The Center for LAM Research and Clinical Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) has been awarded a $1 million plus, four-year grant from the U.S. Department of Defense Office of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs to fund their work on lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM). This work will be performed in partnership with the Massachusetts General Hospital and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. The center will use the funds to conduct a phase I clinical trial to determine the safety of a combination of two drugs to treat patients with LAM.
LAM is a rare lung disease that affects women almost exclusively. In LAM, the normal lung tissue is progressively destroyed. LAM can also occur in women with a genetic syndrome called tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), which causes tumors in different parts of the body, such as the skin, brain and kidneys.
The Internal Medicine Residency Program at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) has been awarded with a $30,000 grant from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation to strengthen residency training for patient-centered care. Through several public narrative workshops conducted at three of its ambulatory centers, CHA will create a series of videos that share the residents’ perspective, highlighting standards for humanistic, patient-centered care, an alignment to CHA’s culture of development and learning, and individual stories of inspiration. Videos created from these workshops will be used to help link what educators intend to teach (formal curriculum) with what learners incorporate in the process of forming their physician identity (hidden curriculum). Administrators of the Residency Program anticipate that integration of the public narrative into the curriculum will help trainees stay connected to core values and to build successful relationships with their multidisciplinary team members within a patient-centered system of care. They hope that because it engages both “head” and “heart,” this method can both instruct and inspire. Workshops will begin August 2012, and the public narrative video series will be available by the end of 2013.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital has been awarded $9.6 million over four years from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to fund the Medical Sequencing (MedSeq) Research Project. The MedSeq Project is the first clinical trial ever funded by NIH to empirically study the use of whole genome sequencing, the mapping of an individuals’ entire DNA, in the practice of medicine.
The proposed project, led by a multi-disciplinary team of more than 40 scientists, will first design an informatics pipeline to interpret several million genetic variants from each patient, and generate clinical reports that will be meaningful to practicing physicians. After that, 200 patients and their physicians will be enrolled in a clinical trial where they will receive either standard care with whole genome sequencing or standard care without whole genome sequencing. Researchers will study two types of volunteers—healthy middle-aged patients followed by primary care physicians and patients with newly diagnosed hereditary cardiomyopathy. The MedSeq Project will begin enrollment in 2012.
Robert Green, HMS lecturer on medicine and a physician-scientist in the Division of Genetics at Brigham and Women’s will direct the study. In addition to Green, the research will be led by co-directors Mike Murray, an instructor in medicine, Christine Seidman, the Thomas W. Smith Professor of Medicine and assistant professor of pathology, Heidi Rehm from Brigham and Women’s; Zak Kohane director of the Countway Library of Medicine and Lawrence J. Henderson Professor of Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston; and Amy McGuire from Baylor College of Medicine.
