Wyss Institute Core Faculty member Jennifer Lewis inducted into The National Academy of Sciences. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University
Lewis was among 84 new members and 21 foreign associates honored for their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research” at Saturday’s annual NAS meeting.
Lewis was one of six new members—one from each Academy Class—invited to present their research during the meeting.
Lewis’ research focuses on the digital design and assembly of functional, structural and biological materials. Her pioneering work on printing soft matter in three dimensions is advancing the development of flexible electronics, soft robotics, lightweight architectures, and vascularized human tissues. Lewis’ multi-material printing platform enables programmable control over the composition, structure and properties of soft and livingmatter over multiple scales. Lewis also is the co-leader of the Wyss Institute’s 3D Organ Engineering Initiative.
Lewis earned an Sc.D. in Ceramic Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among her many honors, she received the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow Award, the Brunauer and Sosman Awards from the American Ceramic Society, the Langmuir Lecture Award from the American Chemical Society, the Materials Research Society Medal, and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. She is also an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has co-founded two companies, Electroninks, Inc. and Voxel8, Inc., that are translating advances in printable materials and methods from her lab.
I very much enjoyed your article regarding the use of antibiotics, particularly for UTIs. Not enough effort of medicine, in my opinion, is focused on women’s health. As you mentioned in your article, antibiotic resistance is a major problem and goes far beyond UTIs.
You mentioned that some doctors are concerned that they may run out of options. When you say “doctors”, it sounds as though you are referring to physicians. It is not just physicians who are concerned. A large portion (I am not saying this is a majority either) of the public is aware of this issue and is very concerned. Scientists/engineers, others with doctoral degrees and master’s degrees care very much about this issue and are working to wih the hope of ensuring that there are solutions to these problems.
The quote about “Antibiotic resistance-not just [for UTIs] but all kinds of antibiotic resistance-is a huge problem, and no one’s really doing anything about it” is simply not true.
The Gates Foundation and the UK committed to $52 million dollars in 2018. The Gate’s foundation also helped support this fantastic research: Link. NIAID of the NIH also supports a great deal of research for inhibiting multi-drug resistant strains of bacteria. There are over 8000 articles in PubMed alone which refer to antibiotic resistance. Specific articles which may be of interest to readers include:
Some 360,000 children a year in three African countries will receive the world’s first malaria vaccine as part of a large-scale pilot project, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday.
Malawi has started vaccinating children under two years of age and Kenya and Ghana will begin using the vaccine in the coming weeks, with health ministries in these countries deciding where it will be used, the WHO said.
The vaccine offers partial protection from the disease, with clinical trials finding that the vaccine prevented approximately four in 10 malaria cases, according to the WHO.
“We have seen tremendous gains from bed nets and other measures to control malaria in the last 15 years, but progress has stalled and even reversed in some areas. We need new solutions to get the malaria response back on track, and this vaccine gives us a promising tool to get there,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press statement.
“The malaria vaccine has the potential to save tens of thousands of children’s lives.”
Malaria is a parasitic disease transmitted through the bite of female Anopheles mosquitoes. It is both preventable and treatable, yet an estimated 435,000 people die of it each year.
Children under five are at the greatest risk of its life-threatening complications and according to the WHO, it claims the life of one child every two minutes. Most of these deaths are in Africa, where more than 250,000 children die from the disease every year.
The vaccine, RTS,S, also known as Mosquirix, was created by scientists at the British pharmaceutical giant GSK in 1987. It has undergone years of testing and was supported by numerous organizations including PATH, a non-profit organization.
From 2000 to 2015, there was a 62% reduction in malaria deaths, according to the WHO, and a 41% reduction in the number of cases. However, more recent data suggests that malaria is making a comeback, with 219 million cases in 2017, compared with 217 million in 2016.
“It’s a difficult disease to deal with. The tools we have are modestly effective but drugs and insecticides wear out — after 10, 20 years mosquitoes become resistant. There’s a real concern that in 2020s, [cases] are going to jump back up again,” said Adrian Hill, a professor of human genetics and director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford.
The vaccine will be given in four doses: three doses between five and nine months of age and the fourth dose provided around the 2nd birthday.
The WHO said the vaccine was a “complementary malaria control tool” to be used in addition to bed nets treated with insecticide, spraying indoor areas with insecticides as well as prompt diagnosis and treatment of the disease.
Alena Pance, senior staff scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said the vaccine was not “overwhelmingly effective.”
“But it is very important to bear in mind that 40% protection in the most endemic part of the world, Africa, is better than no protection at all. Ultimately, this is the only vaccine that has some efficacy that we currently have and has taken decades to develop, this is in itself good news,” Pance said.
