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Showing posts from July, 2019

An Interview with Dr. David Scadden, MD, Recipient of the 2019 ISEH Donald Metcalf Award

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Interviewed by Stephen Loughran of the ISEH New Investigators Committee If you had to pick one discovery, what do you think has been your greatest contribution to science to date? At the risk of being grandiose, I would like to think that my lab helped open up the field of niche biology. First, by using an engineered mouse to alter a specific subset of bone marrow stromal cells and showing a hematopoietic phenotype. And, second, by showing that perturbing a specific set of stromal cells leads to disordered hematopoiesis and myeloid malignancy. I think these studies helped define elements of hematopoietic niches and perhaps, encouraged others to study mammalian niche biology more broadly. I don’t think there were any in vivo studies defining a mammalian niche before the work from my and Linheng Li’s labs. How did you get into the field you are working on? I have a very practical orientation driven by my training as a physician so I was interested in hematopoiesis as a way to c...

Leading a research group in Europe - Part III: Italy

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In my last two posts of this series of blogs on being a PI in Europe, I gave an overview of the French and British systems. In this new entry, I will discuss the Italian system. I will also talk about the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an intergovernmental scientific organization that operates a research unit near Rome where I am currently a principal investigator (PI). People entering the Italian research section are in majority people who performed their PhD research in Italy. After graduation, one is encouraged to undertake the post-doctoral research abroad. Successful PostDoc will likely gain a position in ones' alma-mater. In the Italian university system, a researcher can return to her/his former lab and work there as a post-doc for a few years. One way to gain a permanent position as a professor in an Italian university starts with an exam called “concorso”. First, one has to become a ricercatore tipo A (RtdA). This position is for three years. Practic...

Exploring Experimental Hematology: June 2019 (Volume 74)

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Exploring Experimental Hematology: CD123 CAR T cells for the treatment of myelodysplastic syndrome In this issue of Simply Blood, Christophe Lancrin is exploring Experimental Hematology by highlighting and deconstructing one of his favorite manuscripts from the ISEH society journal: " CD123 CAR T cells for the treatment of myelodysplastic syndrome ."   The power to utilize the adaptive immune system to kill cancer cells has long been recognized to have tremendous therapeutic potential but for many years this remained only an elusive dream. However, over the past few decades, tremendous progress has been made along this front. One notable (and Nobel worthy!) breakthrough was the understanding of immune checkpoints. This helped in the design of effective cancer immunotherapies by removing the “brakes” called PD1 and CTLA4 that restrict the immune response of T lymphocytes against cancer cells. Now, antibodies specific to these molecules have proven to be powerful weapons a...

ISEH July 2019 – Message from the President: Bertie Gottgens

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Former ISEH President Elaine Dzierzak asking a  question at the EHA-ISEH session in Amsterdam Dear ISEH Friends and Colleagues, This is my final president’s message before I will be stepping down at the end of the ISEH Annual Meeting in August in Brisbane. It has been a real privilege to work on your behalf, with invaluable support from enthusiastic volunteers from right across the globe as well as our dedicated team at SmithBucklin in Chicago. We are fortunate to see exciting breakthroughs in our field on an almost weekly basis, where ground-breaking discoveries in basic research go hand-in-hand with the development of exciting new therapies. Such breakthroughs critically depend on a vibrant research community, and I believe that we can all be proud of the important contributions that the ISEH has made over the last nearly 50 years to foster exactly this. I am happy to provide you all with an update on the developing partnership between ISEH and the European Hematol...