LabBook December 20, 2013

Remembering a giant of cancer research and more in this week’s LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from our blogs, around campus and the internet.

This week on the blog:

• We said goodbye to cancer genetics pioneer Janet Rowley, who died this week at the age of 88.
• UChicago physicians announced the results of a pre-clinical study that could soon lead to phase I clinical trials to treat women with relapsed, metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.
• Neurosurgeon Peter Warnke is working with a new, minimally invasive treatment for children with focal epilepsy.
• In December’s Science Life podcast, we discussed new evidence for the RNA origin of life, how Staph aureus hijacks our immune systems, and a new grant to study hypothetical genes in the bacteria that cause plague and brucellosis.
• Arshiya Baig and her colleagues hosted a town hall to bring their community project to fight diabetes full circle.

Remembering Janet Rowley:

In lieu of our usual roundup of UChicago research from the web, we thought we’d recap some of our coverage of Janet Rowley her work over the years here at Science Life.

• In 2009, we spoke to her after she attended a ceremony in which President Obama signed an executive order to lift restrictions on federal support for stem cell research.
• Later that year she won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. We marked the occasion by looking back at her landmark discovery of the gene translocation that triggered uncontrolled cell growth in chronic myelogenous leukemia.
• Rowley’s discovery eventually led to the development of a drug to treat CML called Gleevec, the first of its kind to target the genetic mutations causing cancer. In September of 2009 the research group that developed Gleevec won the Lasker Award, a prestigious honor earned 11 years earlier by none other than Dr. Rowley.
• In 2012 we told the story of another genetic mutation causing leukemia that Rowley and some of her proteges at UChicago helped discover.
• Earlier this year she won the prestigious Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research for her body of work.
• And finally, this summer to looked at Jessica Wapner’s book, “The Philadelphia Chromosome,” which chronicled the discovery of the genetic roots of cancer, including Rowley’s crucial breakthrough on finding the mysterious gene translocation causing CML.

We’re taking a break next week, but we’ll be back with a year-end round up before the new year. Happy holidays!