New Laboratory Notebook Policy - Questions Asked and Answered

Several questions arose about the notebook policy, and those questions (Should a Group Leader counter-sign entries? Do visitors to the lab need to follow this policy? Does digital back-up have to be CD or zip?) are answered here.

Vital-IT Submissions

As you have heard, LICR is an academic partner of the "Vital-IT" project, an academia/industry partnership aiming to make high-performance computing (HPC) and software optimization expertise available to scientists in the life sciences. Project submissions from the LICR scientific community are now being solicited. Read for more details.

Cancer Vaccine Program Meeting

A meeting of investigators from the Cancer Vaccine Collaborative (CVC), a joint venture between LICR and the Cancer Research Institute (USA), met in New York in February. The CVC investigators (including representatives from the Branches in Lausanne, Melbourne and New York Branches, and Affiliate Centers in Buffalo, Frankfurt, Homburg, Mie, New York, Okayama and Zürich) presented and discussed the latest laboratory and clinical research (coordinated by LICR’s Office of Clinical Trials Management) related to the development of cancer vaccines. Read a summary of the meeting.

LICR News

Staff Promotions and Appointments
To Associate Member: Dr. Stefan Constantinescu (Brussels Branch)
To Assistant Investigator: Dr. Christian Iseli (LICR Office of Information Technology)
Congratulations to:
Dr. Web Cavenee, Director of the LICR San Diego Branch, has been awarded the Annual Faculty Award for Excellence in Research 2004, by host institution University California, San Diego.
Dr. Don Cleveland, Group Leader of the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the LICR San Diego Branch, whose NIH Grant was awarded a Jacob Javits Merit Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS); a seven year $350 000 grant.
Dr. Lucy Shapiro, LICR Scientific Committee Member and Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research at Stanford University School of Medicine, has been awarded the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology. The award, from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), is given approximately every two years in recognition of excellence in the field of microbiology, and has been awarded to Dr. Shapiro for "her pioneering work revealing the bacterial cell as an integrated system with transcriptional circuitry interwoven with the 3-D deployment of regulatory and morphological proteins." The award is supported by the Foundation for Microbiology and has been presented since 1968.
Dr. Ira Mellman, Affiliate at the LICR New Haven Affiliate Center, has been named the Scientific Director of the new Yale Cancer Center at Yale University, a $430 million comprehensive clinical cancer center to be completed in 2008. Dr. Mellman's appointment will solidify the existing scientific affiliations between Yale Cancer Center and LICR. "A partnership between Yale Cancer Center and the LICR will help to build a unique, academically-based effort that applies the best of cell biology, molecular biology, genetics, chemistry, and biochemistry to directly benefit our patients," Dr. Mellman explained at the announcement. "Cancer patients coming to Yale are not only be cared for by one of the most skilled and dedicated teams of healthcare professionals anywhere, but also by a team of distinguished scientists singularly committed to understanding and devising treatments for their disease."
LICR in the news:
Two back-to-back papers (in Journal of Experimental Medicine, Jan 17th 201(2):241-8, 249-57) from the Brussels Branch were covered by Nature News and Views-Research Highlights, Reuters Health and assorted medical websites. The studies, performed in collaboration with a group from their host institution (Université du Louvain), analyzed the frequencies of anti-tumor T cells in the blood before and after vaccination with tumor antigens, and also contrasted the frequencies of anti-tumor and anti-vaccination T cells in melanoma metastases.
Another LICR cancer vaccine study conducted through the Clinical Trials Program, this time from the Lausanne Branch, received coverage in the Swiss media. The Lausanne Branch team conducted the first clinical trial of a therapeutic cancer vaccine combining the synthetic bacterial DNA sequence, CpG 7909 (ProMune™, Coley Pharmaceutical), with a peptide antigen. The results (Journal of Clinical Investigation, Feb 3rd Epub) show that the CpG 7909 DNA sequence is safe, and increases the immune system's ability to recognize and destroy cancer cells.

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