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Early-career period of depression builds resilience in top Frederick National Laboratory imaging scientist
Depression upended his life when Kedar Narayan, Ph.D. was a graduate student and post doc, but he’s rarely talked about the experience and it’s likely most of his peers know nothing of his struggle. Now the imaging scientist at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNL) is sharing his story broadly, in an interview on a special mental health episode of the Microscopists podcast. Narayan is group leader at the Center for Molecular Microscopy at FNL, which supports National Cancer Institute research. He revealed this period of depression as the most difficult time of his life during a previous appearance on the podcast, and host Peter O’Toole invited him to return for the mental health discussion. Narayan and O’Toole are joined on the podcast by Beth Cimini, Ph.D. who leads an imaging laboratory at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, and shares her story POSTED: 12/17/2024
Biotech Connector showcases advances in next-generation sequencing
The final Biotech Connector of 2024 focused on advances and uses of next-generation sequencing (NGS) by three organizations in the Frederick, Md, region. NGS can rapidly sequence DNA and RNA, enabling scientists to study genetic variation. It’s called “next generation” because it represents a substantial leap forward over older methods. NGS was first launched in 2000 but has been continually advanced since. The Biotech Connector is a quarterly networking and speaker series, hosted by the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce, to bring together life science professionals for an inside look at local advances and to network. The advantages of NGS are “throughput, speed, and scale” explained Olena Lar, Ph.D., senior director of research and development at CIAN Diagnostics and one of the event’s three speakers. NGS achieves this by investigating millions of fragments of DNA or RNA simultaneously. Sequencing technologies Bao Tran POSTED: 12/4/2024
Controlling blood sugar may improve outcomes for diabetic lung cancer patients
The benefits of controlling a patient’s diabetes are well established. But the consequences of unregulated diabetes on survival rates for lung cancer have been widely debated. Now, a retrospective study of people with lung cancer who are diabetic shows they can survive longer if their blood sugar levels are carefully controlled. This holds true across broad socioeconomic and demographic populations that include obese and morbidly obese patients. The study examined de-identified health records of 32,642 lung cancer patients from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) and 17,768 patients from the Louisiana Tumor Registry and Ochsner Health and University Medical Center New Orleans. It drew an association between glycemic (blood sugar) control and improved survival rates among lung cancer patients who also had diabetes. The findings reveal statistically significantly improved overall survival in lung cancer patients having controlled versus uncontrolled blood sugar levels. "These findings make a strong POSTED: 12/3/2024
New training series for rapid response clinical research available for free
A new virtual training series aims to educate and empower clinical researchers to perform rapid response clinical studies in atypical environments. The Frederick National Laboratory Global Clinical Research Educational Modules (FNL GCREM) is a series of videos that shares expertise, tools, and recommendations to build clinical research infrastructure during infectious disease outbreaks in resource-constrained locations and in areas of armed conflict. “The program demonstrates how the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research deals with difficult clinical trial scenarios, and it serves as a valuable resource for clinical trial professionals,” said Ethan Dmitrovsky, M.D., director of FNL. “This is part of our mission as a national laboratory.” The training series explores the conduct of clinical research in challenging conditions and was created by teams with the FNL’s Clinical Monitoring Research Program and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Division of Clinical Research . The training is broken into POSTED: 11/20/2024
Progress against RAS-driven cancers lauded at RAS Symposium, with more candidate treatments on the horizon
Researchers from around the world met in October to mark progress their field has made in developing drugs to treat cancers driven by the RAS oncogene, and to map out even more ways they can help cancer patients. “This is a great story about tackling an intractable disease that was said to be an impossible task,” said National Cancer Institute Director W. Kimryn Rathmell, M.D., who welcomed participants to the fifth, three-day RAS Symposium. “That challenge motivated people to take it on. It’s a paradigm for success and a program that should be replicated.” The RAS Symposium brings together basic and clinical RAS investigators every two years to evaluate and share their approaches to attack proteins encoded by mutant forms of RAS genes and to ultimately create effective, new therapies for RAS-driven cancers. Many of the participants collaborate as part of the NCI’s RAS Initiative, for which FNL is the POSTED: 11/19/2024
New cancer data commons expands available clinical and translational data
A collaboration between development teams from the National Cancer Institute and the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research has resulted in the September launch of a new data commons that houses clinical and translational cancer data. As the newest component of NCI’s Cancer Research Data Commons, the Clinical and Translational Data Commons (CTDC) provides researchers access to data from NCI-funded clinical trials, correlative studies, and interventional studies. Unique among the NCI’s component data commons, the CTDC includes data about participant demographics, disease stages, and targeted therapies. “Access to high-quality harmonized clinical and translational data is becoming more and more important for cancer researchers,” said John Otridge, Ph.D., director of the Center for Technical Operations Support within the Bioinformatics and Computational Science Directorate at the Frederick National Laboratory. The new data commons launched with an inaugural dataset from the Cancer Moonshot Biobank SM , a 5-year project to learn more about POSTED: 10/29/2024
Infectious diseases scientific meeting highlights findings of NIAID mpox vaccine study supported by FNL
Results of a Phase 2 clinical trial in adolescents that showed a vaccine to prevent mpox was safe and generated an antibody response equivalent to that seen in adults was presented as a Late-Breaking Clinical Trial and highlighted during a media briefing on Wednesday at IDWeek 2024 , the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and partner professional societies. A Frederick National Laboratory team from the Clinical Monitoring Research Program Directorate supported the U.S. clinical trial, led by Mary Healy, MD at Baylor College of Medicine and sponsored by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In August, the World Health Organization declared mpox a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), following an upsurge of cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a growing number of countries in Africa. The U.S. clinical trial sites administered two doses of POSTED: 10/16/2024
The widely used model organism zebrafish may help shed light on blood-brain barrier
Zebrafish were the original pet-store Glofish, popular for tropical aquaria despite their Himalayan origins. In science, they have proved to be valuable models for many investigations, including studying blood diseases, muscular dystrophy, osteoporosis, heart disease, leukemia, and other disorders -- and soon perhaps for studying the blood-brain barrier, an obstacle for treating brain cancer. Inexpensive zebrafish also have brief lifecycles and are easy to care for, making them attractive research models. New research focused on four zebrafish genes that are similar, or homologous, to a human gene that act as a barrier protecting the brain from exposure to foreign compounds, including cancer drugs. These four transporter genes are homologous to the human gene, ABCG2, yet little is known about them. A collaboration involving Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research scientists investigated the function of all four homologous zebrafish genes, results of which were published in the BMC journal Fluids and POSTED: 10/16/2024
RAS drug discovery at Frederick National Laboratory reaches lung cancer patients in a clinical trial
An investigational treatment co-discovered by RAS Initiative scientists at the Frederick National Laboratory (FNL) is now being tested in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer driven by mutant KRAS G12C. BBO-8520 is being evaluated in a Phase1a/1b clinical trial, the ONKORAS-101 Study . It is a first-in-human study which seeks to determine the drug’s safety and tolerability and to detect potential antitumor activity. It was developed in partnership with BridgeBio Oncology Therapeutics (BBOT) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The drug targets KRAS G12C, the most common KRAS variant in lung cancer. Laboratory assays conducted by the team led by Anna Maciag, Ph.D. within the National Cancer Institute’s RAS Initiative at FNL show BBO-8520 blocks the “ON” and “OFF” states of KRAS G12C, resulting in rapid KRAS inhibition. Results of more tests in several cancer models indicated the compound locks KRAS G12C in a conformation that is unable to POSTED: 10/8/2024