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Georgetown Welcomes the Dalai Lama
GUMC and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine welcomed the Dalai Lama and other acclaimed speakers to “Mind & Life XIII: The Science and Clinical Applications of Meditation” on Nov. 8-10. The historic conference on meditation was sponsored by the Mind & Life Institute. The three-day conference explored, with leading scientific and contemplative thinkers, the links between science and meditation, and is only the second public dialogue on this topic with the Dalai Lama, Nobel Laureate and Tibetan spiritual leader. University President John J. DeGioia introduced the Dalai Lama during the opening session on November 8. “ The conference featured sessions on meditation-based clinical interventions: Science, practice, and implementation, possible biological substrates of meditation, clinical research on meditation and mental health, and clinical research on meditation and physical health. Highlighting GUMC's commitment to integrating complementary and alternative medicine into mainstream medical education and practice, Aviad Haramati, professor in the departments of physiology and biophysics and medicine in BGRO, and principal investigator of the educational initiative in complementary and integrative medicine at GU School of Medicine, participated in a press meeting with the Dalai Lama. Other participants included Richard Davidson, the William James and Vilas Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and director of the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Adam Engle, chairman and co-founder of the Mind & Life Institute. More than 70 GUMC faculty and students participated.
Lombardi Celebrates 'Miracles' at 20th Gala
The Lombardi Gala celebrated its 20th anniversary this month by raising more than $1 million -- all of which goes directly to Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center programs, research and services. Co-chaired by former Gov. and Mrs. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, the theme of the black-tie event was “Miracles.” The evening honored two of America’s best-known and most-decorated Olympians, Peggy Fleming and Dan Jansen. More than 1,200 guests attended the event at the Washington Hilton.
“It is so important that we find a cure for cancer,” Fleming said in her acceptance speech. “You have gathered such a wonderful team of people [at Lombardi] and you're doing such cutting-edge research and we are very, very impressed. The work that you are doing is incredible and we applaud you.”
The gala’s 460-item silent auction brought in more than $250,000, while live auction items raised $83,200 and included a Lexus luxury hybrid SUV and an Italian vacation for four in a 350-year old Tuscan villa. The gala also included a new opportunity for guests to make donations to Lombardi. For the first time, organizers placed pledge envelopes in the center of each table and collected more than $30,000 for the cancer center. Organizer Bonnie Roberts, director of donor relations and events at Lombardi, was also recognized for her 20-year involvement with the event, beginning in 1986 as a volunteer at the first gala.
Georgetown to Host Two caBIG Service Nodes
As the “world wide web of cancer research” hits its latest milestone, Georgetown is a crucial player in the caBIG project, an open-source, open-access information network that enables researchers to share tools, data, applications and technologies according to common standards. BGRO’s Protein Information Resource (PIR) in the department of biochemistry and Lombardi’s Microarray Data Services were selected as two of the reference implementations of the caGrid0.5, a significant development in the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) project. Georgetown’s resources were selected from more than 50 cancer centers, according to Cathy Wu (pictured), professor of biochemistry and molecular biology.
caBIG is a technological project that is expected to revolutionize the way that cancer research is conducted in the United States and around the globe. The PIR bioinformatics web server at Georgetown is already being used by more than 50,000 researchers worldwide with more than 3.5 million hits a month. The caBIG initiative will "allow PIR to seamlessly integrate with other cancer databases on the Internet and make Georgetown a central information node where the cancer research community can ask new exciting questions not possible before," said Wu. All caGrid materials and information can be found on the caGrid homepage at https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/workspaces/Architecture/caGrid/
NHS Discovery Center Moving Toward Completion
“Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.” This quote, from 1937 Nobel laureate in physiology and medicine Albert Szent-Gyorgi, sets the theme for the School of Nursing & Health Studies Discovery Center, a 3,000 square-foot area that will house an undergraduate teaching laboratory, faculty/student research laboratory, and a computational science center. The center will be managed by the department of human science and is expected to be ready for use for the Spring 2006 semester.
The center was identified by Dean Bette Keltner and her leadership team as the school’s most critical need and was adopted by the school’s parents’ council, which anticipates raising 100 percent of the cost of the project through gifts. Prior to the opening of the center, hands-on NHS laboratory experiences were more difficult due to a lack of lab teaching space; this need has grown as NHS enrollment has increased. Once completed the Discovery Center will contain labs: a research lab with tissue culture room and an imaging-microscopy room, and a teaching lab with instrument prep room. The renovation also includes upgrading the corridor and the mechanical, plumbing and electrical systems. All portions of the new facility will meet ADA standards.
