Jane Hankins, MD, MS

Due to inequities in diagnosis and access to care for people with sickle cell disease across the globe, children experience disparate rates of morbidity and mortality. A major determinant for child’s survival and health is where they live. For children with sickle cell disease who live in resourced countries, survival exceeds 95%, while in resource-limited countries with a high sickle cell incidence, survival rates plummet with up to 90% of children dying before age 5. 

Now, as director of the St. Jude Global Hematology program, I am committed to building a worldwide program to bring care to catastrophic hematologic diseases. In this role, I am initiating studies with the goal of scaling up diagnosis and linkage to care while increasing engagement within the health system for children and adolescents with sickle cell disease in resource-limited settings. I am also the St. Jude representative for the first global initiative on sickle cell disease, called OneSCD, built in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Coalition on Sickle Cell Disease and Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), with the aim of addressing inequities in diagnosis and care for children with sickle cell disease across the globe.