As many of you know, we are in the process of developing a new look for the Cancer Center – including a new website, a redesign of Lombardi Magazine, and a new logo. Over 120 of our faculty and staff participated in a recent survey about two logo designs that we are considering. We also sent the survey out to donors, patients, and friends/family of patients.
So first, thank you to all who responded to our email survey.
I’d like to share with you the two top designs, to make sure everyone has an opportunity to give us feedback. I invite everyone to leave a comment here and let us know what you think.
Based on the feedback from the survey (over 24 pages of comments!) and your thoughts here, we will work to revise the the most popular design into the final logo.
Bubble logoSkyline logo
Logo descriptions
Bubble: Lombardi operates under the banner of Cura Personalis, a latin phrase that means care of the whole person. Four missions-research, treatment, education, and community-complete the vision of care and research at Lombardi.
The person-the patient, the researcher, the caregiver-is at the center of everything Lombardi does; it is the individual who inspires and it is the individual who makes the difference. The way the figure is portrayed suggests a forward circular movement, paralleling translational research-from bench to bedside, and back. All new ideas move from the researcher to the patient, and ultimately transform the standard of care around the world.
The overlapping circular shapes in this graphic also suggest a microsopic cluster of cells. This, when combined with the human figure, provides a relevant statement about the impact of scientific research on our well-being.
Skyline:The Georgetown University skyline reinforces the reputation and quality of work at Lombardi. The gothic skyline, recognizable to many in the Washington, DC area, conveys a strong sense of location, history, and excellence. Closely tying the cancer center to its academic roots, the logo reinforces the relationship with Georgetown University and provides recognition beyond simply the Lombardi name.
This is an image Lombardi has used in the past, such as the 2006 Annual Report, as well as this blog.
*Due to a technical error, this post did not get published last week. I apologize for the delay*
January 21, 2009
It’s great to be back from my trip last week to Costa Rica to participate in the Breast Cancer Think Tank, organized in part by Marc Lippman. The quality of the science at this meeting is especially high, and I identified two to three new possible collaborations based on my presentation and those of participants. It was also a fantastic venue for a meeting, and the camaraderie that results at a meeting like this really shows in the quality of the participants and the quality of the discussions. Plus, the rain forests are spectacular.
On Monday night, I had the privilege of attending Georgetown University’s celebration of the Martin Luther King, Jr., celebration at the Kennedy Center. In addition to a reception the program, which included the Georgetown University choir (featuring our very own Mia Caparas), featured Nuttin’ But Stringz. They are a duo of violinists that merges hip hop and classical form with stunning effect. There was also an amazing performance by Aretha Franklin. Coming on the eve of President Obama’s inauguration, the evening had a special poignancy.
I don’t know how many of you attended the Inauguration but Harriet and I decided to sit next to the TV. It was truly a remarkable day. I don’t know about you, but I am feeling rather optimistic about the future, and I believe the government will be supportive of innovations in science and health care.
I’ll be paying special attention to our upcoming External Scientific Advisory Committee (ESAC) visit, which is scheduled for February 3rd. I think we’ll have a lot of excellent progress to share with them.
I hope everybody enjoyed their holidays and is ready to go in the New Year. We have certainly had an exciting 2008, and 2009 promises to be even more interesting as we prepare for our core grant renewal and continue to develop our scientific programs and translational research.
Contrary to any wild rumors you may have heard, we do not plan to rent out the Lombardi for the inauguration – even though that could be an interesting fund raising opportunity. (The sound you just heard was the scream of agony emitted by Joe Teague when he read this.)
I’ll be away next week at a meeting out of the country (more on that later), and you will be mercifully blog-free while I am gone.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been one year since I joined Georgetown and assumed my responsibilities as director of Lombardi. I can’t speak for the rest of you, but I have found this year to be utterly remarkable – challenging, exciting, and rewarding on many personal and professional levels.
While Harriet and I certainly miss our friends and family in Philadelphia, we love living in DC. And I still got to march in the Phillies victory parade in October!
It has been a privilege to get to know so many wonderful people at Lombardi and Georgetown University. And I already feel as if I have a new professional family. Hardly a day goes by when I am not surprised and delighted to learn about another exciting research finding or translational research opportunity here at Lombardi. I am constantly amazed by the collegiality, warmth, and loyalty of our faculty and staff to the very important work we do – and to each other.
At this time of the year, it is always nice to take a step back and reflect on where we’ve been and where we might go. I feel very good about where we’ve been and truly excited and humbled by where we are headed.
Please accept my very best wishes for the holiday season, a very happy New Year, and a healthy and productive 2009.
I very much enjoyed attending the clinic’s holiday party on Wednesday, and I was impressed by Tod Greene’s excellent taste in music. I’m looking forward to tonight’s Lombardi-wide celebration as well.
