CCSG – Page 3 – From the Desk of Dr. Louis M. Weiner

Getting ready for spring

I don’t know about you, but knowing that Spring Training has started gives me some hope that Winter is finally winding down! It will feel good to walk around without needing a coat.

As always, this is a very busy time of the year. Last week, John Marshall and I had a very interesting conference call regarding a new vaccine that could be used in pancreatic cancer patients. This week, Khaled El Shami, Carolyn Hurley, and I are meeting with the NCI bone marrow transplant program people to further develop an exciting allogeneic natural killer cell infusion protocol for refractory myeloid leukemia patients. This collaboration truly represents an integrated clinical and laboratory research initiative with our NCI colleagues.

And, on Wednesday, Anton Wellstein showed me some really interesting data from the new Translational Laboratory headed by Narayan Shivapurkar, who joined us in January from the University of Texas, Southwestern, where he worked with John Minna. This laboratory plans to use multiplexed protein and phosphoprotein detection assays on a novel instrument, the Meso Scale Discovery Platform, and the data thus far indicate that a sensitive and fairly comprehensive analysis of key protein phosphorylation events can be monitored using small tissue samples. This tool should greatly expand our capacity to conduct correlative science in the context of clinical trials; if you have any questions, check with Anton or Narayan. Narayan is also developing microRNA expression assays; the very early returns are encouraging. Once the assays have been successfully developed, they too can serve to extend our clinical trial support repertoire. Needless to say, both the phosphorylation and microRNA technologies will prove to be valuable for all types of science that is done at Lombardi.

I’ve also had some interesting meetings in the last week. For example, I participated in a conference call with our Population Science focused External Scientific Advisory Committee (ESAC) on Monday, and received helpful suggestions and very positive feedback as we head into the homestretch for our CCSG submission. I’ll have more information about this at Wednesday’s Town Hall Meeting.

On that note, have a great rest of the week and please make sure to join us at the Lombardi Town Hall Meeting on Wednesday, March 4th.

Report from our External Scientific Advisory Committee

It’s been a busy past few weeks. Last Tuesday, as many of you know, our External Scientific Advisory Committee (ESAC) visited and conducted a remarkably thorough and helpful review of the cancer center. My thanks go out to everyone who prepared so hard to make this a successful and productive exercise. We received generally positive feedback along with specific suggestions that will improve the clarity of our upcoming core grant submission. Several of the ESAC members joined a few of us at the Rutgers game and got to see the only game that Georgetown has won in recent memory. We must bring the ESAC back soon!

I also had the pleasant opportunity to meet with the Lombardi Gala Corporate Committee to continue our planning for this year’s Gala. I’m really excited about resuming this wonderful tradition after a one year hiatus.

This week was highlighted by the University Board of Director’s meeting. As always, I was pleased to note the incredibly thoughtful and wise perspective of our board. I really mean that! And I’m very happy to have their unwavering support for the Lombardi and its mission.

Yesterday’s activities were enlivened by a trip to the NIH campus where Minetta Liu and I met with Jay Berzofsky and his colleagues to discuss collaboration around a novel vaccine concept for the treatment of HER2 positive breast cancer. I think we’ll have a lot of fun working with Jay and his colleagues, and we’ll be able to offer our patients cutting-edge options as well. The visit exemplified for me the potential for reaching out to local governmental and non-governmental entities to collaborate in areas of high scientific importance. As they say in real estate – location, location, location!

Now it’s time to get back to writing my section of the core grant renewal. Talk to you next week.

Update: Be sure to check out the comments we received on the logos. Thank you for your very thoughtful responses. We are taking all of the feedback into consideration as we move forward in collaboration with the University on our branding initiative.