Author: Dr. Louis M. Weiner

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Clinic Events

Congratulations to Lucile Adams-Campbell

I have the distinct pleasure of announcing that Lucile Adams-Campbell has been elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (read the press release). This is a remarkable achievement. I am sure you’ll join me in congratulating Lucile. As you know, Lucile recently joined us, and this external recognition further reinforces my delight in having her at Lombardi. Stay tuned for news about a special reception to recognize her achievement.

Dr. Potter with his portrait.
Dr. Potter with his portrait.

I really enjoyed last Friday’s lecture and reception honoring Dr. John Potter. I know the recognition of his founding contributions meant a lot to him. If you haven’t seen his portrait, check it out by the elevators in the Lombardi lobby.

Thursday is a big day for me, as I finally start seeing patients again. I’ll only have one half-day of clinic per week, but I can assure you that patient care is very important to me, and I am convinced that the humbling responsibility that comes with the territory inspires me and lends added urgency to my research and my research ambitions for Lombardi. What we all do really matters.

Finally, plans for submitting our competitive CCSG renewal are humming along. We have received first drafts for all the programs and cores, and now the hard work of reviewing the write-ups (I will be ably assisted by a small army of internal reviewers) has begun. After one round of revisions, the write-ups will go out to our ESAC for their review and comments.

That’s all for this week.

Categories
Education Events Research

Celebrating Lombardi’s Past, Present & Future

One of the most remarkable features of Lombardi is that our total funding for research actually rose over the past six years, despite the end of the NCI doubling in 2003. This certainly reflects the excellence of our investigators, as we all compete in much deeper and more treacherous funding waters than in the past. So, I am delighted to report that we continue to compete very successfully. For example, our T32 grant, which supports many of our most important educational programs, fared extremely well in review, and will be highly competitive for a favorable funding decision. Congratulations and thanks to Anna Riegel for taking the lead on this very important initiative.

I spent Monday and Tuesday in Chicago, at the AACI meeting, with other Cancer Center Directors. One session focused on the importance of creating tissue banks, and developing high-quality methods for accessing, processing and distributing tissue specimens. We are fortunate to have developed a powerful collaboration with Indivumed to facilitate these activities; needless to say, this will be a fundamental backbone of efforts to create integrated clinical and molecular cancer databases. John Niederhuber, the Director of the NCI, gave a very thoughtful address, and was mercifully spared the onerous task of defending federal funding decisions regarding the NCI budget during the question and answer period.

Speaking of Dr. Niederhuber, I hope everyone will attend the inaugural John F. Potter, MD, Distinguished Lecture, which will be held at 4 pm today in the Gorman Building auditorium. We are honored by Dr. Niederhuber’s presentation of his lecture, but it is important to recognize that he in turn joins us in honoring Dr. John Potter, who is the founding director of the Lombardi Cancer Center. Dr. Potter was on the team of doctors that cared for Vince Lombardi, and occupies a special place in the history of Georgetown University and the Medical Center for having recognized, advocated and developed the Cancer Center. We are all here today because Dr. Potter had the vision and energy to make cancer research and cancer care a priority at Georgetown. To commemorate Dr. Potter’s accomplishments, a reception will follow his comments and Dr. Niederhuber’s presentation, with a rededication of his portrait, which currently hangs in the Martin Marietta conference room, to a more prominent location in the Atrium of the Lombardi building. I do hope you can join us for this memorable event.

Categories
Clinic Events

Hope on Wheels

On Wednesday, Lombardi hosted the now annual Hyundai Hope on Wheels Event. This year, Aziza Shad’s pediatric survivorship program received a $40,000 check from the Washington area Hyundai dealers, bringing their contributions to more than $200,000 over the past five years. The touching handprint ceremony celebrates the achievements of our pediatric team and the brave patients we serve. In recognition of the event, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty proclaimed Wednesday, September 24th, 2008, the official Hope on Wheels Day for the District of Columbia.

Hope on Wheels
Hope on Wheels

On that note, I hope that many of you have had a chance to meet Joe Teague, who is spearheading Lombardi’s Advancement efforts. Joe is working hard to identify and expand our donor base, and we are putting together case statements for our high priority initiatives. You’ll hear more about them in the near future. We are fortunate to have unified and powerful support for our fundraising efforts from all of the important stakeholders at Georgetown. We need to be patient, since it will take time to create and benefit from having a real fundraising engine, but I am very optimistic.