Pestell To Step Down as Lombardi Director
Richard Pestell has accepted a leadership position at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia where, in addition to serving as its director, he will serve as associate dean of the medical college and vice president of oncology services at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. He will leave his position as director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center on Nov. 30. Pestell joined the GUMC community in 2002 after a distinguished career in academic medicine. While at GUMC, he has helped enhance the capacity “Lombardi’s research and education programs are strong, highly productive and extremely promising,” said interim EVP Stuart Bondurant. “I am deeply appreciative of Richard’s contributions during his time at Georgetown, and wish him the best in his new endeavors.” Bondurant expects to name an interim director shortly and will lead a national search to recruit a leader for Lombardi’s next phase of development.
Riesenhuber's Research Featured on GUMC Homepage
Max Riesenhuber wants to figure out how the brain makes sense of the world around it. In “Building a Better Model of the Brain,” the new cover story on the GUMC homepage, readers can learn about the science in the lab of this assistant professor of neuroscience in BGRO. Here’s how the story begins:
And although that sequence of events seems simple, there remains much that is not understood about how the brain accomplishes this task. Specifically, scientists are still uncertain how the brain recognizes objects in changing environments, such as when the same object is set against different backgrounds or in varying lighting. Finding answers to these questions is at the center of the research happening in neuroscientist Max Riesenhuber’s lab, where he’s building computational models of how the brain makes sense of the exterior world. His work focuses on the computational processes underlying perception and face recognition. “It’s a difficult task because the brain is so complicated. In vision, for example, we have millions of photoreceptors, and ultimately 46 different brain areas, that are activated every single time we look at an object,” says Riesenhuber, who is an assistant professor in the department of neuroscience, part of the Biomedical Graduate Research Organization (BGRO). “The system is so complex that we need a computational model in order to even know what kinds of questions to ask.” Click here to read the whole story.
From the Desk of...
Now that the Medical Center has made its first significant strides toward restructuring, the GUMC Update has invited interim EVP Stuart Bondurant to provide his perspective on upcoming institutional issues and highlights of faculty and staff activities. Clinical research is core to our mission as an academic medical center. Georgetown’s General Clinical Research Center, or GCRC, was created to make resources available to scientists for conducting clinical research. Funded by an NIH grant, this core facility helps bridge the gap between research and clinical care and enhances our ability to conduct cutting-edge clinical research across all areas of medicine. Projects such as this one highlight what we can achieve by working together across basic and clinical disciplines and by utilizing the full resources of the MedStar Health network. And we're continually strengthening and enhancing our capacity for clinical research. NIH recently has started an innovative new program -- built around the GCRC model -- that, in addition to providing clinical research funds, also will require that institutions grant degrees in clinical research and translational science. The Institutional Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs) program will promote the advancement of clinical and translational science in the GCRC model, but also will encourage development of novel methods and approaches to By pursuing the CTSA program under the leadership of BGRO Director Vassilios Papadopoulos and Professor and Chair of the department of
Stuart Bondurant, MD
Zheng Examines Lung Cancer in African Americans
Faulty cell cycle “checkpoints” that fail to respond to DNA damage effectively may contribute to a higher incidence of lung cancer in African Americans, say researchers at GUMC and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Their study, reported in the Oct. 15 issue of Cancer Research, is the first epidemiological study to show the association of lung cancer risk in African Americans and efficiency of the critical “G2/M checkpoint.” While the researchers report that this checkpoint was generally less effective in the group of African-American lung cancer patients they studied, they found this risk to be especially high in African-American women -- nearly a five-fold increase in lung cancer risk in women with faulty G2-M checkpoint compared to women with efficient G2-M checkpoint. The study did not found any association of this checkpoint with lung cancer risk in whites.
According to a 2002 report by the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER), the incidence of lung cancer in African-American men was 42 percent higher compared with the incidence in white men and the risk of lung cancer for African-American women was 13 percent higher. Click here to read the entire release.
Neuroscience Earns Multiple Training Grants
The National Institutes of Health has awarded four training grants with a neuroscience focus to GUMC faculty. The prestigious NIH training grants provide support for graduate and post-doctoral students in specified areas of biomedical research and help develop specialties within disciplines. Barbara Bayer, chair of the department of neuroscience, received a second five-year renewal of her grant that provides a stipend and tuition of four post-doctoral students for two years. The focus of Bayer’s grant is neurotoxicity in drug abuse. “These training grants are a sign of the strength and quality of our graduate program,” Bayer said. “They allow us to attract a higher caliber of students because they know there is money here for them.” The other training grants in the department of neuroscience went to professors Barbara Bregman (left) a Karen Gale, professor in the department of pharmacology, also received a grant for her work in the Interdisciplinary Program for Neuroscience, which trains doctoral students for independent research and teaching in neuroscience. This grant includes eight slots for predoctoral students.
