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INTERNATIONAL HEALTH Armenise Speakers Advance Understanding Of Cancer Biology, GenomicsThe Fifth Annual Symposium of the Giovanni Armenise– Harvard Foundation, held on the shores of Lago Maggiore in Stresa, Italy, departed from previous years in both administrative and scientific terms. Former HMS dean Daniel Tosteson said that in addition to providing broader support across the Medical School's six basic science departments, the foundation's focus is now shifting to foster development of individual scientists wishing to pursue their scientific careers in Italy. More than 100 participants from HMS and Italy were on hand for the symposium, held June 13 and 14. Boosting ScienceEffective this fall, the foundation is offering young Italian researchers a PhD program at HMS with a postdoctoral year in Italy and a new Career Development award. This award encourages talented scientists to go to Italian scientific institutes to establish new laboratories of their own, said Tosteson, who is president and CEO of the foundation.The program committee for the symposium also took a new tack. Instead of separating research papers by type, they selected presentations consistent with an overarching theme: cancer biology, genomics, and postgenomics. The opening notes were sounded by HMS Genetics chairman Philip Leder, who described cancer as an "unfortunate genetic collaboration" in which individual mutations accumulate and conspire to cause malignancy. The Genetic ConspiracyNumerous speakers illustrated Leder's point. For example, Saverio Minucci of the European Institute of Oncology in Milan described a series of molecular events in acute promyelocytic and myelocytic leukemias that have already led to clinical testing of a new treatment strategy.HMS's George Church, professor of genetics, introduced the genomics aspect of the symposium by explaining how functional genomics can be used to determine the full range of genes expressed by cancer cells. Not only can RNA and DNA microarrays "fingerprint" these cells, but new computer methods can analyze the timing and level of gene expression, said Church, who heads the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at HMS. Enzo Medico learned computational genetics in Church's laboratory and now uses these techniques to understand invasive growth at the Institute for Cancer Research and Treatment at the University of Torino (Turin) Medical School. Medico used microarrays to sort through 20,000 genes, eventually arriving at a small number of regulatory sequences that interact with a specific growth factor receptor to promote invasive growth. Proteomics, of course, is the frontier of the postgenomic world. The Institute of Proteomics at HMS is taking a first step toward identifying all the proteins encoded by genes and identifying their function, said Joshua LaBaer, institute director and HMS instructor in medicine. The institute has already prepared approximately 9,000 genes from humans and other organisms in a uniform format called FLEXGene (which stands for full-length, expression-ready). Researchers can order hundreds or thousands of genes from the repository and transfer them, in a simple overnight step, into whatever expression vectors their experiments require. The ability to easily generate large numbers of proteins will be invaluable in all sorts of biological research. For example, this technology would speed experiments of the type described by Antonello Mallamaci, a developmental biologist in the Department of Biological and Technological Research at the Scientific Institute San Raffaele in Milan. His laboratory has found that interactions among various proteins during neurogenesis control whether the cerebral cortex in mouse embryos develops normally. Many lectures and posters demonstrated the value of international collaborations fostered by the Armenise–Harvard Foundation over the past five years. Among these was a talk by Andrea Musacchio, who returned to Italy in 1999 after completing a postdoc at HMS. With support from the foundation, Musacchio set up the Center for Structural Biology at the European Institute of Oncology. Distance has not kept him from working with Li-Huei Tsai, an associate professor of pathology at HMS, to explore how the pairing of a cyclin-dependent kinase with an abnormal protein might damage the brain in both Alzheimer's disease and stroke. The structures that Musacchio is determining in his Milan laboratory may eventually lead to better treatments for patients not just in the U.S. or Italy, but around the globe. —Patricia Thomas |
