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University of Washington School of Medicine
Online News
Vol. 11, No. 37
Sept. 21, 2007
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To view an archived version of Online News on the UW
Medicine Web site, visit:
http://www.uwmedicine.org/Global/NewsAndEvents/somnews/index.htm
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MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN: UW Medicine continues success in securing grant funding despite downturn in NIH spending
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This week’s news:
* NIH funds UW Institute of Translational Health Sciences as part of national effort to transform clinical and translational research and speed up delivery of new treatments to patients
* UW's Marshall Horwitz receives NIH Director's Pioneer Award; $2.5 million grant will support work on cell lineages and development
* Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grants $280 million for tuberculosis research, including project led by scientist at Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and UW
* Two UW researchers among the first recipients of Washington state Life Sciences Discovery Fund grants
* Constance Lehman receives Ladies Home Journal Health Breakthrough Award for her work on breast cancer detection
* SAVE THE DATE: Commemoration of the late Bruce Gilliland, longtime medical educator, physician, and administrator, will be held Friday, Oct. 26
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MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN
Dear Colleagues:
Competition for peer-reviewed grant funding for medical research has been extremely difficult in recent years. After a long period of growth, the NIH budget flattened, and many excellent research proposals are not being funded. In this difficult funding environment, UW Medicine faculty have again shown their exceptional strength. For fiscal year 2006-2007, grant and contract awards to UW Medicine faculty based at the University of Washington grew 7.1 percent from the previous year.
UW Medicine had an outstanding year in funding overall. Our academic medical center was second only to Harvard for public or private medical schools in NIH funding, pulling far ahead of all other peer schools. We are nearing our goal of $1 billion for private support in the university’s capital campaign; as of August, we were at $951 million. While some medical schools are seeing a decline in NIH grant awards, we have experienced another major increase.
There are many reasons to celebrate this newest accomplishment. Our success is, however, deeper and broader than funding. It lies with the individual and collective work of nearly 1,900 individual faculty and more than 12,000 staff who make up our immediate UW Medicine community and nearly 5,000 clinical faculty in the Seattle area and throughout the WWAMI community. It is energized by the 1,840 students and more than 1,500 residents and fellows across diverse specialties and scientific disciplines who, after training with us, go on to do their best work as physicians, researchers, allied health professionals, administrators, and in other roles. And it rests with our tens of thousands of alumni who represent our profession worldwide.
I believe that, at its core, our success lies with our dedication to our mission. Peer-reviewed research funding is an excellent benchmark to assess the quality of research programs and the focus of those projects on important health-related questions. UW Medicine faculty, staff, and students are working on our mission of improving health via our research activities as well as our teaching and patient care services.
It is a privilege and a pleasure to be part of UW Medicine. I extend my thanks to each and every one of you for your role in making this a great institution.
Sincerely,
Paul G. Ramsey, M.D.
CEO, UW Medicine
Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs and
Dean of the School of Medicine,
University of Washington
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NIH FUNDS UW INSTITUTE OF TRANSLATIONAL HEALTH SCIENCES
The UW Institute of Translational Health Sciences is among 12 additional academic medical organizations nationwide to receive funding through the National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs). The national consortium is aimed at transforming how clinical and translational research is conducted at academic health centers across the country. Ultimately, this consortium will enable researchers to provide new treatments more efficiently and quickly to patients.
The UW Institute will receive approximately $62 million of the approximately $577 million in total funding that will be awarded over five years to the national consortium. The UW is part of a second round of participating centers, joining the first 12 member institutions announced last October. The consortium sites serve as discovery engines that can rapidly translate research into prevention strategies and clinical treatments. When fully implemented in 2012, 60 institutions will be linked together to energize the discipline of clinical and translational science.
The Institute of Translational Health Sciences is a consortium of six UW health science professional schools and multiple partner institutions covering 12 sites, involving 67 key scientific personnel, and connecting researchers to more than 150 centers. This CTSA site includes the UW, Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Group Health Cooperative Center for Health Studies, Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason, and the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research, which will educate the public about translational research and the importance of participating in clinical trials.
The institute is led by Nora Disis, associate dean for translational science in the UW School of Medicine, UW professor of medicine in the Division of Oncology, director of the UW Center for Translational Medicine in Women's Health, and member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
The institute will integrate research and clinical institutions across the five-state region of Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho (WWAMI) through collaborative pathways that are part of the successful WWAMI program led by the UW School of Medicine. Features of the Institute of Translational Health Sciences include:
* a community engagement plan which considers diversity across race, ethnicity, culture, rural and urban locations, geography, health status and health service delivery in partnership with Group Health Cooperative Center for Health Studies;
* an integrated ethics program linking adult and pediatric medical centers in partnership with Children’s Hospital; and
* advanced capability for therapeutic product development and clinical testing, in conjunction with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, aimed at enhancing future health care in the region.
In addition, six American Indian/Native American network sites have been invited to partner with the institute, including the Seattle Indian Health Board, the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, the Native Health Clinic (Spokane, Wash.), the South Puget Sound Intertribal Planning Agency (Shelton, Wash.), the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (Anchorage, Alaska), and the Montana-Wyoming Tribal Leaders Council (Billings, Mont.).