Hill said that there had been “stops and starts” about whether it was worth going forward with the vaccine but it would be a useful addition in the fight against the disease.
He said it would be particularly important to make sure that children received all four doses of the vaccine to maximize its efficacy.
A Texas A&M team has identified a possible new treatment approach for chemotherapy-resistant glioblastoma.By Christina Sumners, Texas A&M University Health Science Center FEBRUARY 21, 2019
Glioblastoma (GBM) is among the most common and malignant types of primary brain tumors in adults, and one with a poor prognosis. The tendency of this type of tumor to aggressively and widely spread through the brain makes it nearly impossible to completely remove the cancer through surgery. And although a limited number of chemotherapy drugs have been approved to treat glioblastoma, the first-line treatments like the drug temozolomide often cause chemo-resistance, meaning the drug becomes ineffective against the tumor and any recurrences.
“There is an urgent need to develop novel effective drugs for glioblastoma therapy in the clinic,” Zhou said. “To expedite this process, we set up a high throughput method using high-content imaging-based techniques to screen inhibitors that target various proto-oncogenic pathways in living cancer cells.”
In other words, he and his team ran through inhibitors of a number of cancer-related pathways to determine their effect on cancer cells.
The screening efforts were strongly supported by the High Throughput Research and Screening Center under the supervision of Clifford Stephan, PhD, research associate professor at the Institute of Biosciences and Technology.
In this study, Zhou and his team focused on a master regulator of gene expression called the nuclear factor of activated T-cells (NFAT). NFAT was first described as a key transcription factor for the activation of cells of the immune system, but has been recently shown to contribute to tumor growth and cancer progression in patients.
Abnormally high expression or overactivation of NFAT is often seen in multi-cancer types and particularly in cancer in advanced clinical stages. NFAT controls the expression of a set of downstream cancer-associated genes to promote tumor growth and malignant transformation.
After going through multiple rounds of screening, the team identified YZ129 as a promising lead compound. By collaborating with a medicinal chemist Minyong Li, PhD, at Shandong University School of Pharmacy, they further improved the efficacy of the compound.
“YZ129 proved to be potent in anti-glioblastoma activity that might provide alternative therapeutics for temozolomide-resistant tumors,” said Lian He, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in Zhou’s lab. “YZ129, unexpectedly, not only suppresses NFAT-mediated gene transcription, but also directly inhibits the heat shock protein 90 (HSP90), a protein chaperone that assist the unfolding and folding of key macromolecules in cancer cells.”
Through a combination of chemical biology and biophysical approaches, the team described the underlying working mechanisms. They have shown that YZ129 imposed broad inhibitory effects on key cancer-associated pathways.
When YZ129 was injected in an animal model of brain tumors, the compound effectively curtailed glioblastoma growth and promoted cancer cell death. More promisingly, the team was able to see its therapeutic effects on tumors implanted in the brain, thereby attesting to the possibility that YZ129 might travel across the blood-brain barrier to take effect. In the clinical trials, a lot of drug candidates fail because of their inability to efficiently cross this barrier.
“Further investigations on the pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, and mechanisms of action in living animals are needed to fully establish the rationale for launching clinical trials.” said Peng Tan, PhD, a former graduate student who also contributed to this project. “Clearly, this new class of HSP90/NFAT inhibitors hold great promises to offer viable therapeutic options for future glioblastoma intervention.”
After four years of litigation battles, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, or USPTO, has finally approved a third CRISPR patent for the UC system.
CRISPR-Cas9, co-developed by UC Berkeley professor of biochemistry and molecular biology Jennifer Doudna, is a revolutionary gene-editing technology derived from a bacterial genome. The UC system is not the sole entity to benefit from this patent, as it is also in collaboration with Emmanuelle Charpentier of Umeå University and Krzysztof Chylinski of the University of Vienna.
“We are excited to have been granted a patent recognizing the Doudna and Charpentier contributions to CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, and look forward to future successful patents that expand upon this technology and its applications,” said Doudna Lab project manager Meredith Triplet.
Litigation for the patent began in January 2015, according to UC lead CRISPR patent strategist Eldora Ellison, who said that litigation was necessary due to crossover between the UC’s patent and a Broad Institute patent application. The Broad Institute is a biomedical research facility that belongs to Harvard and MIT.
“It’s always been the university’s view that it should be entitled to a patent on the subject matter; there was simply a question of whether there needed to be interference proceedings with the Broad Institute,” Ellison said.
Ellison added that the three patents are not limited to use in eukaryotes and allow CRISPR use in both cellular and noncellular environments, such as laboratories. The three patents differ in the specific guide RNAs directing the Cas9 protein to the target nucleotide sequence, according to Ellison.
