Once again this September, the International Biomedical Research Alliance was fortunate enough to host six students in the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program for a visit to the New York area to meet with science icons.
The trip began on Wednesday, September 21st with a meeting at the newly-opened (August 2016) Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at Columbia University Medical Center with P. Roy Vagelos, M.D. Dr. Vagelos is the Chairman of the Board of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and the retired Board Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Merck & Co., as well as Board Member Emeritus of the Alliance.
In a conference room within the 14-story glass tower with sweeping views of the Hudson River, Dr. Vagelos related the story of his career – from his humble beginnings and early ambitions to help care for people, to his research at the NIH, in academia, and finally to his rise at Merck, all the while putting humanity at the forefront of his work. Dr. Vagelos played a pivotal role in 1987 in committing Merck to donate Mectizan – as much as needed for as long as need – with the goal to help in eliminating river blindness. Today, the Mectizan Donation Program is the longest-running, disease-specific drug donation program of its kind and has been foundational in the growth of a number of other drug donation programs. The program reaches more than 250 million people in affected areas annually, with more than 2 billion treatments donated since 1987. NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholar Huayu Ding noted, “I was most impressed by Dr. Vagelos, both in meeting him in person as well as in hearing stories about him from people at Regeneron. He had a clear vision of how science and drug discovery should be carried out and strong principles about how to run a company to help people. In addition, he had an excellent sense of humor.”
The following morning, the scholars traveled to Tarrytown, New York for a day-long visit to the campus of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. George Yancopoulos, M.D., Ph.D. Founding Scientist, President of Regeneron Laboratories and Chief Scientific Officer, has enthusiastically welcomed NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars to his company each September. The visit included an overview of the company, tour of the facilities, scientific presentations by Regeneron scientists as well as presentations made by the scholars on their research projects. NIH OxCam Scholar Joanna Cross commented, “As someone who has only been involved in academic research, it was helpful to have first-hand experience [visiting] with a bio-tech company. The profit side of industry has previously made me apprehensive about leaving academia, but I was impressed that Regeneron is still mainly science-driven. The equipment available, especially in the genetics section, was amazing.” Scholar Keval Patel remarked, “The opportunity to visit Regeneron was my first exposure to a pharmaceutical company. One thing I noticed during my visit was how proud each person we interacted with was with the work they were conducting. Dr. Yancopoulos is a great role model for many of us starting our biomedical science careers, and it was inspiring to see his enthusiasm for science, even at this stage in his career, during our presentations.”
Later that evening, the Scholars were the guests of honor at a cocktail reception held in the home of Alliance board member Ann W. Jackson. Guests included individuals representing science, business, academia, private industry, philanthropy, the Lasker Foundation, and New York City area alumni of the program.
The following morning, the group attended the Breakfast at Lasker – an intimate gathering of the 2016 Lasker laureates, the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars, the Lasker Clinical Research Scholars, winners of the 2016 Lasker Essay Contest, and representatives of the Alliance. Moderated by Jordan Gutterman, M.D., the breakfast was a roundtable discussion where the young scientists freely posed questions to the winners in order to gain sage career and life advice. Recommendations from the laureates were constructive and priceless.
Bruce Albert (University of California, San Francisco), winner of the 2016 Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science, reminded the young trainees that the “people at this table do not ask small questions – go for big problems” as they were urged to continue to conduct their research in the face of what may often seem to be a litany of failures. “It was reassuring to hear that the Lasker winners also ran into many obstacles on their road to discovery, and their stories reiterated the point that perseverance and good science will eventually lead to success,” noted Scholar Ding.
William G. Kaelin, Jr. (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School), co-winner of the 2016 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for his work in oxygen sensing, offered practical advice and emphasized the need for more young scientists to involve themselves in research-related social media discussions in order to advance science communication. He noted that “cancer is like having 9/11 every other day,” and the urgency and importance of research needs to be communicated to the public through all means. The laureates echoed the notion that students should not shy away from being the spokespeople for science.
Referring to the three co-winners of the 2016 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (Ralf F. W. Bartenschlager of the University of Heidelberg, Charles M. Rice, of the Rockefeller University, and Michael J. Sofia, formerly at Pharmasset; now at Arbutus Biopharma), Scholar Patel expressed that “It was amazing to meet with the people responsible for the discovery and development of the cure to a disease [Hepatitis C] that, until my second year of medical school, was a lifelong condition for those infected. As a PhD student, it was inspiring to meet successful scientists who had to overcome years of negative results with incredible persistence to make a profound discovery.”