For next week, please mark your calendars to attend the Fisher Center’s first annual lecture coming up on Thursday. The speaker, Dr. Steven Narod, was named the most highly cited scientist in the world in the field of breast cancer.

Finally, I spent time in the Lombardi clinic yesterday so John Deeken could show me the ropes. My first day seeing patients is in the middle of next month. While I’ll have to keep my practice small, I really look forward to getting back to patient care; I am always inspired by my patients, and reminded that cancer research should always be conducted with the knowledge that people depend on us to help them. We have lots of work to do!

Categories
Events Research

My Blue Suede Shoes

 

I’m glad to be back at work, though my schedule has been pretty hectic this week.

My blue suede shoes
My blue suede shoes

In my last post, I neglected to mention the fabulous Doo Wop Concert for Cancer, held at the Warner Theater on October 6. Thanks to the fabulous efforts of the organizing committee the theater was full, and everyone seemed to have a great time (special kudos to Paul Schweitzer and Jack Schneider, and to Elena Jeannotte for carrying on the great work started by Bonnie Roberts). I do not know what I will do with the blue suede shoes I purchased for the occasion, though I am open to suggestions. We raised a lot of money for Lombardi programs, and I hope we will have similar events in future years. And, don’t forget that the Gala will be back next year!

For those of you who did not attend, we had a very nice reception yesterday in the E501 conference room to congratulate Chip Albanese, Rabindra Roy, Offie Soldin, and Ken Tercyak on their promotions. Expect this to become a Lombardi tradition. It was also great to see Arnie Potosky and Subha Madhaven at the reception, so I could informally welcome them too, as new members of our faculty.

I was at the Georgetown University Board of Directors meeting on Thursday morning, and as always, came away impressed by the commitment of the Board to the success of Lombardi.

Finally, I really enjoyed Jeff Toretsky’s research presentation this week. It is always fun to witness the early development of exciting translational research initiatives, though I was disappointed that Jeff did not bring his clarinet to play a tune appropriate for the occasion.

Categories
Research

Afternoon Tea

Greetings from Colorado. I’ve tried to not think too much about work, but I am really ready to dive back into action.

Lucile Adams-Campbell reminded me of a wonderful tradition she remembered from when she spent time at Fox Chase Cancer Center. Every afternoon there is an informal “tea” where people get together and socialize or talk about their science. It made me wonder if we should start our own tradition where we can all get together as our schedules permit. Any comments?

See you all on Monday!

Categories
Administration

Doo Wop, but no Blues!

I hope everyone had a great labor day weekend, and is ready for the opening of the academic year, which will be a very productive and exciting time for Lombardi. I’ve returned from my vacation refreshed and ready for action. While it was rather sedentary (since Harriet’s ankle is in a cast), we enjoyed the beauty at the shore and the chance to be with our family.

After a travel day on Tuesday, I had the privelege of participating in the Committee on Medical Center Affairs (COMCA) at the Wye River Retreat where Clinton, Arafat, and Nethanyahu met for one of their meetings. While the topics at COMCA were not nearly so momentous, I was gratified by the strong, consistent, and public support for Lombardi and our vision for the future from Jack DeGioia, Tim O’Neill, the new chair of the committee who also chaired the search committee that led to my recruitment, and from Howard Federoff. Having this consistency of vision can only be useful to us as we move forward.

I’m also really excited about the Doo Wop Concert this Saturday. I’m told we’ll have 1500 attendees and we expect to raise a lot of money, awareness, and good will for the cancer center. Along with the other organizers of the event, I’ve been forced to don attire appropriate to the era – a white dinner jacket with a blue lapel handkerchief – leading to the effect of Frank Sinatra in blue jeans. I also purchased a special accessory for the evening, and all those who attend the concert will be both bemused and horrified by what they see.

The other big event coming up in the next week is the Georgetown University Medical Center Convocation (thanks for the reminder, Susette!). I’m sorry I won’t be able to be there – I will be traveling yet again. I think this will be a really special event that will become a GUMC tradition. I expect it to be interesting and inspiring, and I encourage you to be a part of it.

Categories
Outreach Research

Greetings from Long Beach Island

Well, I hope I’m having a good time on vacation. I actually posted this before I left so I wouldn’t eat into my two hour email allowance.

Although I think the programs have already announced this, I want to make sure that everyone knows we have three terrific recruits starting in the next month or so.

