A research team led by Dr. John Young, professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Dr. Sumit Chanda, associate professor at Sanford-Burnham, was awarded a $21 million Program Project Grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This funding will allow the team to analyze the innate immune response (the body’s earliest defenses) against HIV infection using a systems biology approach. This large-scale initiative aims to increase our understanding of all the body’s cellular and molecular factors that work together to respond to HIV-1 infection and how these factors influence a patient’s prognosis.
Dr. Salvatore Albani is a champion of translational medicine – the philosophy that research findings shouldn’t be confined to the laboratory, but “translated” into new therapies that treat disease. With both a Ph.D. and M.D., Dr. Albani embodies the bridge between the laboratory and the hospital. As the new director of translational research in Sanford Burnham’s Infectious and Inflammatory Diseases Center, he plans on expanding this discipline at the Institute.
“I first fell in love with Sanford-Burnham because of the emphasis on translational medicine. I joined the faculty at a moment of dramatic transformation, in which immense intellectual resources have made the Institute a worldwide technology leader,” Dr. Albani said. “And these exciting new ideas can be brought to fruition. For the first time, I’m in a place that thinks like I do.”
Inflammation – one of the body’s earliest responses to infection or injury – can help the healing process when it’s closely controlled by the immune system. Mismanaged inflammation, however, can contribute to a variety of disorders, such as autoimmune diseases or allergic reactions. The immune system maintains this careful balance in part through the activity of a protein known as NF-κB. When triggered by cellular damage, infectious bacteria or some other molecular signal, NF-κB binds to DNA and turns on genes that activate inflammation. Since NF-κB acts like a master inflammation regulator, it makes an attractive target for researchers hoping to manipulate the immune response in patients suffering from either too much or too little inflammation.
A bi-coastal Sanford-Burnham research team led by Dr. Greg Roth in Lake Nona, Orlando, Fla. and Dr. John Reed in La Jolla, Calif. recently used the robotic technology in the Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics (Prebys Center) to screen a collection of more than 100,000 chemical compounds to find that one needle-in-a-haystack (or handful of needles) capable of blocking NF-κB. In a pair of studies published in ACS Chemical Biology (March 19, 2010) and the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (May 18, 2010), they discovered a chemical compound that selectively impairs NF-κB activity under certain conditions. By inhibiting NF-κB this way, the compound has the potential to dampen potentially harmful inflammation without shutting down the whole immune system.
Playing off Sanford-Burnham’s slogan, Dr. Tomas Mustelin, adjunct professor and head of Amgen’s Seattle site, gave a talk last week on an issue at the heart of the institute: translational medicine. As a former academic scientist and now a leader in one of the country’s top pharmaceutical companies, Dr. Mustelin gave the packed audience a fascinating overview of what it takes to translate basic research into a marketable drug and the role that scientists, society and government play in the process.
“We scientists are quite privileged to be trusted by society to conduct research and develop therapeutics for patients with diseases like cancer or rheumatoid arthritis,” Dr. Mustelin told the audience. “We all have relatives who have experienced a serious disease, so we know it’s a task not to be taken lightly.”
New medicines must travel a long road from original idea to FDA approval. For the past several years, the scientific community has had an ongoing discussion on how we can smooth that path, so that new treatments reach patients sooner.
Recently, Domenico Fasci and Philip McQuary, two Sanford-Burnham Ph.D. students, entered a week-long intensive training program at the Eureka Institute to earn certifications in translational medicine. The program seeks to help physicians, scientists and business professionals better understand the mechanisms that slow down new medicines and work together to develop innovative solutions.
The San Diego-Union Tribune has a nice article today about pandemic flu. One flu over: Lessons of the H1N1 Pandemic provides some interesting overviews from a number of flu experts on what went right and wrong (and what could yet happen) in the fight against H1N1. Among the experts were Sanford-Burnham researchers Dr. Robert Liddington and Dr. Sumit Chanda, who have both done extensive research on flu.
“We dodged a bullet,” said Sumit Chanda.
This award-winning image, Osteoclasts – The key to proper bone health, was created by Melanie Hoefer, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scientist in the Robert Rickert laboratory.Two different cell types drive the bone remodeling process. Osteoblasts synthesize bone matrix while osteoclasts resorb mineralized bone. The balance of bone formation and bone degradation determines the overall health of the bone. Thus, a dysregulated activity of those two cell types can result in osteopetrosis, osteoporosis or osteolytic lesions, which are characteristically seen in diseases such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and bone-metastasizing cancers.
“The photograph depicts mouse osteoclasts, which can be generated in vitro by stimulating cells isolated from the bone marrow,” says Dr. Hoefer. “By studying osteoclasts in culture, we aim to increase our understanding of their activity and hope to learn more about how bone degradation is regulated.”
In 2009 Dr. Hoefer received first place in the BioEASI (Bio-Education and Art for Science Innovation) Science As Art contest for her image.