Stephen Blacklow, the Gustavus Adolphus Pfeiffer Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, and Yang Shi, professor of cell biology at Boston Children’s Hospital, have received National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator Awards.
In T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL), there are frequent Notch receptor mutations that result in aberrant signaling activity. Blacklow’s research program will focus on the molecular mechanisms of both normal and aberrant Notch signaling, emphasizing structural, biochemical, molecular and cell-based approaches. Key objectives of the program will be to illuminate the structural basis for normal and oncogenic activation of Notch receptors by ADAM metalloproteases and to deduce the role of important Notch cofactors and negative feedback regulators in the response of cancer cells to aberrant Notch activity.
Shi's lab will interrogate the epigenetic basis of AML and HGG cancer cell fate using a number of approaches: integrative epigenomic profiling of induced differentiation programs, high throughput CRISPR-Cas9-based screening of these cellular models to identify chromatin factors that regulate differentiation, biochemical analyses to identify the molecular mechanisms by which existing screen hits and those found in future screens manipulate chromatin to influence cancer cell fate, and validation of findings in preclinical animal models and clinical sample analyses.
Samira Musah, HMS research fellow in the Wyss Institute, was one of six individuals named as first-tier winners of a Baxter Young Investigator Award, which seeks to stimulate and reward research applicable to the development of therapies and medical products to help resolve critical needs.
Musah received a $2,000 prize for her work “human glomerulus-on-a-chip established by directed differentiation of induced pluripotent stem cells in mature kidney podocytes.”
Two HMS researchers have received awards from the American Cancer Society.
Johannes Walter, professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at HMS, was one of two individuals to have been awarded a five-year renewable American Cancer Society Research Professorship.
Walter will use cell-free extracts to investigate how the DNA replication machinery overcomes obstacles in the DNA template, including chemical damage and transcription complexes. By studying this process, he hopes to identify new DNA repair proteins and pathways that maintain our genomes. The work is expected to elucidate how cancer develops and to identify new targets for cancer chemotherapeutics.
Yang Shi, HMS professor of cell biology at Boston Children's Hospital, was one of two American Cancer Society Research Professors renewed for a 5-year term.
Two HMS faculty members were recently honored by the National Academy of Medicine.
Barbara McNeil, Ridley Watts Professor of Health Care Policy and chair of the Department of Health Care Policy, was awarded the 2017 Walsh McDermott Medal.
Given to a member of the National Academy of Medicine for distinguished service to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine over an extended period, McNeil has contributed in numerous capacities since the early 1980s.
Educated in quantitative biochemical science and devoted to the study of new medical technologies, McNeil is an investigator in decision procedures and theory, technology assessment, and quality-of-care measurement, as well as a member of numerous government and foundation advisory groups. She has engaged in rigorous development and study of quality measures in health care and their implications for the organization, delivery, and cost of that care.
Joseph Coyle, the Eben S. Draper Professor of Psychiatry at McLean Hospital, received the 2017 Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health, which is presented to individuals, groups, or organizations that have demonstrated outstanding achievement in improving mental health.
Coyle, who is former chairman of the HMS Department of Psychiatry, did research that laid the foundation for integrating neuroscience and clinical psychiatry and shifted psychiatry's emphasis toward empirically based brain research. His work has facilitated recognition of the central role of the brain in psychiatric disorders and by doing so improved the understanding and treatment of these disorders. His pioneering research illuminated some of the neurological mechanisms underlying Huntington's disease, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's disease. For example, his research revealed that oxidative stress can lead to neural damage in schizophrenia and prompted the identification of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors as a treatment for Alzheimer's disease.
Charles Serhan, the HMS Simon Gelman Professor of Anaesthesia at Brigham and Women’s Hospital received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Eicosanoid Research Foundation at the International Bioactive Lipids Conference.
Serhan, who is also director of the Center for Experimental Therapeutics and Reperfusion Injury at Brigham and Women’s, was recognized for his pioneering work in identifying bioactive mediators and cellular pathways critical in the resolution of inflammatory diseases.
Two Harvard Medical School researchers have been named among 26 as STAT 2017 Wunderkinds.
