Category: Research

Categories
Events Research

Learning the meaning of petaflops

I began my training this morning for the Avon Walk by taking 1 hour walk before the sun rose. My goal is to put in a minimum of 10 hours per week walking and increasing it as we get closer to the walk on May 1st and 2nd. I was delighted to receive Jeanne Mandelblatt’s email yesterday informing us that the Lombardi team is now up to 23 walkers. This is one more than we had last year and there’s still time for the team to grow. Since we’d like to raise significantly more money than we did last year, I think it would be great to increase the number of walkers to 40 or 50. So there’s still time to sign up!

I had an interesting vist to Oak Ridge National Laboratories on Wednesday. As many of you know, Georgetown University has a memorandum of understanding with ORNL related to systems bio-medicine. Several Lombardi faculty have collaborative research activities with ORNL colleagues funded through this collaboration. I was there this week to discuss opportunities for deepening collaborative ties with ORNL with an emphasis on systems bio-medicine as it relates to cancer in general, and on the G-DOC. It was a busy day of meetings so I didn’t get to do much touring of the facility, which contain some historically significant buildings and pieces of equipment – including one of the first atomic reactors. ORNL is also home to the largest and third largest computers in the world. The largest one, called Jaguar, has 2.3 “petaflops” of processing power, which means it can make 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second. As far as I can tell, it is created by placing 10,000 dual-processor laptops in parallel. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the task, it requires 2 gigawatts of power per year just to keep the machine cool and an additional 7 megawatts per year to supply power to the equipment. They plan to increase the capacity of their computer another hundred- to thousand-fold over the next decade. It it sounds as though they may need a nuclear plant to provide sufficient power for the equipment.

Interesting factoids aside, ORNL possesses exceptional high-performance computing capabilities. It will be interesting and potentially very valuable to identify ways we can collaborate with them to analyze increasingly complex data sets, such as integrated clinical and molecular databases of cancer.

Categories
Events Outreach Research

Walking the Avon Walk

I was so delighted to be a part of Wednesdays “Fighting a Smarter War on Cancer” Symposium at the Leavey Center. This symposium reflected the challenge of the Ruesch Center to cure, and not just treat gastrointestinal cancers, John Marshall assembled a terrific lineup of speakers who really did a great job of speaking to a diverse audience. Many of these speakers were from Lombardi, and really demonstrated the depth and originality of the work being done here. I must say that I was very proud of our Cancer Center. I also was, as always, captivated by John, who was the sensational emcee’ of the event. Imagine seeing “Donohue” live in the studio (I guess I am dating myself), infused with a passion for a most worthy cause. It was a great day.

When I got done with clinic yesterday, I turned my attention to the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, which will be held on May 1st and 2nd. As you know, Lombardi has a growing team of walkers, and I officially joined the team today. I invite everyone who wants to help us support this fabulous event to do so by joining our team. If you can, walk with us. If you can’t walk, cheer for the walkers. And, of course, feel free to support the team with a donation. Together, we can make a difference via our advocacy to have a huge impact on addressing breast cancer health disparities through our Avon Foundation-supported Capital Breast Care Center. We have great ambitions for this year’s walk. I will begin training as soon as the snowpack has receded, and predict that there will be many long walks in my future!

Categories
Clinic Research

Living in a Snow Globe

So, I’ll bet lots of us are itching to get back to work! I have managed to make it in every day this week except yesterday, when it just was not worth the risk and the roads were, for a while, especially impassable. I am in clinic right now, seeing a couple of new and few follow up patients. Hopefully we’ll be fully operational by Friday.

Unfortunately, tomorrow’s Grand Rounds with Michael Kastan has been postponed due to travel woes; it’s a real shame because he is really one of the most thoughtful and insightful leaders in our field. Hopefully, we’ll get him rescheduled fairly soon.

As much fun as it has been to shovel, shiver, slip and slide over the past week, I expect that next week will be a real challenge as I (and everyone else) catch up on missed meetings. For example, I have been waiting on some potentially exciting results from a siRNA library screen against pancreatic cancer cells in the lab, but I guess I’ll just have to hold my breath a little bit longer…

Be safe, and remember – pitchers and catchers report in a few weeks.