Hope on Wheels Makes Stop at Lombardi
Pediatric cancer patients at Lombardi made another mark in their fight against the disease Oct. 20 by leaving their colorful handprints on a white Hyundai Sante Fe SUV that stopped at Georgetown as part of the national “Hope on Wheels” tour.
“We are truly honored to make this contribution and support such an important cause,” said Don Reilly, from Fairfax Hyundai. “Our dealers recognize the lifesaving work being done at The Children’s Cancer Foundation Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Clinic at Lombardi and are proud to join in their fight against childhood cancers. Through all the patients and families joining in this event we can also help celebrate their treatment milestones.” Patients and their families were joined at the event by Aziza Shad, director of pediatric hematology/oncology; Shirley Howard, president of The Children’s Cancer Foundation; and Washington-area Hyundai dealers.
Lucey Helps Prepare for Avian Flu Outbreak
Daniel Lucey, adjunct professor in department of microbiology and immunology, is one of the authors of a study that makes the case that a traffic safety model can help authorities prepare for an avian flu outbreak.
“If the current H5N1 avian influenza virus changes such that it does trigger a human flu pandemic within the next 12 months, then we will be significantly underprepared in terms of antiviral drugs, a protective vaccine and sufficient respiratory masks,” said Lucey. “We should be organizing community-wide preparedness plans for a human flu pandemic, building on the overlap with bioterrorism preparedness planning across the United States.”
Lombardi, UDC Partnership Earns NIH Grant
Lombardi teamed up last year with the University of the District of Columbia to offer a master’s degree in cancer biology, prevention and control. The program recently received a grant from the National Institutes of Health -- the first peer-reviewed independent funding the program has received and a demonstration of how the partnership between the two universities has grown since the program began in 2004.
UDC is the only university in the greater Washington metropolitan area to offer a master’s degree in this specialty and the first to be affiliated with the only comprehensive cancer center in the nation’s capital.
Two tools developed by Natarajan Ganesan, research assistant professor in the department of surgery, were recently featured in Science magazine’s NetWatch section. The tools allow researchers to analyze DNA and protein sequences more easily than before. Previously, search results from the NIH database BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) did not provide direct, simple access to analysis tools, making it difficult to navigate smoothly between searches and often causing users to open numerous web browsers and lose track of previous searches. Ganesan's SEQUEROME addresses these problems by bringing everything together in a single interface. It is designed to perform the entire analysis on one web page while recording the user’s previous steps.
“We want our colleagues at GUMC to be aware of these bioinformatics tools and the help they can offer in profiling different sequences in their research,” he said. You can find these tools at http://sequerome.georgetown.edu/sequerome/ and bioinformatics.georgetown.edu/InstaSeq.htm.
Association Provides Resources for Post-Docs
The Georgetown University Post-Doctoral Association (GUPDA) was established to help create, nourish and sustain an academic community and identity for post-doctoral scholars at Georgetown. The association helps post-docs take advantage of the resources available to provide support and assistance in their work. All scholars with a doctorate degree who do not currently hold a permanent full-time faculty position at Georgetown are eligible to be members of GUPDA. GUPDA provides new employees with orientation information, helps post-docs who are foreign nationals with transition to living and working in United States, organizes educational activities including the monthly career development seminar series, and provides a forum to address concerns and ideas for the interest of post-doctoral fellows at Georgetown. GUPDA also provides an opportunity for Georgetown University and the postdoctoral community to connect with other organizations and entities, including other institutions’ and national postdoctoral associations. GUPDA recently elected Junaid Abdulghani, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of oncology, to serve as chair. Click here for more information on GUPDA.
UNC Med School Building Named for Bondurant
The name of interim EVP Stuart Bondurant will be on a major addition to the University of North Carolina School of Medicine expected to open this fall. The moniker was assigned in appreciation of Bondurant’s 15 years as dean of the school.
While at UNC, Bondurant appointed a faculty curriculum review committee and established a student research and academic enrichment program; he developed innovative partnerships between the School of Medicine and other institutions; and he oversaw two major curriculum reviews designed to be dynamic and perpetually responsive to the changing healthcare environment.
Breast Care Center Offers Flu Shots
As flu season begins, Georgetown’s Capital Breast Care Center has partnered with Delmarva Foundation, Medicare’s quality improvement organization for the District of Columbia, and Men Against Breast Cancer to provide free influenza vaccines to all qualified District or Maryland residents who take advantage of the center’s free mammogram services this fall. The flu vaccine campaign kicked off on Oct. 25 at the Capital Breast Care Center.
