Greetings on a beautiful and brisk Saturday. I had a very productive week, highlighted by our Faculty Meeting on Monday and attendance at the Festschrift honoring Larry Gostin, a leading global health expert at Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and a dear friend.
We’ve had some exciting results in the lab. After several years of trying, we were finally able to successfully introduce the fibroblast activation protein (FAP) gene into normal human donor natural killer cells. NK cells are notoriously difficult to transduce, but with the help of Miriam Jacobs (who studies NK cell biology and has significant relevant expertise) and Marwa Afifi (a recent addition to my lab), Rachael Maynard, who described her work at Thursday’s Cancer Research Data Meeting, was able to demonstrate that these FAP-transduced cells efficiently invade through matrix. This has important implications for developing cell therapies that can invade into solid tumor microenvironments.
So, work is good. But, if you are like me, you are on pins and needles about the upcoming election on November 5. Harriet and I have already voted, and I certainly hope you have or will vote as well if you are a citizen. The stakes could not be higher, and I won’t belabor the many factors that each voter will consider as they cast their ballots. In Zoom meetings with colleagues around the country, the conversations inevitably turn to the election as it pertains to biomedical research and medical care.
So much is at stake. In our corner of the world, cancer death rates have dropped remarkably over the past quarter century, and we are poised to accelerate that progress with continued investments into fundamental and applied cancer research. Cancer outcome disparities in the District of Columbia have narrowed as well, with the greatest improvements in Black males. This unprecedented progress is fragile, as it is endangered if the access of underserved patients to research-inspired cancer care is undermined in any way.
Let us hope that the election’s outcome, however it turns out, allows us to sustain that progress. People’s lives depend upon it.
Make the world a better place this week. Vote.
Lou
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