Categories
Events Research

Fighting breast cancer – in the lab and on the walking trail

Greetings from the “Breast Cancer Think Tank 20,” which is co-organized by former Lombardi Director Marc Lippman. There are many other former Lombardi people here, including Vered Stearns, Dan Hayes, Jimmy Rae, Shaomeng Wang and Doug Yee. All of them view Lombardi with great affection, and it is good to know that over the years we have generated so many wonderful sparks that have ignited important research at many distinguished institutions. And, we are well-represented at the meeting by an equally distinguished group of current Lombardi faculty, so we must be doing something right. I must say that this is one of the very best meetings I have attended in many years. It has the feeling of a Gordon Conference, but with an amazing amount of world-class give-and-take with every presentation. Naturally, when I spoke I stayed away from the talons of the ER signaling mavens and tried to convince the audience that the answer to breast cancer is in the field of immunology. Perhaps I am a little biased? However, I have come away with a bunch of new ideas for experiments, and that is always a sign of a good meeting.

It’s time for me to sign up for this year’s Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. Yes, I am walking this year! I look forward to being a part of the Lombardi team, and hope that this commitment will stimulate an even higher level of support for our efforts to raise money for this wonderful cause. Last year, our Lombardi team raised over $48,000 and our successful fundraising, large team of walkers and supportive cheering section let everyone at the event know that Lombardi is clearly on the move. As you know, our very own Capital Breast Care Center has benefited greatly from Avon’s support and this is a wonderful (if blister-inducing) way for me to do my part for the cause. I think I’ll need some great walking shoes, so if anybody has a favorite brand, please let me know.

Categories
Events Outreach Research

Learning more about informatics than I thought possible

Since this is my first blog of the year, I’d like to wish everybody a happy and healthy new year. I believe this will be a productive and highly successful new year. I hope everybody enjoyed the University-wide break during the week between Christmas and New Year and had a chance to spend the holidays with their families. Harriet and I had the unusual chance to be together with all of our grown children during that week and it was especially sweet. However, my son-in-law developed a brief but serious case of food poisoning that sent me in search of an all night pharmacy. Fortunately, I found one.

Thank you to Drs. Pishvaian, Dawson, Harter, Liu, Isaacs, Kessler, Cocilovo, Liang, Bright-Gbebry, Nancy Morgan and Jennifer Sween for generously giving up time this past weekend to participate in Lombardi’s booth at the NBC4 Health Expo (January 15th & 16th at the Washington Convention Center). As many of you know, Giant Foods invited Lombardi to be a part of their pavilion at the Health Expo, and we are excited by this opportunity to continue to reach out to the community in a number of ways to both do good and do well. Thank you to all of you who stopped by our booth to say hi.

One of the highlights of my week last week was a day-long meeting of a group that focuses on the signaling and bioinformatics of breast cancer. The meeting was organized by Bob Clarke and was held here in the E501 Conference Room and included a number of Lombardi scientists, two researchers from Fox Chase, and a group from the Virginia Tech Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. We identified a number of exciting collaborative directions and I learned more about informatics than I thought was possible.

Finally, I hope everybody will make time on their calendars to attend the first event sponsored by the Ruesch Center. John Marshall has poured his heart and soul into putting together a symposium on February 17th titled, “Fighting a Smarter War Against Cancer: Personalized Medicine & the Cure for Cancer.” John has put together a wonderful program which includes a handful of Lombardi scientists and a several high profile speakers from the cancer world. Mace Rothenberg the Senior Vice President of Pfizer Oncology will be giving the Thomas R. Schafer Memorial Lecture on the topic of “From Bench to Bedside to Pfizer.”

Categories
CCSG Education Events Research

A Busy Week Before Heading to Seoul

I’ll be at Dankook University in South Korea as of November 11, doing some teaching and exploring collaborative opportunities, and I will spend a day or two at Seoul National University as well, giving a talk and meeting additional cancer research experts there. Hopefully, they’ll let me on the plane; those of you who have heard me speak in the last few days must have been looking around for the frog that invaded my larynx.

I have not yet received any news about our CCSG evaluation, but we should be hearing fairly soon. Frankly, I’ve been too busy to worry much about it. This week was highlighted by a busy clinic on Wednesday. I gave Department of Medicine Grand Rounds on Thursday morning (though my voice rarely rose above a hoarse whisper). I then spent some time in Vienna, VA at the NCI Translational Meeting, and then returned to meet with Dr. Eyran Halpern, who is in charge of the Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva, Israel, and was here to explore collaborative opportunities. Since he also oversees that largest HMO in Israel (with over 3 million covered lives), there are interesting opportunities to consider, such as those in Health Services Research (are you reading this Arnie Potosky?). This morning I returned to the NCI meeting to co-chair a session on antibody-based cancer immunotherapy. I returned in time to hear Cheryl Lyn Walker’s very interesting Grand Rounds presentation, and had some time to catch up on calls and paperwork.