The Scholars raised questions about interviewing for positions where they may be lacking in a specific skill. You “must learn new things on the industry side to be effective at what you do,” urged Sofia. The laureates described techniques as being “enabling but transient.” Scholar Cross added, “After listening to the Lasker winners, it inspired me to be bolder as I move forward in my career. It is both scary and exciting to leave graduate studies and decide what path I want my career to take, especially if the area lies outside my prior experience. However, the advice from the winners was to not be put off by unknown techniques but to be brave and show what I can do.”
On the topic of both the advantages and challenges of global collaborations, the laureates agreed that these collaborations are imperative and are becoming easier to manage. One of the strengths of the NIH Global Doctoral Partnerships and the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program that the Scholars freely articulate is that negotiating their dual-mentored collaborative projects on both sides of the Atlantic better prepares them for a dynamic research career in a way that few programs can claim. Scholar Cross observed how welcome the Scholars were made to feel: “Everyone was willing to share their experiences and advice and one of the P.I.s approached me to ask my opinion on a discovery his lab had made. This experience reinforced my belief that collaboration is of the utmost importance and I was grateful for the opportunity to attend.”
The breakfast was followed by the 2016 Lasker Awards luncheon in which Dr. Claire Pomeroy, in her opening remarks, acknowledged the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program alongside the Lasker Clinical Research Scholars. Sean Carroll, Vice President of Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor of molecular biology, genetics, and medical genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, delivered his keynote address entitled “Seeking Thrills Through Science.” For full descriptive information on the 2016 Lasker Award winners, video viewing of award overviews, and expectance speeches, please visit http://www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/.
In summing up the meetings and events hosted by Dr. Vagelos, the Alliance, Regeneron, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, and the Alliance, Scholar Andrew Breglio commented, “I can’t thank everyone enough for an incredible trip to the Lasker Awards. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet, converse with, and learn from so many influential figures in the world of science and medicine. I think those few days help me gained some clarity in regards to my career trajectory.”
Certara®, the leading provider of decision support technology and consulting services for optimizing drug development and improving health outcomes, announced on Septemter 22, 2016 that the first Certara Biomedical Research Scholarship has been awarded to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) on behalf of postgraduate oncology research student David Morse, MPhil, and the research he is conducting in the laboratory of Craig Thomas, PhD.
“We are delighted to support Mr. Morse’s ovarian cancer research and the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program in which he also participates,” said Certara CEO Edmundo Muniz, MD, PhD. “At Certara, we are committed to scientific education and to leveraging modeling and simulation to develop novel therapies for cancer. This scholarship, along with our recent appointment of Adam Darwich, PhD, as the first Certara Lecturer in Precision Dosing at The University of Manchester in England, affirm our beliefs in education and innovation.”
Modeling and simulation have proven to be beneficial in determining the best dosing strategies, the potential for drug-drug interactions with multiple drug combinations, and identifying biomarkers that predict antitumor activity.
Mr. Morse is using microfluidic-based, single-cell RNA sequencing, “drop-seq,” to explore the cellular heterogeneity of ovarian cancer spheroids and reveal parts of their transcriptome that may be expressed, functional and targetable.
“These spheroids remain within patients after surgical resection of primary ovarian cancer tumors, and are thought to lead to relapse and further cancerous growths. Because of their diffuse locality within the abdomen, the most appropriate form of treatment is chemotherapy,” said Mr. Morse. “We hope to reveal the unique genomic makeup of these spheroids so that they can be effectively targeted and treated by chemotherapies.”
The American Cancer Society estimates that during 2016 about 22,280 women will receive a new diagnosis of ovarian cancer and about 14,240 women will die from the disease. Ovarian cancer ranks fifth in cancer deaths among women. A woman’s risk of getting ovarian cancer during her lifetime is about 1 in 75.
Mr. Morse’s previous research focused on the development of nanomedicines to deliver multimodal therapies to tumors. However, he discovered that the primary limitation with oncological nanomedicines is their inability to exclusively target and localize therapies to tumor sites. He believes that single-cell sequencing of cancer tumors is one of the most promising ways to advance active targeting by revealing the genomic identities of the individual tumor cells.
NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars join an accelerated MD/PhD program for postgraduate medical research students and typically graduate two years early. Each Ox-Cam scholar has a mentor at the NIH and another one at either the University of Oxford or Cambridge in the UK. Mr. Morse’s mentors are Dr. Craig Thomas at NCATS and Professor Tuomas Knowles in the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge University. Mr. Morse also received a 2015-16 Fulbright Scholarship and a Whitaker Fellowship to complete his MPhil in nanoscience at the University of Cambridge.
The Certara Biomedical Research Scholarship is administered by the International Biomedical Research Alliance in Bethesda, Maryland. The Alliance’s mission is to support the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program and associated global PhD and MD/PhD training programs based in the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, America’s largest biomedical research organization. Its goal is to assure the financial viability and scientific excellence of the scholars’ program by supplementing government funding. The Alliance supports program events and scholarships designed to enrich the program and broaden the perspectives of its highly selective students as they train to become the next leaders in biomedical research.
In 2013, the Board of Directors of the International Biomedical Research Alliance initiated yearly science recognition awards to honor scholars whose work has been of an extremely high caliber and deserving of merit. These awards have traditionally been announced at the Annual Scientific Research Workshop held each year in June at a location rotating between the NIH, Cambridge, and Oxford. This year, the workshop was held at Keble College at the University of Oxford June 22-23, 2016.
The NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program conducts an in-depth yearly review of the progress of all scholars in the program. During the review, the NIH Scientific Directors, led by Academic Dean Dr. Jim Sellers, assesses the progress and scientific accomplishments of the scholars from each class year. Scholars in their third and fourth years in the program with significant research accomplishments were selected for award consideration. The chosen scholars’ accomplishments included the publication of first-author papers with significant findings and presentations made at conferences. Prizes are awarded in three categories; Basic Science, Translational, and Innovation.
The award consists of an engraved statuette and, commencing in 2016, a modest monetary prize. The Alliance was pleased to announce that this year the award for Basic Science has been permanently endowed by Dr. Michael Lenardo, Co-Founder of the Scholars Program, in loving memory of his brother Gregory Paul Lenardo.
The winners of the 2016 International Biomedical Research Alliance awards are as follows:
THE GREGORY PAUL LENARDO BASIC SCIENCE AWARD for discoveries of fundamental cellular, molecular, or genetic processes using model systems that advance scientific understanding of biological processes in higher organisms was presented to Michael Chen.
Michael Chen is an OxCam Class of 2012 scholar, whose mentors are Dr. Adrian Ferre D’Amare of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and Dr. Shankar Balasubramanian of the University of Cambridge, Department of Chemistry. Michael recently published his elaboration of the mechanism by which DHX36, a G4-quadruplex helicase unwinds substrates in the context of nucleic acid biochemistry. While previous research focused on substrate stability through the alteration of the substrate nucleic acids, Michael’s work clarified the effect of the composition of the G4-quadruplex helicases themselves on the stability of the substrates and their role in controlling gene expression.
The TRANSLATIONAL AWARD FOR ADVANCES IN MEDICAL SCIENCE in the field of medical science that move fundamental discoveries from the bench to the bedside was presented to Brennan Decker
Brennan Decker is an OxCam Class of 2012 scholar and MD/PhD student at the Medical College of Wisconsin, whose mentors are Dr. Elaine Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute and Dr. Douglas Easton of the University of Cambridge, Department of Oncology. Brennan recently published his identification of a mutation in the canine BRAF gene associated with bladder cancer that is identical to the mutation commonly found in several human cancers. His research opens up the possibility to develop a canine model to study the tumor in a naturalistic microenvironment that reproduces tumor heterogeneity. Brennan’s approach holds great promise for a better understanding of the molecular events leading to BRAF mutation-associated cancer.
The INNOVATION AWARD FOR NOVEL SOLUTIONS IN BIOLOGY OR MEDICINE for discoveries of unusual importance, application, or magnitude that make use of new or unusual methods, paradigms or approaches to solve important problems in biology or medicine was presented to Steven Witte.
Steven Witte is an OxCam Class of 2012 scholar and MD/PhD student at the University of Alabama – Birmingham, whose mentors are Dr. John O’Shea of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases and Dr. Allan Bradley of the Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge. Steven investigated the role of super enhancers during cell activation and differentiation through the analysis of p300 binding. His work has established that p300 ChIP-sequencing data can be used to reveal key nodes in genetic regulatory networks that govern cell fate and determination, and to uncover potential targets for anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer therapeutics.