I was very pleased by the positive response when I presented at last week’s Committee on Medical Center Affairs (COMCA) Board meeting. Our COMCA members are incredibly knowledgeable, deeply engaged, and very interested in helping the cancer center succeed in its mission. I came with a 12 slide presentation, but could only get through 9 slides because I was peppered by so many questions. While some of the COMCA members primarily have backgrounds in business, several of them are extremely knowledgeable about medical center operations and provided valuable feedback and informed advice.
I had the pleasure of meeting with Subha Madhavan yesterday to review the status of the G-DOC effort. It seems hard to believe she’s only been here for 3 months since she’s been an absolute whirlwind of activity since her arrival. I’m extremely excited to see our ideas transforming into tangible action, and am very excited to see what happens in the next 3 months.
I was gratified that my comments about Mike Pishvaian’s Drug Discovery and Developmental Therapeutics meeting generated such a nice response. Mike has organized a follow-up meeting on January 6th at 4 pm in E501, and we look forward to identifying the most promising clinical trial concepts for cancer center investment and rapid activation.
I hope everybody is surviving the holidays so far. I am off again, this time to San Diego for the yearly Antibody Engineering meetings sponsored by the Antibody Society. I am looking forward to the excellent science and to giving a talk about work going on in the lab. While it will be nice to enjoy the wonderful San Diego weather, it is even nicer to stay connected to science. It keeps me centered as I grapple with the day to day challenges (most of them are actually very interesting!) of running a Cancer Center.
Yesterday, I attended a very interesting meeting of the CCSG program formerly known as MTDT (no, we are not renaming it Purple Rain), organized by Mike Pishvaian. The objective was to identify new and exciting clinical trial concepts that would rapidly emanate from science being done at Lombardi, with support provided by me. Despite all of Mike’s efforts, the turnout was relatively sparse, though the discussions were vibrant and interesting. Those of us who attended got to have their ideas discussed and used as bases for a whole new generation of exciting clinical trials. Folks who chose not to attend really missed the boat on this opportunity!
Greetings from Miami, where I am attending the AACR Tumor Immunology Conference. The high today was 75 degrees. Cuban coffee is wonderful.
I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving as we head into the full force of the holiday season. As you do your holiday shopping, please remember to check out shopforcancercures.org, which is a fundraising initiative of the Cancer Research Alliance; a portion of sales through that organization goes to the 11 member institutions (including Lombardi).
Things are very busy as we prepare for the meeting of the Committee on Medical Center Affairs (COMCA) of the Board of the Directors. I always look forward to the opportunity to share my vision and excitement about the cancer center, and the Board has proven to share in that enthusiasm.
I hope everyone stays warm (I guess I’ll miss Miami when I return to DC tomorrow).
I hope everybody found our recent Town Hall to be informative and useful. I know that I find it very valuable for all of us to get together for these types of updates. And you can be assured that we will continue to have these Town Halls as long as people are interested to hear what we have to say.
Everyone heard a lot about what’s happening at the Town Hall meeting, so I don’t have a lot of new information to share with you.
I did have a nice meeting with the Gala chairs last Monday as we start planning for next year’s Gala. While the event planning is obviously at its earliest stages, we are committed to bring it back – freshly updated – and continuing to be the premier celebration of the accomplishments and mission of Lombardi.
Below you will find a guest post from Maria Laura Avantaggiati, which is in part a response to one of my recent posts. Have a great week.
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Dr. Maria Laura Avantaggiati
I am personally pleased that Obama won this election, and several editorials on Nature have outlined his positions on novel initiatives that he plans to undertake. One of them includes the reinstatement of the appointment of a science advisor who reports directly to the President, and apparently Dr. Varmus has been playing a somewhat equivalent role during his presidential campaign. Therefore, we can anticipate that his choices for this position, as well as for the NIH and NCI directors, will be in a category of people who are in touch with the scientific community.
On the other hand, Obama’s proposals and projections to redouble NIH funding will have to deal with the challenges of this economy of the next two years. I am also certain that within the budget for science, the first priority will be on development of alternative energy. Thus, we may not see a real impact on grant success rates for quite awhile.
There are additional concerns that I would like to share, and that are independent of the NIH budget. While I do not entirely disagree with all the changes that the Zherouni’ administration has introduced in the NIH grant programs, there will be negative tails from his policy. Zherouni and Scarpa have reshaped the grant review process, and starting next year the size of RO1s will be similar to that of R21s. It can be anticipated that this will favor large laboratories with a higher track record of publications. While a few years back we could get an RO1 on great ideas and work that was not yet published, this will be highly unlikely, if not impossible, in the years to come.