I am looking forward to Saturday night’s Lombardi Gala, which has already been quite successful, considering the challenging economic climate. This year’s theme is “Celebrate Lombardi”, and we will certainly do that!

If only I could have celebrated a Phillies victory in the World Series. I guess I’ll have to focus on the Eagles for now.

Categories
CCSG Events Research

Army generals and handprints

After a week of vacation and our Town Hall Meeting, I’m back to the blog.

As you know, we launched the new Lombardi website on July 1st. You can read about the changes we’ve made on the new Lombardi Magazine website. There are a number of improvements to the new site, but I want you to know that there is still more to come. The next projects under development by Mark Goetz and Allison Whitney are the capability to provide individual faculty with laboratory pages that they can update and an internal website to help Lombardi faculty and staff access the various resources at their disposal. We’d love to hear your comments on the site. Feel free to leave a note here, or email Mark or Allison.

Over the past two weeks we’ve also been in increasingly regular communication with NCI regarding the upcoming site visit. Things are on track as we proceed with our rehearsals for the presentations and the associated preparations. If you happen to run into Ellen McLaughlin or any members of her team please thank them for all that they’re doing in their work for the Cancer Center.

I was excited to meet with a representative from Springer, the publisher, on July 6th about an Encyclopedia of Cancer Therapeutic Targets. John Marshall will be the chief editor of the volume, and other editors include me, Anton Wellstein, our old friend Ed Gelmann, and Howard Kaufman at Mount Sinai Medical School. We’re going to be creating a novel and easy to use compendium of cancer-related molecular targets that can be used for quick reference, but with links to deeper annotation. This is an exciting project and I look forward to being involved in it.

On July 8th, a delegation of Lombardi faculty traveled to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center to meet with John Potter and his colleagues to discuss possible collaborations. We identified a number of areas of potential interest and we will be following up on many of these. In case anybody is ever dismayed by what they perceive to be excessive bureaucracy at Georgetown, we arrived at Walter Reed in 2 vehicles and after going through security (where my poor car was strip-searched) we proceeded to the parking spots which had been assigned to us. When we got there, we found that each of them was occupied by cars that were traveling with a general. Apparently generals get priority treatment in the army. So we circled Walter Reed for a half hour and I ended up doing the next logical thing – I parked in a Colonel’s spot. Despite the late start, the Lombardi delegation was intrigued by the remarkable clinical and laboratory resources available through collaboration with Walter Reed. But the next time I go, I’m either getting a taxi or hitching a ride with a general.

Best of all, yesterday morning I had the great pleasure of receiving a $40,000 check along with Aziza Shad and David Nelson from the Hyundai Hope on Wheels event. This is a terrific partnership between all of the Hyundai dealers in the country. At the event, children from the pediatric heme/onc clinic dipped their hands in paint and put their handprints on a new Santa Fe Hyundai, and the handprinted car tours the thirty different pediatric cancer centers that receive funds from Hope on Wheels. The check to Lombardi will go to fund the pediatric survivorship program run by Aziza.

Categories
Events Outreach Research

Addressing disparities in our city

I attended the DC Cancer Consortium Meeting at the Cosmos Club last Wednesday night where representatives from Georgetown, GW, Washington Hospital Center, Howard University, and the American Cancer Society met to discuss how to invest in strategies that will reduce cancer incidence, morbidity, and mortality in the District. For me, one of the highlights was seeing Arnie Potosky in action. I had invited him to discuss a proposal he’s putting together to establish a District of Columbia Cancer Outreach, Research, and Evaluation Database. It’s still under active discussion, but we’re hopeful that it or something like it will be adopted by the consortium. Steve Paterno also presented a very interesting proposal for a patient navigation network for the District. What pleases me about these initiatives is that they provide us with collaborative outlets for addressing disparities and health care access and care for our city.

Thursday morning I met with Lucile Adams-Campbell to get her thoughts about how we might coordinate obesity and cancer initiatives. We cam out with some exciting ways of connecting our science with the outreach and population intervention studies. These were echoed in a later meeting I had with Peter Shields.

After my meeting with Lucile about obesity, I then tried to increase the level of obesity at Lombardi by taking the CCSG team to lunch at the French Embassy. It was great to have a formal opportunity to thank them for a wonderful job and their hard work on getting the grant out the door.

