From the Desk of Dr. Louis M. Weiner

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.

I received a very exciting grant proposal this week from Khaled El-Shami, one of our newest faculty members. Khaled is a hematologist/oncologist who joined the Lombardi clinic on July 1st, after finishing his fellowship at Hopkins.

He sent me a draft of a grant he’s writing on understanding the immune response to acute myeloid leukemia. The question he asks is whether activated T-cell infiltrates in the bone marrow of AML patients are associated with improved outcomes. Such associations have been found in several solid tumors, but have not been studied in hematological malignancies.

I was impressed by both his enthusiasm for the study and the excellence of his proposal. I encourage anyone who is interested in learning more about this project to contact Khaled (email elshamik@georgetown.edu). It’s a great example of the translational research going on at Lombardi.

I also wanted to briefly mention how impressed I am that people have continued to attend the Wednesday seminars, even in the middle of August when it seems like everyone is on vacation (Although, I was pleased that turnout was a little lighter than usual so I got to eat an extra piece of pizza!). I really enjoyed Chip Albanese’s presentation, and I was particularly struck by the new imaging tools that he has incorporated into his research. I hope others are finding these seminars useful as well.

I wanted to find a way to keep in touch with all of the faculty, staff, and students of the Lombardi Center without clogging your inboxes with too many emails. This blog gives me a chance to keep you up to date with the issues I’m wrestling with, and I hope you’ll let me know what you think as well.

We will continue to send important announcements out via email, but my thoughts on the news and direction of the cancer center will stay right here.