Johns Hopkins to Develop Medical School and Teaching Hospital in Malaysia
The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) has signed an agreement to help Malaysia develop its first fully integrated private four-year graduate medical school and teaching hospital. The agreement was signed in November 2010 and includes the JHU, the JHU School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI), and Academic Medical Centre Sdn Bhd (AMC). AMC is jointly owned by Chase Perdana Sdn Bhd, a leading construction company in Malaysia and the Middle East which holds 80% equity interest in AMC, and Turiya Berhad, formerly Sitt Tatt Barhad, which owns the remaining 20%.
Johns Hopkins will assist with campus and facilities design and planning, medical education programs, clinical affairs, and all major aspects of the new medical school. Academic development will be aligned with breakthroughs of the Genes to Society curriculum and Johns Hopkins will consult on a variety of issues related to pedagogy, teaching environment and infrastructure, administration and student affairs. Johns Hopkins will also provide guidance on the design and development of the teaching hospital. The hospital is slated to be a 600-bed facility with ambulatory care facilities, diagnostic capabilities and ancillary support services. According to the agreement, all education, patient care and research functions and programs will be managed in accordance with the Johns Hopkins Medical organizational and operational model. Johns Hopkins will also work with Malaysian colleagues to guide the development and integration of medical research programs.
NIH Announces Clinical Trials Funding to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced four new contracts for clinical trials that will address the problem of antimicrobial resistance. Each trial will enroll a minimum of 1,000 participants who have been diagnosed with illnesses and diseases that are frequently resistant to first-line antibiotics. Investigators will evaluate treatment alternatives for these illnesses, which include acute otitis media, community-acquired pneumonia and diseases caused by Gram-negative bacteria. These awards double the current number of large-scale NIH clinical trials focused on preserving the efficacy of currently licensed antibiotics.
The newly announced trials, as well as the four trials already in progress, are designed to determine how to improve the use of currently licensed drugs in order to protect their efficacy while also facilitating the development of novel drugs. Investigators will focus on answering specific questions about how to improve treatment strategies. The new contract awardees include:
Alejandro Hoberman, MD, Principal Investigator
University of Pittsburgh
Determining the efficacy and impact on antimicrobial resistance of short-course antimicrobial therapy in young children with acute otitis media
Initial award for fiscal year 2010: $772,863
Victor Yu, MD, Principal Investigator
University of Pittsburgh
Comparing narrow-spectrum antimicrobial therapy to standard of care in patients with community-acquired pneumonia
Initial award for fiscal year 2010: $3.01 million
Keith Kaye, MD, MPH, Principal Investigator
Wayne State University, Detroit
Comparing combination antimicrobial therapy with monotherapy for the treatment of Acinetobacter baumannii, a major cause of bloodstream infection and pneumonia in health care settings
Initial award for fiscal year 2010: $2.84 million
George Drusano, MD,
Ordway Research Institute, Albany, N Y
Comparing pharmacodynamic guidance of therapy, based on the drug's effect on the body, versus standard of care for Gram-negative bacteremia
Initial award for fiscal year 2010: 1.98 million
Texas Children's Cancer Center Opens Liver Tumor Center
Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine announced the formation of the first Liver Tumor Center to open in Texas and the Southwest. The center brings together top specialists focused on all aspects of liver cancer to provide a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary approach to treating children afflicted with liver diseases. The center also offers a broad clinical and laboratory research program to investigate the causes of liver tumors in children.
Investigators will focus on tumor biology, prevention, and the development of novel therapies. The multidisciplinary center will provide a single location for patients throughout all phases of treatment. The Liver Tumor Center will have direct access to the pediatric liver transplant program at Texas Children's Hospital, the nation's largest program of its kind, and will be supported by the Texas Children's Cancer Center infrastructure, which also includes the nation's largest pediatric oncology and hematology center. The Texas Children's Cancer Center is a joint program of Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital and is the pediatric program of Baylor's National Cancer Institute-designated Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center.
NIH Announces Pathfinder Awards to Promote Diversity in the Scientific Workforce
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded six grants as part of a new initiative aimed at fostering diversity within the scientific workforce. The initiative, known as the NIH Director's ARRA Funded Pathfinder Award to Promote Diversity in the Scientific Workforce, is funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and is administered by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), a part of the NIH.
The three-year awards total approximately $12 million and are awarded to scientists who propose highly innovative approaches to increasing workforce diversity. Awardees receive approximately $2 million for their project. Recipients must devote roughly 30 percent or more of their research effort to the Pathfinder activity. The recently awarded investigators and their research activities, as reported by the NIH, are:
Mary (Molly) Carnes, MD, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison will develop an interactive tool that will help faculty recognize and self-correct implicit, stereotype-based bias that affects the participation and advancement of groups underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine.
Bradley S. Duerstock, PhD, of Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, will create an accessible wet laboratory for practical training as well as a Web-based interactive community for individuals with disabilities pursuing biomedical research careers.
Vivian Lewis, MD, of the University of Rochester, NY, will test the hypothesis that mentoring interventions will promote the resilience of biomedical researchers from underrepresented groups, resulting in greater career satisfaction, confidence and academic success.
Richard McGee, PhD, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, will test a model employing coaching to complement what scientific mentors typically provide as an approach for improving the professional advancement of students from underrepresented groups toward academic research careers.
