HMS/HSDM Class Day
2005
The Doctor’s Advice: Talk to Strangers
Faculty Symposium
Profs Tell Tales of Molecular Medicine
HSPH Class Day
UN Official Sees Women’s Health Crisis in Africa
Alumni Day
How Doctors Speak to the Public
Class Symposium
For Class of ’80, Risk and Reward Mark a Productive 25 Years
DMS Symposium
Integration Key to Student Success in Life Sciences
Student Speakers
Students Recount Lessons Learned
Scenes From Alumni Week
Pictures from Commencement and Alumni Week activities
Student and Faculty Awards
Honors Given to Faculty and Students During Commencement
Growth Factor May Aid in Crohn’s Disease Treatment
Bench Science Advances Against Cancer
Dental School Dedicates New Building on Longwood
Faculty Health Survey Being Conducted
Awards Recognize Advancement of Women
BLAST Resource Available to HMS Faculty
The July Effect: How Hospitals Cope with Intern Turnover
CLASS SYMPOSIUM
For Class of ’80, Risk and Reward Mark a Productive 25 Years
In 1980, fresh out of HMS, David Eisenberg was offered a fellowship to study traditional Chinese medicine in Beijing. It was an invitation many newly minted doctors would have rejected. Alternative medicine was, in the eyes of most physicians, “unconventional, unorthodox, unproven,” said Eisenberg, the Bernard Osher associate professor of medicine at HMS. He accepted. Twenty-five years later, complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is wildly popular—Americans spend billions of dollars on such therapies each year, according to a landmark study by Eisenberg and colleagues. And CAM is gaining scientific respectability. This year, the National Institutes of Health will give out $300 million for studies on once esoteric practices such as acupuncture, shiatsu and other forms of massage, herbs, and even prayer, several of them being carried out at the Osher Institute, which Eisenberg helped found.
 Photo by Graham Ramsay Attendees of the Class of 1980 symposium were treated to old film clips of the student show, featuring performances by David Eisenberg (left) and Lewis First (middle). They are shown with classmate and fellow presenter Marlene Beggelman. |
Like many of the stories told, Adler’s began with a revelation. It occurred in the mid-1980s during an internship in Sweden with Lars Leksel, who pioneered the use of lasers to surgically remove brain tumors. Adler was amazed by the approach. “It was an epiphany,” he said. To locate, and guide lasers to, the tumor, patients had to have cumbersome frames screwed into their skulls. Adler wanted to do away with the unwieldy frames and came up with the idea of using real-time images that could be compared with previously acquired scans to stereotactically locate lesions. Finding venture capital would be a long struggle. “No one would give me the time of day,” he said. Eventually, he scraped together enough money to build the first version of what would become the CyberKnife, in 1994. There would be additional struggles, but over the past five years, his company, Accuray, has sold more than 112 CyberKnife systems. Patients have been rid of cancerous tumors and metastases, acoustic neuromas, and spinal cord lesions without a single incision. “I have literally had patients ride their bicycles home after the procedure, if they live close enough,” he said.
John G. Freund’s moment of reckoning came late one night during his surgical rotation at Massachusetts General Hospital. Surgery had been his favorite rotation but it still did not feel like the right fit. “I was standing there after surgery at 2 a.m.,” he said. He knew he would have to leave clinical medicine. “I realized I was pretty much a natural at making certain business deals.” After two years at Harvard Business School and more than a decade at Morgan Stanley Ventures, he cofounded a venture capital firm, Skyline Ventures. One of the companies developed and managed by his firm is Renovis, which has developed a drug that in clinical trials was found to limit the damage incurred by strokes. Another, TolerRx, has come up with a type 1 diabetes drug that when given to newly diagnosed patients, prevents further loss of insulin production. “This could be the biggest breakthrough in juvenile diabetes in the last hundred years,” he said.
For Marlene Beggelman, an aptitude in business was a slow surprise rather than an outright epiphany. She started out wanting to be an academician and, toward that end, got a degree in public health. She found herself working for a company, analyzing insurance data to discern trends in health care. “I was surprised by the extent and severity of the problems,” said Beggelman, president and CEO of Enhanced Medical Decisions, Inc. Bothered by the injustices, she found it easy to adopt the vantage point of the little person. “Perhaps it is because I am a short, Jewish female from Chelsea,” she said. Beggelman would go on to start three companies. The most recent uses natural language recognition systems to create computerized medical knowledge bases.
Andrew Marks began his presentation with a different kind of mind-altering experience. “I must take exception with one of David’s slides,” he said, referring to Eisenberg’s diagram depicting the recent rise in Americans’ use of herbal remedies. “As you may recall, there was quite a lot of herbal experimentation going on at Harvard Medical School.”
Like Freund, Marks found surgery appealing. But he did not have the patience to complete the seven-year surgical training. He went into academic cardiology and, following that, molecular biology. “Seven years later, I ended up at Enders,” said Marks, currently professor and chair in the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. While working in the Children’s Hospital building, he discovered a protein that appeared to play a critical role in the calcium channel of heart muscle cells. The protein, calstabin2, turned out to be a receptor for rapamycin which, Marks found, could prevent restenosis, the often deadly rethickening of the arteries that occurs after stents have been installed. This insight led him to invent rapamycin-coated stents, which were approved by the FDA in 2003. Just last year, Marks and his colleagues discovered an experimental drug that helps bind calstabin2 to another protein in the calcium channel. The drug, JTV519, prevented heart arrythmias in disease-prone mice and could someday be used to do the same in patients with heart failure and arrythmias.