNN when she had a seizure. She died seven months to the day after her diagnosis. She was 35 years old.
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Her sister, Loren Taylor, told Channel 2′s Wendy Corona that Moore was a deep source of comfort after her sister’s passing. Jovita delivered final remarks at Chanda Taylor’s funeral service.
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“She just spoke from the heart about Chanda as a friend and what it meant to her,” Loren Taylor said. “And just now to see that she was a comfort to us and now she’s gone is really heartbreaking.”
Dr. Edjah Nduom was Jovita’s neurosurgeon at Emory University. He said Jovita hoped that maybe her battle with the disease could help someone in the future, even though it wouldn’t change her own prognosis.
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“She was adamant that she wanted to make sure that anything we can learn from her experience and from her tumor would be added to our repositories, into our databases so that it might help someone in the future,” Nduom said.
Nduom is leading the charge for new discoveries at Emory University School of Medicine. Jovita’s tumor has been the subject of molecular sequencing to help doctors learn more about the disease.
“That information makes our database richer and gets us that much closer to figuring out how we can treat patients in the future,” Nduom said. “It really could have been anyone, and it could be anyone in the future.
Nduom said he’s fighting for future patients who haven’t even been diagnosed yet to make sure they have new therapies.
Loren Taylor said the disease quickly debilitated her sister.
“It became apparent that her speech had left and then just other faculties really, really quickly deteriorated,” Loren Taylor said. “It just always seems like it’s a person with a brilliant mind that gets affected.”
Loren Taylor hopes more funds can be allocated to studying glioblastoma because it is so aggressive.
You can support glioblastoma research HERE.
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