I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend. I had an interesting week, as usual. As many of you know, we are gearing up for the Lombardi Gala in November and I had the privilege of meeting with the Gala Corporate Executive Committee last Wednesday. I was inspired by the passion of our volunteers and especially want to thank our four co-chairs for this year’s event Marc DeLuca, Brian Katz, Barry Scher and Paul Schweitzer for donating their efforts; I am especially grateful to Paul for his continuing commitment to Lombardi. It also was great to see Howard Adler, one of last-year’s co-chairs, at the breakfast. As some of you know, the theme of this year’s Gala is “Color the Cure”, and it should prove to be a valuable and memorable theme as it is fully developed. Thanks to Allison Whitney for the inspiration that led to this theme.
Later in the week I received excellent feedback from my GI cancer colleagues as I prepare to deliver an oral presentation (a discussion on two abstracts related to cetuximab-based adjuvant chemotherapy for colorectal cancer) at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology meetings, which start this coming weekend. Because of this meeting I won’t be available to attend this Friday’s Grand Rounds in the Research Auditorium by Doug Hanahan, from UCSF. Dr. Hanahan is a true innovator in the field; his paper on the Hallmarks of Cancer [Cell. 2000 Jan 7;100(1):57-70], with Bob Weinberg, is one of the really seminal reviews of the past decade. I urge everyone to attend.
On Wednesday we have another very interesting seminar, which will be given by Skip Garner, the recently installed Director of the Virginia Tech Bioinformatics Institute. As many of you know, Lombardi and VBI have a number of collaborations through both Tony Dritschilo and Bob Clarke. Skip is very cancer-focused, and will be discussing a new technology he has developed that could be useful to many of us. The title of his talk is “Global Microsatellite Signatures Classify Cancers and Facilitate Biomarker Discovery”. Again, I urge everyone to attend what promises to be a very interesting presentation.
That’s all for now. Have a wonderful and productive week.