Lasker Foundation Awards Laud Achievements in Genetics, Cancer, and Ebola Response

While significant scientific breakthroughs can be rewarding in their own right, celebrating critical advances in disease research through award nominations is a wonderful and important tradition within the scientific community. The Lasker Awards, established and endowed in 1945 by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, are one of the most prestigious of these celebrations in the United States, honoring advances made in basic research, clinical medicine, and public service. In particular, they serve not only as an opportunity to applaud the tireless and ingenious efforts of field leaders for their outstanding medical research and service, but also as a call-to-arms those in the biomedical sciences. They are a reminder that there is still much left to understand about a host of diseases and disabilities that affect the lives of so many individuals, within the United States as well as globally. That was indeed the awards’ original purpose, as the Lasker family brought them into existence in the wake of World War II to invigorate both immediate and long-term interest and financial investment from the general public and the U.S. government in cutting-edge medical research.

Albert Lasker. (Library of Congress)
Albert Lasker. (Library of Congress)
Mary Lasker. (Library of Congress)
Mary Lasker. (Library of Congress)

Albert and Mary Lasker were relentless in their efforts to engage the country in the fight for increased research efforts and funding. Together they reorganized and revitalized the group that would become the American Cancer Society (ACS), and they were incredibly instrumental in substantially expanding the activities and finances of the National Institutes of Health throughout their lifetimes. After Albert’s death in 1952 due to colon cancer, Mary continued to be a passionate patron of medical research, holding leadership positions in a dozen prominent healthcare societies and organizations—including the ACS and Planned Parenthood Foundation— and contributing to the implementation of President Richard Nixon’s War on Cancer. Her decades-spanning commitment to medical research advocacy and philanthropy earned her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1989. Upon her death, she left over $10 million dollars to the Lasker Foundation, ensuring that her legacy of championing disease research and public health would continue.

The tenacity and passion of Albert and Mary Lasker for medical research and outreach are reflected in the recipients of their foundation’s awards, as Lasker laureates are exceptional leaders in their fields. Indeed, over eighty Lasker Award recipients have also gone on to be awarded a Nobel Prize, forty-four of them within the last three decades. This year’s laureates are no exception to this trend of excellence.

2015 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award winner Evelyn M. Witkin. (Jane Gitschier/Rutegers Today)
2015 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award winner Evelyn M. Witkin. (Jane Gitschier/Rutegers Today)
Stephen J. Elledge. (Emmanuel Ording/The Boston Globe)
2015 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award winner Stephen J. Elledge. (Emmanuel Ording/The Boston Globe)

The Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award was bestowed upon two recipients in 2015—Dr. Evelyn Witkin of Rutgers University and Dr. Stephen Elledge of Brigham and Women’s Hospital—for advances made in understanding bacterial and eukaryotic DNA damage repair. Dr. Witkin’s work began in 1944 when, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, she uncovered a radiation-resistant strain of Escherichia coli while investigating the effects of ultraviolet light on impeding bacterial cell division. One summer’s worth of work ignited an entire career, as she pursued studying DNA mutagenesis and subsequently DNA damage repair over numerous decades. Her work, in conjunction with that of Dr. Miroslav Radman, led to the discovery and characterization of the SOS response, a broad, error-prone DNA damage response in bacteria that promotes both repair and mutagenesis and is mediated by the proteins RecA and LexA. Like Witkin, Dr. Elledge has made astounding impacts in the biomedical research community due to his work on DNA damage response mechanisms, but in the eukaryotic system. Initially he studied how DNA synthesis and damage repair pathways interacted in yeast, and these findings eventually led him to investigations regarding the ATM-mediated damage response. Significantly, he discovered how ATR detects DNA damage and initiates the subsequent response cascade; he continues to investigate the complexity of these pathways, as well as a host of other topics related to DNA and cell cycle maintenance.

James Allison. (Lasker Foundation)
2015 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Award
Winner James Allison. (Lasker Foundation)

Dr. James Allison of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center was bestowed with the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award this year for his development of a monoclonal antibody that stimulates tumor detection by the immune system. His work delineating the role of the protein receptor CTLA-4 in T-cell proliferation and as an antagonist to CD28-mediated T-cell activation led him to cancer immunotherapy research. He proposed that blocking CTLA-4 suppression of T-cell response would allow the immune system to detect tumors it previously ignored. Initial success in mouse models—where an anti-CTLA-4 antibody spurred tumor rejection—led Allison to pursue advancing this treatment to clinical trials. Over a decade later, the human anti-CTLA-4 antibody, termed ipilmumab, was approved by the FDA in 2011 for treatment of late-stage melanoma. This type of immune therapy is a radical one, as it triggers a general immune response instead of targeting tumor-specific markers, and thus has promising potential to be a treatment option for multiple types of cancer.

Medecins Sans Frontieres International President Joanne Liu, with healthcare worker. (P.K. Lee/Doctors Without Borders)
Joanne Liu, International President of Doctors without Borders (MSF), with a member of the MSF team in Sierra Leone.
(P.K. Lee/Doctors Without Borders)
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Logo. (Doctors Without Borders)
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Logo. (Doctors Without Borders)

In 2015, the recipient of the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award was not an individual, but rather an organization. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders) was commended for their tremendous response to the Ebola outbreaks in Africa last year. Members of MSF were on the ground from day one, serving as leaders in disease treatment and containment as well as pillars of patient and community support despite facing immense challenges on a local, national, and global scale. Even after the most significant outbreaks subsided, MSF continued their efforts through advocacy for programs and support that will aid and improve response efficacy to future epidemics.