For more information about the CTSA awards, including a list of participating academic health centers around the country, visit http://www.ctsaweb.org
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HORWITZ RECEIVES NIH DIRECTOR'S PIONEER AWARD
Marshall Horwitz, UW professor of medicine, pathology and genome sciences, is a 2007 recipient of the National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award. He is one of only 12 scientists to receive the award this year.
NIH Director Elias Zerhouni announced the recipients of the $2.5 million Pioneer Awards and the 29 recipients of the $1.5 million New Innovator Awards at the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award Symposium last week. The awards will cover direct costs over a five-year period. Both programs are part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research initiative designed to transform the nation’s medical research capabilities and speed the movement of research discoveries from the bench to the bedside.
NIH selected the award recipients through special application and evaluation processes that engaged 262 experts from the scientific community in identifying the most highly competitive individuals in each pool. The Advisory Committee to the Director performed the final review and made recommendations to Zerhouni based on the evaluations by outside experts and programmatic considerations.
Horwitz will use his Pioneer Award to chart cell lineages by tracking mutations in order to better understand how stem cells contribute to development and cancer.
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GATES FOUNDATION GRANTS $280 MILLION TO TUBERCULOSIS RESEARCH
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation this week announced 11 grants totaling $280 million in support of tuberculosis research. The projects will attempt to speed up vaccine development, spur creation of new drug treatments, and improve diagnostic tests. TB infects about one in three people worldwide, and kills nearly 2 million each year, with most deaths occurring in the developing world.
One of the grants, a two-year, $7.5 million award, goes to David Sherman, a researcher at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and a UW associate professor of pathobiology in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine. Sherman will lead an international team trying to improve understanding of the basic biology of tuberculosis bacteria and use that information to help in drug discovery.
For more information on the Gates Foundation grants, visit:
http://tinyurl.com/388zdc
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UW RESEARCHERS AMONG FIRST RECIPIENTS OF LIFE SCIENCES DISCOVERY FUND AWARDS
Washington state's new Life Sciences Discovery Fund has announced its first six grants, giving $4.5 million to research teams around the state. Two UW research projects are among the recipients in the fund's inaugural grant competition.
David Flum, UW associate professor of surgery, will lead a project related to assessing and improving surgical outcomes. He will lead an expansion of the Surgical Care and Outcomes Assessment Program (SCOAP) to include an additional 30 hospitals in Washington state. The program will benchmark many of the state's hospitals against each other in the use of some health-care technologies, and will help reduce the inappropriate use of those technologies to improve patient safety. Flum's project received a $1.35 million grant.
Daniel Chiu, UW professor of chemistry, will receive $760,000 for a project related to breast cancer monitoring. Chiu and his colleagues will work on a chip-based device that could monitor circulating tumor cells and tumor DNA in the blood of breast cancer patients. This work could help physicians track the spread of cancer and observe the efficacy of treatments.
The Life Sciences Discovery Fund was established in 2005 to support biomedical research that promotes life-sciences competitiveness, enhances economic vitality, and improves health and medical care. Its operating expenses and grants are primarily supported by a settlement the state received following a large, multi-state lawsuit against tobacco companies. Money from the tobacco settlement will not be available until next April, so this round of grants was funded by private sources, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Microsoft Corp., Amgen Inc., Safeco Corp., and Regence BlueShield.
For more information or to view other grant recipients, visit the fund's Web site at:
http://www.lsdfa.org/grantees/profiles.html
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CONSTANCE LEHMAN RECOGNIZED WITH HEALTH BREAKTHROUGH AWARD
Constance Lehman, UW professor of radiology and director of breast imaging at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, has been recognized with a Ladies' Home Journal Health Breakthrough Award for her work in breast cancer detection.
Lehman led a research team that looked at the effectiveness of using MRI to monitor women diagnosed with cancer in one breast. About 5 to 10 percent of women who have cancer in one breast will develop cancer in the other breast within 10 years. Lehman and her colleagues found that MRI can help detect the tiny cancers in the other breast early on. This can allow women to have surgery on both breasts simultaneously and help them avoid a second surgery, chemotherapy, and possibly an unnecessary mastectomy.
To read the article about Lehman and other recipients of the magazine's Health Breakthrough Awards, visit:
http://tinyurl.com/28g4r5
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SAVE THE DATE: COMMEMORATION OF BRUCE GILLILAND TO BE HELD OCT. 26
The UW School of Medicine will commemorate the life and career of Bruce Gilliland, a leading rheumatologist and longtime teacher, physician, and administrator, at a special ceremony at 3:30 p.m., Friday, Oct. 26, in Hogness Auditorium, Room A-420 of the UW Health Sciences Center. The event is free and all are welcome, including the UW community and the general public. A reception will follow the ceremony.
Gilliland, who served in several leadership positions in the UW School of Medicine, including as acting dean, died in February at age 75 after a prolonged battle with cancer. He served on the UW faculty for nearly 40 years, including several years as associate dean for clinical affairs, where he oversaw all graduate medical education for the medical school.
Gilliland made significant contributions to the field of rheumatology, and was recognized many times as an outstanding medical teacher. He was known for his professionalism in clinical care and medical education, and was well-regarded for his work in building bridges between the medical field and the larger community.
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Justin Reedy, editor:
206-685-0382, jreedy@u.washington.edu
Online News is copyright 2007. All rights, including electronic
redistribution, are reserved.
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