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