I’m looking forward to attending the Gala Benefit Committee Reception tonight at the home of Darby and Monte Gingery, who are good friends of Tanya Potter Adler and Howard Adler who are this year’s Gala co-chairs. I will be joined by several of my Lombardi colleagues to thank the committee for all its hard work and provide continuing inspiration for our old and new friends who actively support the cancer center. By the way, you may want to check out the new website for the Lombardi Gala, which launches on Friday.

On Thursday, the Shared Resource Directors and Managers attended the first organizational meeting as we gear up to get the posters ready for the site visit. I was very gratified to see a member of nearly every Shared Resource in attendance, and I look forward to reviewing the poster drafts in the coming weeks.

I’m also looking forward to visiting Ohio State on Friday to present Grand Rounds there. I’m particularly interested in the opportunity to present some data from lab, which was just submitted yesterday for publication. It’s nice to know that I can continue to stay active in the laboratory and the clinic. It reminds me why I’m here and why it’s important to have cancer centers.

I won’t be here next week. I’m taking a week off and Harriet and I will be in an undisclosed and unfindable location. So don’t expect any blogs next week.

Categories
Research

Opportunities abound at ASCO

I finally felt as if I could take a deep breath. The CCSG was in, I had submitted (or participated in) three RC2 proposals, and I had submitted a non-competing administrative R01 supplement. And then I went to ASCO.

As you know ASCO has become a huge meeting, dwarfed only by the pharma-related meetings that surround it. In fact, many ASCO attendees struggle to even make it to the scientific sessions. According to a cab driver I spoke with, whenever ASCO is held, it is the busiest week of the year in Orlando (I repeat – in Orlando!). However, instead of feeling overwhelmed, I was struck by the amazing opportunities there are to make important contributions to the field of cancer research. So many clinical trials were presented, yet few would qualify as high-quality experiments in the eyes of a rigorous scientist. After all, we humans belong to an outbred species, possess free will, and object to incessant sampling of tumors and normal organs to help our doctors learn about new treatments. This is our field’s great challenge, and Lombardi’s opportunity to make a real difference is embedded in that challenge.

So, what is that opportunity? I believe that some answers will arise from the identification of new targets or pathways and the testing of new drugs and treatment strategies. However, we rarely know how to maximize therapy with existing drugs, even when those drugs target molecular drivers of the malignancies. For example, trastuzumab works as a single agent in only about a third of women with previously untreated HER2/neu overexpressing metastatic breast cancer. I believe that well designed clinical trials that rigorously examine pharmacodynamic endpoints can identify potentially responsive patients, and can yield molecular insights that drive research and improve patient care. There is no reason why the Lombardi scientific and clinical research community can’t assume a leadership role in this dynamic environment. Even though I have seen enough RC1 and RC2 grants to last me for quite some time, I look forward to helping Lombardi to address the “Grand Opportunity” and “Challenge” of revolutionizing clinical trial design, devising and implementing innovative biomarker analyses and integrating the information to drive future discoveries.

For those of you who would like to learn more about targeted therapies, the NCI has produced a web tutorial for health professionals called, “Understanding Targeted Therapies for Cancer.” You can access it on the NCI’s website.

Categories
CCSG Research

Clinical Trials and Clinical Endpoints

I hope everybody had a nice Memorial Day holiday. In case you were wondering the CCSG did get mailed out on Friday morning and the NCI did confirm receipt. Thanks again to Ellen, Stephanie, and the rest of the team who did such a wonderful job pulling together this truly massive enterprise.

I hope that everybody who is interested in the design of biomarker rich clinical trials was able to attend Thursday’s 3DT meeting chaired by Mike Pishvaian. It was an opportunity to hear about new clinical trial concepts and enrich their scientific content to increase their impact. Mike has done a great job organizing these meetings, which have resulted in the opening of several new clinical trials. Interestingly, our clinical trial accruals have improved over the past 6 months and I am convinced we can continue to make progress in this important aspect of our cancer center’s mission. I know I am doing my part because I have enrolled a few people in clinical trials over the past several weeks.

I was delighted to note the very nice turnout for the Wednesday seminar given by Sian Jones and Devin Dressman. The talks were both exhilarating (So much information!) and sobering (So much information!). Just imagine the impact of incorporating multiple databases and connecting the information to clinically relevant endpoints. It certainly will be fun and challenging to roll out G-DOC.