First, Lucile Adams-Campbell, the Director of the Howard University Cancer Center, is joining us to be the Associate Director for Minority Health and Health Disparities Research. Lucile is an internationally-recognized epidemiologist with particular expertise in nutrition and physical activity, as well as fostering health disparity research and conducting community health interventions and outreach. Lucile will be a vibrant member of the CGE Program, and her years of experience and important leadership role in the DC cancer community will add a special dimension to our leadership team.

Subha Madhavan joins us on October 1st from NCI where she has played a major role in the organization and execution of the caBIG enterprise. Her recruitment allows us to move forward with the design and implementation of the G-DOC concept. So we’re very excited to have her joining us.

On a related note, you may have seen the press release regarding our collaboration with Indivumed for patient sample acquisition, processing, and data entry. These two developments put us in an excellent position to move forward with our plans to create an integrated clinical molecular database for selected cancers.

And last, but certainly not least, Arnie Potosky joins us from the NCI. He is an internationally-recognized health services researcher who will be the Director of Heath Services Research within the Cancer Control Program. In this role, Arnie will lead a national caliber health services research program at Lombardi that builds on the wornderful foundation established by Jeanne Mandelblatt and colleagues. I’m delighted we are able to add someone of his distinction to our faculty and look forward to his active interaction with our clinical providers and with researchers across the spectrum of Lombardi activities.

I am out of town and therefore can’t comment on this week’s faculty seminar. Sorry Rebecca. But maybe there is a brave soul who can post something to the comments.

See you in September! (Does anybody remember that song?)

Categories
Research

The CCSG director’s overview

While my wife Harriet recovers from a broken ankle, I’ve had a bit of extra time to work on projects at home. So I’ve begun working on the director’s overview portion of the CCSG competitive renewal. While I’m at an extraordinarily early stage of working through that section, it’s already clear to me that the Lombardi not only survived, but in fact thrived over the past six years, due in large part to the great people that work here. For example, our total funding grew from about $70 million in 2002 to roughly $100 million by early this year. While our very solid foundation of excellence won’t make it any easier to write the competitive renewal (it is an awful lot of work, as you know), we will have great stories to tell the reviewers.

I really enjoyed this week’s Faculty Research Seminar by Chris Loffredo. (I guess the weekly seminars will be a theme in my blog posts.) He spoke about gender differences in bladder cancer, and I thought it was remarkable to see the broad range of disciplines that are represented at Lombardi. I was particularly struck by his openness to and interest in developing collaborations across disciplinary boundaries. I guess I’m also a little jealous of him because he gets to deal with a completely different type of red tape when doing his studies than the rest of us have to deal with here in DC.

The other thing that I wanted to share is that I’ll be on vacation next week with my family in Long Beach Island and I promised that I would spend no more than two hours each day on email. So I hope everybody will be kind in my absence and keep your emails down to a torrent.

Categories
Research

An exciting proposal

I received a very exciting grant proposal this week from Khaled El-Shami, one of our newest faculty members. Khaled is a hematologist/oncologist who joined the Lombardi clinic on July 1st, after finishing his fellowship at Hopkins.

He sent me a draft of a grant he’s writing on understanding the immune response to acute myeloid leukemia. The question he asks is whether activated T-cell infiltrates in the bone marrow of AML patients are associated with improved outcomes. Such associations have been found in several solid tumors, but have not been studied in hematological malignancies.

I was impressed by both his enthusiasm for the study and the excellence of his proposal. I encourage anyone who is interested in learning more about this project to contact Khaled (email elshamik@georgetown.edu). It’s a great example of the translational research going on at Lombardi.

I also wanted to briefly mention how impressed I am that people have continued to attend the Wednesday seminars, even in the middle of August when it seems like everyone is on vacation (Although, I was pleased that turnout was a little lighter than usual so I got to eat an extra piece of pizza!). I really enjoyed Chip Albanese’s presentation, and I was particularly struck by the new imaging tools that he has incorporated into his research. I hope others are finding these seminars useful as well.

Categories
Weekly post

Welcome to my blog

I wanted to find a way to keep in touch with all of the faculty, staff, and students of the Lombardi Center without clogging your inboxes with too many emails. This blog gives me a chance to keep you up to date with the issues I’m wrestling with, and I hope you’ll let me know what you think as well.

We will continue to send important announcements out via email, but my thoughts on the news and direction of the cancer center will stay right here.