Ying Kai Chan, research associate in genetics at HMS, is trying to develop ways to make gene therapy safer and build better vaccines. In his PhD research at HMS, Chan engineered dengue virus so that instead of proliferating without being detected by the immune system, it would instead trigger a robust immune response. Now, as a postdoctoral researcher in George Church’s lab at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Chan has created an “invisibility cloak” that shields gene therapy and its viral carrier from the immune system. The cloak blocks the immune receptor that normally recognizes the virus, called adeno-associated virus. He is testing the technology in human cells and mouse models.
Arun Sharma, research fellow in genetics at HMS in the lab of Jonathan and Christine Seidman, has studied the effect of gravity on cardiomyocytes and is building better systems to test for toxicity in drugs that affect the heart. Sharma plans to use the genome-editing tool CRISPR to incorporate various mutations into cardiomyocytes to see how those variants might contribute to heart disease at the cellular level.
Five HMS faculty members were among 70 individuals elected as regular members to the National Academy of Medicine. Election to the Academy recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service in the fields of health and medicine.
The following HMS faculty members were newly elected to the National Academy of Medicine:
Scott Armstrong, the HMS David G. Nathan Professor of Pediatrics and chair of the department of pediatric oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and associate chief of the division of hematology/oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital
Mark Daly, HMS associate professor of medicine and chief of the Analytical and Translational Genetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital
Alan D'Andrea, the HMS Alvan T. and Viola D. Fuller American Cancer Society Professor of Radiation Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Michael Greenberg, the Nathan Pusey Professor of Neurobiology and chair of the HMS Department of Neurobiology
Scott Pomeroy, the HMS Bronson Crothers Professor of Neurology and chair of the Department of Neurology at Boston Children's Hospital
A. Sloan Devlin, assistant professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at HMS, has received a 2017 Karin Grunebaum Cancer Research Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship, which is awarded to junior faculty members who have demonstrated a commitment to an academic career in cancer research.
Devlin plans to use small molecules to study and manipulate human-associated bacteria in order to better understand how the microbiome affects human health and disease. Specifically, in cancer, growing evidence suggests that gut dysbiosis can promote inflammatory conditions that promote tumor initiation and progression.
Dingding An , HMS assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, received a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar Award. The Rita program funds basic biomedical research in the fields of cancer, immunology and neuroscience and allows early-career biomedical researchers to establish labs and pursue research directions with above-average risk and promise.
An’s research will focus on how bacteria living in the intestine modulate the immune system and protect the host from inflammatory bowel disease.
Mark Shrime, HMS assistant professor of otolaryngology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and research director in the Program in Global Surgery and Social Change at HMS, was one of five newly named Damon Runyon Clinical Investigators. The award supports independent young physician-scientists conducting disease-oriented research that demonstrates a high level of innovation and creativity. The goal is to support the best young physician-scientists doing work aimed at improving the practice of cancer medicine.
Shrime plans to study the health and economic consequences of cash transfer for cancer surgery in West Africa. Each year, surgical conditions cause 81 million individuals to face catastrophic financial hardship, of which less than half is attributable to medical costs. These findings highlight the need for financial risk protection for surgery in health-system design to produce maximal health benefits. The overall objective of this research is to evaluate the effect of a Cash Transfer Instruments (CTIs) in surgical oncology by determining the impact on health and impoverishment of this CTI for patients requiring cancer surgery in West Africa. The central hypothesis is that an optimized CTI will increase appropriate cancer care utilization, improve health and decrease impoverishment, and will be cost-effectively scalable in West Africa and around the globe.
Three HMS faculty members received Xconomy Awards Boston at a gala during @Biotech Week Boston on Sept. 26.
Joan Reede, dean for diversity and community partnership, has received the Commitment to Diversity award.
Reede has created more than 20 programs intended to support women and minorities at HMS. One of these programs is the Commonwealth Fund Mongan Fellowship in Minority Policy, which aims to prepare physicians for roles in improving healthcare access for minorities and others who have challenges getting care. Monica Bharel, Massachusetts’ commissioner of public health, is an alumnus of the program. Reede says that close to 80 percent of the 128 fellows who have gone through the program have held faculty appointments throughout the country.