No doubt this year’s award laureates will continue to change the face of medicine in the years to come and also inspire future medical researchers and advocates to do the same.

On the Shelf (October 2015)

For work…

Advances in Applied Microbiology
Advances in Applied Microbiology
Advances in Genetics
Advances in Genetics
Advances in Cancer Research
Advances in Cancer Research

Book Series: Advances in…

Location: Electronic

Released on a quarterly basis, the Advances in… series publish comprehensive reviews on current topics in various fields. The library currently receives several titles, including: Advances in Applied Microbiology, Advances in Cancer Research, Advances in Drug Research, and Advances in Genetics. Browse the ScienceDirect e-book series for available titles: https://login.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/login?url=http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/bookseries/all/full-text-access.

And leisure…

Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee
Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee

Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee

Location: HHSL Leisure Reading Fiction L477g

This companion novel to To Kill a Mockingbird was published this past summer amidst controversy surrounding its discovery and contrary reviews. Now you can read it for yourself. Two copies available in the leisure reading section located on Sackler 4.

-Laura Pavlech

PubMed Tip of the Month: Using MeSH Headings (October 2015)

Including MeSH terms in a PubMed search can help you get more precise results.

What is MeSH? Most of the more than 25 million citations in PubMed come from MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) journal citation database. Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a controlled vocabulary of standardized terms that indexers (actual humans!) apply to each article in MEDLINE to describe the publication type and topics covered in the article.

Why should you care about MeSH? Biomedical topics are often expressed in different ways. For example, chronic kidney disease may also be called end-stage renal disease, chronic renal failure, or abbreviated as ESRD. The MeSH term for this condition is kidney failure, chronic. Using MeSH terms in a PubMed search helps you find articles regardless of how an author referred to that topic. MeSH terms also allow you to search on all concepts in a broad category without having to enter every term. MeSH headings are arranged in a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms; when you search a broader term, all the narrower terms are automatically included in your search. For example, the MeSH term for cancer, neoplasms, can be used to search for all types of cancer.

How do I find MeSH terms? When you conduct a search in PubMed, the database will try to match your terms to MeSH headings in a process called automatic term mapping. To see how the PubMed translated your search, look for a box labeled ‘Search Details’ in the right column on the results page (you will need to scroll down the page). You can also search the MeSH database directly by choosing ‘MeSH’ from the dropdown menu to the left of the PubMed search box. See this example of the term meningitis in the MeSH database: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/68008581.

Need help with MeSH? Contact me at laura.pavlech@tufts.edu or 617-636-0385.

-Laura Pavlech

Notes from the Library… (October 2015)

Whether orientation is a recent or distant memory, here are a few tips on the resources and spaces available at the library:

Finding Books at Tufts: We have a lot of books, both in print and electronically. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to find these books. When you want to know whether or not the library has a specific book, search the library catalog (http://library.tufts.edu/) by title, author or course reserves (a few books are on reserve for Sackler courses). If a book is located at another Tufts library, then you can request that it be delivered to the Hirsh Health Sciences Library by clicking the ‘Request Item’ button at the top of the catalog record. You will be notified when the book is ready for you retrieve at our library. While e-books will appear in the library catalog, you can also browse our e-book collections (http://www.library.tufts.edu/hsl/resources/ebalpha.html).

Book not Available at Tufts? Search WorldCat (http://tufts.worldcat.org/), a global catalog of library collections. You can request that books available at Boston Library Consortium libraries be delivered to our library at no charge. For more information on requesting books, book chapters and journal articles from non-Tufts libraries, see: http://www.library.tufts.edu/hsl/services/docDelPolProc.html.

Study Rooms: Study rooms are located on the 5th, 6th and 7th floors of the Sackler building. Study rooms on the 5th floor may be reserved for groups of two or more people. Study rooms on the other two floors are available on a first come, first served basis with precedence given to groups. To make a reservation for the 5th floor study room, see: http://tufts.libcal.com/booking/hhsl.

Computers: Public computers are located on the 4th and 5th floors of Sackler. In addition, two computer labs, also located on the 5th floor, are available for use when not occupied by a class. Laptops, both Macs and PCs, are available for check out at the Library Service Desk. Software installed on library computers includes: Adobe products (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, etc.), MatLab, SAS, SPSS and Stata. Complete list of software on library computers: http://www.library.tufts.edu/hsl/computing/softinlibrary.html.

Software: Visit the Tufts Technology Services Help Desk on the 5th floor of Sackler to get software installed on your personal computer. Complete list of available software: https://it.tufts.edu/soft. Unfortunately, Adobe software is not available for installation on students’ personal computers, and Adobe only offers a student discount on their Creative Cloud Complete package.

Lynda.com: Online library of video tutorials that teach software, creative and business skills, including beginner to advanced Illustrator, R, Tableau, SPSS. Tufts Technology Services recently acquired a license that allows Tufts students, faculty and staff unlimited access to Lynda.com. Free apps for iOS and Android devices allow you to watch videos on your mobile device. To access, go to: https://it.tufts.edu/lyndacampus, click the ‘Login’ button and sign in with your Tufts username and password.

-Laura Pavlech