The Capital Breast Care Center was established in Southeast Washington in 2004 to reduce the cancer disparities that exist in the District and develop models to improve the quality of breast care for Washington area residents.
Be an Angel This Holiday Season
People are encouraged to select an angel from one of the angel trees and purchase a book suitable for the age range described on the angel. Leave book donations with the angel attached in boxes located near the Angel Trees. Angel tree sponsors include the president’s office, Princy Kumar, associate dean of student sffairs in the School of Medicine, will launch the GUMC portion of the 2005 Angel Tree book drive at noon on Friday, Nov. 18 at Dahlgren. The Medical Center’s bookstore is offering a 25 percent discount on children’s books throughout the Angel Tree drive.
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Fleming, figure-skating gold medalist and breast cancer survivor, received the Lombardi Symbol of Courage award, and Jansen, a gold medalist in speed skating who lost his sister to leukemia, was honored with the Lombardi Symbol of Caring award. The Margaret L. Hodges Leadership Award, honoring the gala’s founder, was given to Paul Schweitzer, EVP of Studley, Inc., a national commercial real estate firm specializing in tenant representation, and co-chair of the gala’s corporate executive committee. Vince Lombardi II, grandson of the football coach for whom the center is named, and his wife, Sally Sue, flew in from Seattle to attend. (From left: Keating, Jansen, Fleming, Pestell and Lombardi.)
Before the gala, Fleming (right) and her husband, Dr. Greg Jenkins, toured Lombardi to see the facilities first-hand and meet researchers, staff and patients.
A master “index service” that all service nodes must register with to be part of caGrid is being hosted at NCI, while six additional scientific service nodes are part of the initial test bed. The initial reference implementations include:
Now under construction on the center corridor of the third floor of Med-Dent, the Discovery Center – which will take the place of unused laboratory and office space – blends classroom laboratory teaching with the practice of science at the bench. It will enable faculty to establish an undergraduate teaching laboratory with space for five to six faculty and their 10 to 12 undergraduate research assistants to work side-by-side at the research bench.
of Lombardi’s research enterprise, recruited a group of outstanding scientists to the Lombardi team and helped realize the extraordinary potential of the Georgetown-MedStar partnership in providing excellent educational opportunities and patient care. His research lab has also made significant scientific contributions in the areas of endocrinology and oncology. In addition, Lombardi’s engagement in the Washington community through projects such as the Capital Breast Care Center, which opened in 2004 in Southeast DC, has strengthened the Medical Center as a whole.
It’s a process that happens so effortlessly it’s often taken for granted. Walking into a crowded room, your brain quickly sifts through data, identifies familiar faces, recognizes voices, and assigns meaning to the millions of inputs it handles every second. 
“Although the study has limitations, our findings suggest one possible explanation for the higher incidence of lung cancer in African Americans, who as a group smoke less than whites, yet still develop more lung cancer at comparatively younger ages,” said the study’s lead author, 
nd Jean Wrathall. Bregman, who has also received an “outstanding mentor citation” from the NIH, was awarded a grant for her research on recovery of function injuries to the central nervous system. This grant has eight slots for 
Nearly a dozen children added their handprints to the vehicle, which has been on the road since February 2004 and has collected more than150 handprints from patients who are battling and beating cancer everyday. 
As the demand for scientists qualified to conduct biomedical research focused on health disparities continues to grow, the master’s degree program comes at particularly relevant time in the medical profession. Interest in cancer and the human genome project has increased research in the public sector and within private research laboratories. Employment of biological and medical scientists is expected to grow faster than any other profession through the year 2005, according to the program.
The second tool, InstaSeq, can be compared to Google.com, the popular Internet search engine. InstaSeq scans the World Wide Web as well as gene databases for particular DNA, RNA or protein sequences and can search through Microsoft Word files, PDF documents and Internet sites to bring up information on a particular sequence. Users can even occasionally find patent files from USPTO for particular sequences. Since Ganesan launched the tools in June 2004, more than 3,000 users from around the world have taken advantage of the websites.
According the UNC website, “
“This partnership provides an important opportunity to bring preventive services to residents during flu season. At CBCC, we will not turn any woman away for mammography services, regardless or insurance or financial status. The thing we care about most is getting Washington women properly screened and cared for in a quality setting,” said Jeanne Mandelblatt
There will be angel trees in the bookstore, president’s office, Lauinger Library, ICC, Dahlgren Medical Library, the