June 2009

On May 26th, the IGSP welcomed 15 undergraduate summer fellows, who will spend the next two months exploring questions in genome sciences and policy under the mentorship of IGSP faculty.

Six of this year's undergraduate fellows are Duke students and the other nine hail from other schools around the country, both near and far, including Northwestern University, Case Western Reserve, North Carolina Central University and Dixie State College of Utah. The students also come from diverse educational backgrounds, with majors in mathematics, biology, chemistry, bioinformatics, biomedical engineering, pharmaceutical science, cognitive science and evolutionary anthropology.

We also welcome Ahmad Hariri as a new IGSP Investigator in the department of psychology and neuroscience. Hariri's research focuses on the use of "imaging genetics" to reveal the complex interplay of genes, brain and behavior. He comes to Duke from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Hariri was one of several IGSP Investigators who participated in a recent conference at Duke, entitled "Gene-Environment Interactions in Developmental Psychopathology: So What?" If you missed it, check out the video online.

SPECIAL UPDATE: ARRA

Mark Delong and Hunt Willard have been awarded the first grant for the IGSP courtesy of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The National Institutes of Health award will support a High-Performance Computing System for Bioinformatics.

Patenting Breast Cancer Genes: Good for Patients?
If the American Civil Liberties Union wins a lawsuit challenging the breast cancer gene patents held by Myriad Genetics, "it will be game changing in terms of how patents are granted for genetic testing," says Bob Cook-Deegan in a U.S. News and World Report blog post.

Will Francis Collins Lead the NIH?
In a GenomeWeb report, Misha Angrist comments on speculation that Former National Human Genome Research Institute Director Francis Collins may be the next leader of the National Institutes of Health.

Hardware or Software?
A Duke Research blog post features a recent Sigma Xi talk by Greg Wray in which he shared his view that biology's fixation on the "hardware," the coding sequences of DNA that carry blueprints for specific proteins, has obscured the importance of the regulatory sequences, or "software," that tell those coding sequences when, where and how to take action.

Fighting Cancer in Man and His Best Friend
Sandeep Dave has teamed up with cancer researchers at N.C. State University's veterinary hospital and UNC-Chapel Hill to study dogs with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer common in dogs and humans alike, The News & Observer reports.

Will Genetic Test Results Drive Lifestyle Decisions?
A San Diego Union-Tribune article about a 20-year study of Scripps Health employees who have undergone genomic testing by Navigenics features the IGSP's David Goldstein and his recent commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine. Goldstein was also featured in a second column about whether genetic tests deserve more regulation, which appeared in Reason Online.

Cutting Carbs to Slow Prostate Cancer Growth
The IGSP's Phil Febbo and Alok Tewari were collaborators on a study that found carbohydrate restriction, regardless of weight loss, appears to slow the growth of prostate tumors. Read the original article in the journal Cancer Prevention Research.

Personalized Medicine Coalition Publishes The Case for Personalized Medicine
An announcement issued by the Personalized Medicine Coalition features Geoff Ginsburg and the genome-guided cancer trials led by the IGSP's Clinical Genomics Studies Unit.

Why Screening Your Genes is Big Business
David Goldstein says in a CNN report that "given the current knowledge of how genes influence disease, there is only a 'recreational' use for retail tests." The comment got a mention in an Allure Magazine blog.

Gates' 'Grand Challenge' grants fund Duke, Emory projects
The IGSP's Ashley Chi will lead a "potential program to eradicate malaria" with a $100,000 "Grand Challenges" grant award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, WRAL reports.

Epigenetic Events Highlight the Challenge of Validating Prognostic Biomarkers During the Clinical and Biologic Evolution of Prostate Cancer
In a Journal of Clinical Oncology editorial, Phil Febbo says that "future improvements in our ability to anticipate prostate cancer prognosis are likely more dependent on the incorporation of molecular events than on additional refinement of clinical variables."

Factors Influencing Uptake of Pharmacogenetic Testing in a Diverse Patient Population
A survey of adult patients at Duke Family Medicine Center conducted by Susanne Haga, Julianne O'Daniel and their colleagues found no differences in interest in PGx tests by race or socioeconomic status, according to a report in Public Health Genomics.

Polymorphisms of the Scavenger Receptor Class B Member 1 Are Associated with Insulin Resistance with Evidence of Gene by Sex Interaction
Jeanette McCarthy and colleagues report in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism new evidence supporting an association between SCARB1 variants and insulin resistance, especially in women, with evidence of significant gene by sex interaction.

IGSP Investigator Ashley Chi has been selected by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund as a recipient of a 2009 Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease award, which will provide $500,000 during a five-year period in support of multidisciplinary approaches to pathogenesis. Chi's proposed research will focus on the sequence determinant of Plasmodium falciparum gene regulation by human microRNAs.

Subha Chandrasekharan in the IGSP's GELP has won a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project entitled "Intellectual property challenges for the development of genomic diagnostics."

The National Institutes of Health will fund development of new non-invasive methods for diagnosis and monitoring of the progression of diabetes, kidney, urological, hematological, and digestive diseases and kidney disorders, with grants covering up to five years of research.

Two NSF grant programs, the Major Research Instrumentation Program and the Academic Research Infrastructure Program, aim to foster research and educational opportunities by funding the purchase of shared next-generation research tools and the renovation or repair of laboratory space. Both programs are part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The National Cancer Institute will give grants for US-based researchers studying new technologies for detecting and evaluating carcinogens, including assays that use markers for DNA damage, oncogenic contaminants, and other genetic and cellular methods.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) will reissue an RFA for the "Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET)" aimed at cancer control interventions, including the use of genomic and family history risk profiles and the optimization of biomarker development strategies.