Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is proud to announce that Laurie H. Glimcher, MD, president and CEO, has been recognized by Modern Healthcare as one of 2021’s Women Leaders Luminaries. The list includes executives whose careers have been defined by reshaping the industry who are also perennial figures in Modern Healthcare’s recognition programs. The profiles of all the honorees are featured in the February 15…
Seward Rutkove, MD, has been named Chair of the Department of Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Starting March 1, Rutkove will lead the department’s cutting-edge patient care, clinical and translational research, as well as foster innovative approaches to diagnostics and delivery of care. “We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Rutkove into his new role as Chair of…
While PCR testing has been used widely for COVID-19 diagnosis, it only provides information on who is currently infected. Antibody testing can tell who has been previously exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, a metric that is essential for tracking spread across a population. It may also, as a study recently published in the journal Nature Communications shows, hold the…
Vaccines are needed to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) and to protect persons who are at high risk for complications. The mRNA-1273 vaccine is a lipid nanoparticle–encapsulated mRNA-based vaccine that encodes the prefusion stabilized full-length spike protein of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes Covid-19. This phase 3 randomized, observer-blinded, placebo-controlled trial was conducted…
We are developing algorithms that can learn from rich and widely collected medical data, like mammograms or CT scans, to deepen our understanding of cancer. On the oncology side, we are particularly interested in predicting future cancer risk, in order to reduce over-treatment and advance early detection.
Benjamin Ebert, MD, PhD, Chair of Medical Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, George P. Canellos, MD, and Jean S. Canellos Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Institute Member of Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, has been awarded the Sjöberg Prize, an annual international prize in cancer research. The prize was awarded for Dr. Ebert’s discovery of the…
Antibodies serve as biomarkers of infection, but if sustained can confer long-term immunity. Yet, for most clinically approved vaccines, binding antibody titers only serve as a surrogate of protection. Instead, the ability of vaccine induced antibodies to neutralize or mediate Fc-effector functions is mechanistically linked to protection. While evidence has begun to point to persisting antibody responses among SARS-CoV-2 infected…
Early on in the pandemic, Lee Makowski read an article about the condition of people’s bodies after dying of COVID-19, and he was shocked by what he learned—there was something very wrong with the patients’ blood. The autopsy reports revealed COVID-19 patients were suffering from huge amounts of thick, coagulated blood, and dysfunctional blood vessels were tearing through body tissue instead of…
The Toffler Scholar Program was established by the Karen Toffler Charitable Trust to support promising young medical researchers, physicians and scientists working on early-stage, future-focused brain science with funding and a vital, relevant network through an internal competition at BUSM. Their research is focused on building artificial intelligence models to identify brain regions that suggest Alzheimer’s disease risk and seek…
Scientists say they have discovered a potential new target for immunotherapy of malignant brain tumors, which so far have resisted the ground-breaking cancer treatment based on harnessing the body’s immune system. The discovery, reported in the journal CELL, emerged from laboratory experiments and has no immediate implications for treating patients. Scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Broad Institute…