This “beautiful technology” is different from past CRISPR systems because the newer system better specifies where to cut sequences, which distinguishes it from older CRISPR technologies that were less specific, added Ellison.
The approval of the patent will not affect current lab activity as all technology in the CRISPR patents are allowed to be used in labs, said Robert Sanders, campus manager of science communications.
Though CRISPR technology has been available for research purposes in the past, the new patent will have implications for commercial use, according to Ellison.
“This is important technology,” he said. “The university is committed to ensuring that this technology can be used for the betterment of humankind.”
CRISPR-Cas9 has important implications for the future — even as this patent is finalized over the next eight weeks, others are in the works.
“It’s great that we got the patent that we applied for six years ago,” Sanders said. “There are many more patents that we have for the CRISPR technology, so we hope that we will continue to get more patents for out portfolio.”
Dr. Bernice “Bunny” Sandler in an undated photo. She was a driving force in the creation of Title IX, which opened doors and established protection for women in education.CreditMcClatchy-Tribune/Alamy
When Bernice Sandler was a schoolgirl in the 1930s and ’40s, she was annoyed that she was not allowed to do things that boys could do, like be a crossing guard, fill the inkwells or operate the slide projector.
When she was older, teaching part-time at the University of Maryland, she was told that she wasn’t being hired for a full-time job because “you come on too strong for a woman.” Another interviewer complained that women stayed home when their children were sick. Another rejected her by saying that she was “just a housewife who went back to school.”
By that time, which was 1969, Dr. Sandler was more than annoyed. She was good and mad. And that led her to become the driving force behind the creation of Title IX, the sweeping civil rights law of 1972 that barred sex discrimination by educational institutions that received federal funding.
Dr. Sandler, who died on Saturday at 90, was known as “the godmother of Title IX.” She was central to its development, passage and implementation.
The law would change the landscape of education. It required that male and female students have equal access to admissions, resources and financial assistance, among other things.
“Every woman who has gone to college, gotten a law degree or a medical degree, was able to take shop instead of home-ec, or went to a military academy really owes her a huge debt,” Margaret Dunkle, a research colleague and friend, said in a telephone interview.
As time went on, Dr. Sandler identified more areas where sexual discrimination could be fought with Title IX. One was college athletics. It has since been transformed, with far more women able to play sports today than in the past.
Another focus was sexual assault and harassment. The United States Supreme Court has established that sexual harassment of students qualifies as discrimination in violation of Title IX; schools that receive federal funding must take steps to prevent sexual misconduct on their campuses.
“Title IX turned out to be the legislative equivalent of a Swiss Army knife,” Marty Langelan, an expert in sexual harassment and longtime friend of Dr. Sandler’s, said in a telephone interview.
“It opened up opportunities in so many areas we didn’t foresee, and Bunny laid the essential groundwork for it all,” she said, using Dr. Sandler’s nickname.
Back in the 1960s, Dr. Sandler did not consider herself a feminist. It was her husband who defined her rejection notices as sex discrimination.
“Like many women at that time,” she wrote in a 1997 article for the National Association for Women in Education, “I was somewhat ambivalent about the women’s movement and halfway believed the press descriptions of its supporters as ‘abrasive,’ ‘man-hating,’ ‘radical,’ and ‘unfeminine.’ ”
Dr. Sandler delved into research on sex discrimination, which at the time was not illegal in education. In a footnote to a scholarly article on enforcing civil rights legislation, she found a golden nugget — a reference to an unheralded executive order, amended by President Lyndon B. Johnson, that barred organizations with federal contracts from discriminating on the basis of sex.
Dr. Sandler well knew that most universities received federal dollars.
Armed with that executive order, she and the Women’s Equity Action League, a now-defunct spinoff of the National Organization for Women that focused on equality for women in employment, began a historic class action in 1970 on behalf of all women in higher education.
They did not go to court but instead filed an administrative complaint with the Labor Department against all colleges and universities in the country, charging an “industrywide pattern” of discrimination against women in academia. They sought an investigation into admission quotas to undergraduate and graduate schools and into faculty hiring practices, promotions and salary differentials.
Dr. Sandler vacuumed up data on rampant discrimination, attaching 80 pages of documentation to the complaint. She pointed out quotas, like one at the Cornell School of Veterinary Medicine, which admitted two women a year, regardless of how many applied. She found that many academic departments across the country had no women faculty at all and that women were often denied scholarships if they were married.
During the next two years, she filed additional administrative complaints against more than 250 institutions, including the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University and the entire state university and college systems of California, New Jersey and Florida. Allies filed dozens more.
Dr. Sandler shared all of her research with Rep. Edith Green, an Oregon Democrat, who held seven days of hearings in the House of Representatives in the summer of 1970 on sex discrimination in education; after the hearings, Ms. Green hired Dr. Sandler to join her subcommittee staff to put together the written record of the hearings.