Connecting Harvard and its surrounding community, Reede started after-school academic programs for middle and high school students and offers professional development programs for teachers. This outreach led to the formation of the Biomedical Science Careers Program (BSCP), a non-profit organization led by Reede that provides students of all backgrounds, from high school to the postdoctoral level, with the guidance and support to pursue careers in the sciences. Growing beyond its New England origins, BSCP now serves students across the country. In 2018, more than 1,000 students from 200 schools will be represented.
Reede says making multiple programs available to students and faculty at various stages in their careers will help improve recruitment and retention of minorities and women.
Sangeeta Bhatia, HMS lecturer on medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, received the Innovation at the Intersection award.
Trained as both a physician and engineer, Bhatia has been mining new inventions at the intersection of biology, nanomaterials, microfabrication and engineering. She has co-founded companies to commercialize her work; one sells devices based on the “liver on a chip” technology developed out of her lab and are used to screen drugs for toxicity. Combining nanotech with medicine, her multidisciplinary lab came up with diagnostic tests for cancer that use nanoparticles and work like pregnancy tests. More recently, Bhatia has moved into infectious disease and microbiology, using artificial livers she’s developed to study how malaria parasites infect the liver.
Nikhil Wagle, HMS assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, received the Patient Partnership award Xconomy award.
Early engagement with patients was also key for Wagle’s Metastatic Breast Cancer Project, an effort at the Broad Institute to try to understand why some patients with metastatic breast cancer respond better to drugs than others and why some have more aggressive disease. To find an answer, Wagle, a breast cancer oncologist and researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, came up with a patient-centric plan. The idea: Collect and sequence the DNA from patients’ tumors and look for genetic changes that are associated with how those patients responded, or didn’t respond, to treatment. In the year leading up to the launch of the project in late 2015, Wagle and his team worked with patients and patient organizations to hone the mission, work out the details and build the website. In the next couple of months, the team will release data from 125 sequenced tumor samples along with the relevant clinical information.
Now Wagle is starting similar projects for other cancers. He launched the Angiosarcoma Project several months ago, and initiatives for prostate and other cancers are on the way. Wagle says working with patients so closely has changed the way he thinks about research.
Seven Harvard Medical School scientists are among 86 recipients nationwide honored by the National Institutes of Health High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program.
Neuroscientist Jeffrey Macklis, the Max and Anne Wien Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, and David Sinclair, professor of genetics, are recipients of the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, which challenges investigators at all career levels to pursue new research directions and develop high-impact approaches to a broad area of biomedical and behavioral science.
Zirui Song, assistant professor of health care policy, is a recipient of an Early Independence Award, which provides an opportunity for exceptional junior scientists who have recently received their doctoral degree or completed their medical residency to skip traditional postdoctoral training and move immediately into independent research positions.
Four are recipients of the NIH New Innovator Award, which supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators who are within 10 years of their final degree or clinical residency and have not yet received a research project grant or equivalent NIH grant. They are: Evan Macosko, HMS assistant professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital; Sherri Rose, associate professor of health care policy at HMS; Radhika Subramanian, HMS assistant professor of genetics at Mass General; and Brian Wainger, HMS assistant professor of anaesthesia at Mass General.
These awards recognize unconventional approaches to major challenges in biomedical research and honor exceptionally creative scientists pursuing high-risk, high-impact research. The program accelerates scientific discovery by supporting high-risk research proposals that may not fare well in the traditional peer review process despite their potential to advance the field.
Gordon Freeman and Arlene Sharpe were among five scientists were honored with the 2017 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize for critical discoveries in the field of cancer immunology at the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize Symposium on Oct. 5. Their work elucidated mechanisms in cancer’s ability to evade immune recognition and destruction, and their findings profoundly altered the understanding of disease development and treatment and led to the development of effective immune therapies for several types of cancer. They will share a $500,000 prize.
The 2017 award recipients are:
- James Allison, professor of immunology and chair of the Department of Immunology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
- Lieping Chen, United Technologies Corporation Professor in Cancer Research and professor of immunobiology, of dermatology and of medicine, Yale University
- Gordon Freeman, professor of medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School
- Tasuku Honjo, professor of immunology and genomic medicine, Kyoto University
- Arlene Sharpe, the George Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology, Harvard Medical School; senior scientist, department of pathology, Brigham and Women's Hospital