Congratulations to the International Biomedical Research Alliance 2016 Scientific Research Awards winners and best wishes for continued success.
The International Biomedical Research Alliance, a non-profit organization which provides programming and funding support for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program, announced that Harold Varmus, MD, is joining the Alliance’s board of directors. Dr. Varmus, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes, stepped down as director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 2015; previously, he served as president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and as director of the NIH. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at the Meyer Cancer Center of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center.
“The International Biomedical Research Alliance’s goal is to help train a new generation of top biomedical researchers who are better equipped to investigate human diseases and develop new preventions, treatments, and cures,” said Stephen M. McLean, chairman of the Alliance Board of Directors. “We want to increase the speed at which medical research occurs and also the efficacy of outcomes for patients. We warmly welcome Dr. Varmus to our Board.”
Dr. Varmus has had a long association with the Scholars Program, has met with many of its students, and has said that he is joining the board “to promote the development of the scientific careers of these remarkably talented young people.”
The NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program was created in 2001, through collaboration between the NIH and Oxford and Cambridge Universities, to revolutionize the way in which the most talented biomedical PhD and MD/PhD students in the United States and the European Union are taught. Participants in the Program receive accelerated training, work on collaborative projects that address critical biomedical research problems, and graduate approximately two years early with a PhD degree from either Oxford or Cambridge University. They spend an equal amount of time with a mentor in a laboratory at either Oxford or Cambridge University and an NIH Intramural Laboratory.
“The NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program has exceeded our expectations in training the next generation of biomedical researchers and in fostering international research collaborations,” said Michael Gottesman, MD, deputy director of intramural research at the NIH and chief of the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the NCI. “I can think of no one better than Harold Varmus to help the NIH-OxCam Program maintain its hallmark characteristics of intellectual freedom and flexibility that have made the program the success that it is.”
Dr. Varmus’ joins a board that includes scientists, physicians and business leaders. Fellow board members include Ralph Snyderman, MD, chancellor emeritus and James B. Duke Professor of Medicine at Duke University, and John Niederhuber, MD, executive vice president of Inova Health System and chief executive officer (CEO) of the Inova Translational Medicine Institute. P. Roy Vagelos, MD, retired chairman and CEO of Merck & Co., Inc. is also an emeritus board member.
Further information about the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program can be found at http://oxcam.gpp.nih.gov.
Rick Fairhurst, MD, PhD – an NIAID physician-scientist and director of the NIH MD/PhD Partnership Training Program – has now trained seven NIH-OxCam students in malaria research, in collaboration with seven different professors at the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge. Recent graduates include Jeanette Beaudry, MD, PhD, who just matched into her top choice pediatrics residency program at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, Michael Krause, DPhil, who is completing medical school at Case Western Reserve University, and Aaron Neal, DPhil, who is currently completing a post-doctoral fellowship in the Fairhurst laboratory and applying for positions at the CDC. Current students include Jessica Hostetler, Kimberly Faldetta, Megan Ansbro, and Erin Coonahan. All of these PhD and MD/PhD students have challenging projects, such as discovering new mechanisms of antimalarial drug resistance or identifying new malaria vaccine candidates, and the opportunity to work in remote malarious areas of Mali and Cambodia. On some days, these students are spread across four continents. In the Fairhurst laboratory, every day is World Malaria Day!
Photo courtesy of the Fairhurst Lab shows Michael Krause, an NIH-OxCam student in the Fairhurst laboratory, as he helps to enroll 1500 children into a four-year cohort study of malaria risk in Kenieroba village, Mali. The findings from this study were later published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, the world’s top-ranked Infectious Diseases specialty journal
The Lasker Lessons in Leadership lectureship series provide strategies for developing essential leadership skills to MD/PhD students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. The series is a collaboration between the International Biomedical Research Alliance, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and the National Institutes of Health NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program.
Craig Thompson, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was the keynote speaker for the Lasker Lessons in Leadership event on March 31, 2016. His talk entitled “The Difference between Leadership and Management’ can be viewed below.
Once again this September, the International Biomedical Research Alliance was fortunate enough to host six students in the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program for a visit to the New York area to meet with science icons.
The International Biomedical Research Alliance, a non-profit organization which provides programming and funding support for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program, announced that Harold Varmus, MD, is joining the Alliance’s board of directors. Dr. Varmus, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes, stepped down as director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 2015; previously, he served as president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and as director of the NIH. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at the Meyer Cancer Center of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center.