Joan Reede, MD, MPH, of Harvard Medical School, Boston, will conduct a study of the institutional and environmental factors that impede and/or support the careers of clinical and research faculty from diverse groups, as well as how these factors impact an individual's career-related networks.
Hannah A. Valantine, MD, of Stanford University, CA, will test the hypothesis that mitigating the experience of stereotype threat will improve the advancement and retention of female faculty members.
Bertarelli Foundation Donation to Fund Neuroengineering Program
The Bertarelli Foundation has announced funding for a collaborative exchange program between Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. This partnership, The Bertarelli Program in Translational Neuroscience and Neuroengineering, will focus on improving quality of life for people with neurological disabilities. The initial donation of $9 million also includes endowment of the Bertarelli Professorship in Translational Medical Science. HMS executive dean for research, William Chin, MD, is the inaugural incumbent.
Dr. Chin will be responsible for overseeing the development of the new joint program, which is designed to move device design at EPFL to clinical testing at HMS and to create a bidirectional exchange for students and researchers of the institutes. EPFL and HMS already have a history of working together on translational neurobiological research and recently published a joint paper pertaining to the structure of the brain in children between the ages of 2-18 years in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Bertarelli Grant program is being established this year to encourage further collaboration. The program will fund cutting-edge neuroscience and neuroengineering research projects for students and faculty members of the institutions, and an annual symposium will be held to share results. The symposium will be held in Boston and Lausanne, alternating the location each year.
UAMS Awarded $3.3M to Fund HPV Vaccine Clinical Trial
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences has been awarded $3.3 million to support a Phase I clinical trial of an HPV therapeutic vaccine for those already infected with the HPV virus. Mayumi Nakagawa, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology in the UAMS College of Medicine, was awarded the five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant Program. Women with high-grade precancerous lesions will be enrolled, and the effectiveness of the vaccine - which will consist of synthetically made peptides of the E6 protein of HPV - will be assessed by monitoring the lesions. Dr. Nakagawa will investigate the use of naturally occurring yeast in the body, specifically Candida, to enhance the immune response.
Gift to Establish USC Ming Hsieh Institute for Research on Engineering-Medicine for Cancer
Ming Hsieh, alumnus and trustee of the University of Southern California (USC), has given $50 million to establish the USC Ming Hsieh Institute for Research on Engineering-Medicine for Cancer. The interdisciplinary research institute will bring together expert engineers, scientists and physicians to facilitate and expedite discovery and translation of novel therapies and medicines to combat cancer. The gift will support research and development in the field of nano-medicine for cancer, and bridges research from both the engineering and medicine schools at USC. The two schools recently launched a joint program called the HTE@USC (Health, Technology and Engineering at USC), which provides an existing collaboration upon which the new Institute will build.
This was the second multimillion dollar donation made to USC by Mr. Hsieh. In 2006, he donated $35 million to the Viterbi School of Engineering to name the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering. Mr. Hsieh, a native of China, earned his BS in electrical engineering in 1983 and a MS in electrical engineering the following year from USC. He is the founder of AMAX Technology as well as of Cogent, Inc.
Sarnat Prize Awarded
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) awarded the 2010 Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health to Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD, and Charles P. O'Brien, MD, PhD. The Sarnat Prize, established in 1992, highlights outstanding achievement toward improving mental health. The award consists of a medal and $20,000 and is supported by an endowment created by Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat of Los Angeles, CA. Drs. Nestler and O'Brien are recognized for their research illuminating biological mechanisms of addiction, improving quality of care offered by treatment programs, and reducing the stigma associated with addiction.
Dr. Nestler is the Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience, chair of the department of neuroscience, and director of the Friedman Brain Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. His research has focused on how drugs affect the brain at the molecular level. His work has illuminated how drugs affect the brain's "reward" regions and has provided a fuller picture of how addiction occurs from the molecular to the cellular and behavioral levels. In addition to his discovery of a molecular basis for relapse among drug abusers, he was first to propose the implication of the brain's reward pathways in depression and other stress-related disorders. His mouse model for depression has demonstrated that long-lasting behavioral abnormalities resulting from stress can be reversed through treatment with antidepressants.
Prior to joining Mt. Sinai in 2008, Dr. Nestler served as chair of the department of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. During his tenure there, the department became one of the top 10 National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded psychiatry departments in the nation. Dr. Nestler is an alumnus of Yale University, where he earned both his MD and PhD degrees. He has earned numerous honors and awards for his work. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 1998 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.
Dr. O'Brien serves as the Kenneth Appel Professor of Psychiatry and vice chair of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. His research discoveries have been critical in proving that drugs affect brain functionality and in the development of pharmaceutical and behavioral therapies for addiction. His laboratory work demonstrating that symptoms of addiction result from reflexive memories that continue even after a person stops using a drug, and that re-exposure to drug-associated cues activates drug urges, has led to development of behavioral therapies focused on relapse prevention.
Dr. O'Brien's work has led to the use of naltrexone as a pharmaceutical therapy to treat alcoholism. His work has also paved the way for making outpatient care in the treatment of alcoholism common practice. Along with colleague, A. Thomas McLellan, PhD, Dr. O'Brien developed the Addiction Severity Index (ASI), which is used to determine the severity of patients' problems and to tailor treatment approaches accordingly. Dr. Obrien is an alumnus of Tulane University, where he earned both his MD and his PhD degrees. In addition to numerous national research awards, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bordeaux. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 1991.