This is worrisome, especially when we think about the explosion of resources and technology that comes from the biotech companies. Certain companies such as Origene, Genescript and others have expression vectors-, antibodies- and siRNA- ready for thousands of the human and mouse ORFs. At the cost of 30K (not so unreasonable after all!) Taconics offers transgenic or knockout mice strains for 20,000+ genes, many of which have not been published yet, and for which preliminary information about the phenotype (whether embryonic lethal or not), is already known.
Today, if we are working on a new gene and have thousands of dollars to spend, in a few weeks we could have cDNAs, antibodies, siRNAs and a mouse model that could make our science really competitive in time. And time is at the essence of our work. This again will give an advantage to large laboratories. Without the thousands, we are back to the standard, old fashion, time consuming, laboratory techniques.
When we look at papers that are published on high impact journals, and RO1 grants the get funded in study sections, it is really the techniques and the resources that the laboratories employ that make the difference. The difference is between being able to ask questions at a mechanistic level, or simply describe a phenomenon.
So, how can we remain competitive, and keep up with the fast pace at which science is moving in a period of financial constraints? Obviously there is no easy solution, One of the initiatives that I thought about, and I discussed individually with some of our collegues, is to programmatically (and Departmentally) invest money in purchasing key, cutting edge reagents that could serve the purpose of advancing projects with potential for PO1s applications, which could act as research catalysts for multiple investigators. We could programmatically invest in salary support for key personnel as well, such as one technician or one post-doctoral fellow who could work on the development of such projects. This could be done in a competitive fashion, with intra-departmental grant applications. Similarly to what is being done with IRG grants, except with a more sizeable budget, and by keeping applications within the Lombardi Cancer Center.
May be it is a surrealistic proposal. Is this something that Dr. Weiner and other colleagues would find reasonable and feasible?
Sorry I missed you last week, but I was a little busy. We had an opportunity to host a delegation from the largest hospital in China last week. The Chinese PLA 301 General Hospital – also known as Hospital 301 – is, I am told, the Chinese equivalent of a hybrid of Massachusetts General Hospital and Walter Reed Hospital. The chairman of the Chinese Traditional Medicine Department presented his work on using traditional medicines to limit radiation therapy-related injury to the lung, and several Lombardi investigators described our work in drug discovery and establishing G-DOC. There’s strong interest from both sides in continuing to explore collaboration opportunities.
It was also very interesting to be a guest for dinner at the Chinese Embassy where I learned the elaborate rituals for drinking shots of a traditional liquor called Maotai. I lost count after the 7th toast, but our hosts seemed to have a very good time.
However, the true highlight of the week for me occurred on Wednesday. I was in Philadelphia for a cancer center site visit and the baseball gods decreed that my beloved Phillies should win the World Series while I was in town. I got to join a horde of surprisingly well-behaved Philadelphians in an impromptu victory parade that lasted well into the night. Hence, the absence of a blog last week…
Like many of you, I was up far too late on election night this week. It’s hard to know how the changes in the administration and Congress will affect the work we do here at Lombardi. However, President-Elect Obama has previously indicated a desire to double the NCI budget in 5 years. I don’t have to tell you how I would feel if he and Congress are able to deliver on that particular promise.
Harriet and I are wondering whether we should watch the inaugural parade in person, from our home, or if we should get out of town. We’ll probably hang around because it should be quite a remarkable occasion.
And while I can’t promise that next week’s Town Hall meeting will be as remarkable as a Presidential Inauguration, I do hope to see you all there.
Congratulations to Suzanne O’Neill, Tapas Saha, Rebecca Riggins and Tushar Deb for successfully competing for our institutional American Cancer Society Young Investigator Awards. Suzanne’s project is entitled, “Breast Cancer Patients’ Experience with Risk for Recurrence Testing.” Tapas will study the role of chaperone-mediated autophagy in breast cancer. Rebecca is studying how exposure to BPA induces Tamoxifen resistance in ER-positive breast cancer, and Tushar is investigating the mechanism of Pnck-induced tumorigenesis in HER2 amplified human breast cancer.
Many of you may remember our very interesting and successful ACS symposium last month, where the talented young investigators who received last year’s awards presented their work to an audience that included representatives from ACS. I look forward to hearing presentations about these projects next year.
The GUMC strategic planning process is well under way, and I am helping to lead the Systems Biomedicine design team. It has been a pleasure to get to know Mark Smith from the Washington Hospital Center, who has designed what may be the leading medical informatics system that is available. Along those lines, we’ll be hosting a Chinese delegation next week hoping to engage them in collaborations around G-DOC and our drug discovery efforts.
Yesterday, Curt Harris, from the NCI gave a terrific Department of Medicine Grand Rounds discussing his approaches to analyzing polymorphisms and microRNA expression profiles to define cancer risk, prognosis and predictive value. Like many of us, he views the analysis of multiple parameters as being necessary to make sense of all the complex information that is being generated.
