Tag: AACR

I’m looking forward to the upcoming AACR meeting at the Washington Convention Center Saturday through Wednesday. Like many of you, I plan to attend the meeting and Lombardi investigators are well-represented in posters and presentations. To make it easier to find your colleagues, a full list of oral and poster presentations and their locations and times is pasted at the end of this post. You can also view them in a Printable itinerary or Mobile itinerary.

I had a very interesting meeting with Dr. Reinhard Krepler who is the CEO of the Vienna General Hospital (AKH), which serves as Vienna’s university hospital. With 2141 beds, it is one of the largest hospitals in Europe. Dr. Krepler is interested in establishing a comprehensive cancer center along the lines of the US model and is touring various cancer centers here to understand how to proceed. Talking with him drove home the immense complexity and quality of comprehensive cancer centers (as if I didn’t know that from our CCSG!). Despite the remarkable patient population and general excellence of his hospital, it will likely take five to ten years of hard work for that hospital to emerge as a full-fledged comprehensive cancer center. It’s a sobering thought, but we can take pride in all that Lombardi has accomplished over the years. It’s easy to take our excellence for granted. Dr. Krepler’s visit was a useful reminder to the contrary.

Speaking of the CCSG, we’ve been asked by the NCI to provide the additional documentation related to our comprehensiveness review. This is a prelude to our notice of grant award, but nobody knows what the award amount will be.

Click through for a list of the AACR presentations.

Greetings from Denver where I am attending the annual AACR meeting. This is always busy – as I try to absorb as much new information as possible in between various organization-related meetings.

I was pleased that Lombardi’s profile was reflected by the publication of 25 abstracts. Many of you will remember that when I first arrived at Lombardi, I underscored my belief, which is still firmly held, that for Lombardi to be appreciated for its excellence, we have to share our work at major meetings like AACR and ASCO. While 25 abstracts makes a nice showing, let’s not forget that we have 106 full members, an additional 60 associate members, and many trainees. The AACR provides an excellent venue to share the exciting research we have going on here.

I’d like to congratulate two members of our community who received the recognition of “highly-rated abstract” for their research posters at AACR: Zhangzhi Hu, PhD, and Ramona Dumitrescu, PhD. You can view all of the coverage of Lombardi’s activities at AACR on the Lombardi Spotlight, including the opening ceremony video which featured three of our scientists, and a press conference moderated by Peter Shields.