That record became the basis for the legislation that eventually became Title IX. Senator Birch Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, pushed the bill through the Senate, and President Richard M. Nixon signed it into law.
“She had many allies, but Bunny Sandler was the point person,” Ms. Langelan said. “She taught us that you could actually do something about discrimination.”
Dr. Sandler said later that she had been naïve in guessing how quickly change would come. She initially thought, she said, that “it would only take a year or two for all the inequities based on sex to be eliminated.”
Over time, she kept lengthening that prediction, until, she said, she finally realized that true change “would take more than my lifetime to accomplish.”
Her daughter Deborah Jo Sandler said Dr. Sandler died of cancer at her home in Washington, D.C. Dr. Sandler is also survived by another daughter, Emily Maud Sanders, and three grandchildren.
Bernice Resnick was born on March 3, 1928, in Brooklyn, where she and her older sister, Rhoda, grew up. Her father, Abraham Hyman Resnick, and her mother, Ida (Ernst) Resnick, owned a woman’s sportswear store, Resnick’s Fashions, in Rockaway, N.J.
She received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Brooklyn College in 1948, a master’s in psychology from the City College of New York in 1950, and a doctorate in education from the University of Maryland in 1969. Her marriage in 1952 to Jerrold Sandler ended in divorce in 1978.
Unable to find a job in psychology or counseling, Dr. Sandler worked as a preschool teacher, a guitar instructor and a secretary.
But once she got involved in Title IX, she devoted the rest of her life to combating sex discrimination. She spent two decades as the director of the Project on the Status and Education of Women at the Association of American Colleges. She delivered more than 2,500 presentations and served as a consultant to numerous institutions, including the Citadel, the South Carolina military college, as it edged toward coeducation with a “female assimilation plan.”
When attending events at the all-male Cosmos Club, an exclusive Washington organization that did not admit women until 1988, Dr. Sandler refused to enter by the back door, as women were instructed to do. Once, while scattering buttons around the club that said “Uppity Women Unite,” a male waiter asked for a handful. He then planted them on the urinals in the men’s bathrooms.
Dr. Sandler received multiple awards, a dozen honorary degrees and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2013.
In a 2007 article, she concluded that Title IX had precipitated a social revolution comparable to the Industrial Revolution. Women and men, she said, “are far closer to equal than they have ever been in the history of the world.”
But, Dr. Sandler added, “We have only taken the very first steps of what will be a very long journey.”A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 8, 2019, on Page B10 of the New York edition with the headline: Bernice Sandler, ‘Godmother of Title IX,’ Dies at 90.
Peter Meldrum in his office at The Meldrum Foundation in Salt Lake City in 2016. He argued that allowing companies to patent genes would “encourage innovation and development of products that can save lives and improve the quality of lives.”CreditDan Hixson/University of Utah College of Engineering
Peter Meldrum in his office at The Meldrum Foundation in Salt Lake City in 2016. He argued that allowing companies to patent genes would “encourage innovation and development of products that can save lives and improve the quality of lives.”CreditCreditDan Hixson/University of Utah College of Engineering
Peter D. Meldrum, who led the biotech company Myriad Genetics for 23 years, when it was at the heart of a landmark court battle involving whether two genes associated with breast cancer could be patented, died on Dec. 20 in Salt Lake City. He was 71.
A spokesman for the company said the cause was a head injury sustained when he fell while playing touch football with his grandchildren.
Mr. Meldrum and Mark Skolnick founded Myriad Genetics in 1991, and Mr. Meldrum became its chief executive officer the next year, taking it from a small start-up to a publicly traded company that by the time he retired in 2015 had annual revenues of more than $700 million. Its most visible product during that time was a test for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that could indicate a heightened risk of breast and ovarian cancer.
The company had been granted patents on those genes, which, working with several partners, it had isolated after Mary-Claire King, then at the University of California, Berkeley, had traced it to a particular chromosome in 1990.
Those patents, which the company vigorously defended during Mr. Meldrum’s tenure, enabled Myriad to monopolize the testing for mutations in the genes. A coalition of groups, including the Association for Molecular Pathology and the American Civil Liberties Union, challenged the patents in court, arguing that a part of the human body could not be patented and that Myriad’s monopoly was stifling research, inflating the cost of the test and preventing many women from getting tested.
After years of back-and-forth rulings in lower courts, in June 2013 the Supreme Court invalidated the patents, ruling 9-0 that human genes, as opposed to those created synthetically, could not be patented.
“A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court. “It is undisputed that Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information encoded in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.”
By that time, though, the company was moving toward a more comprehensive genetic test and had developed tests in other areas like colon cancer and rheumatoid arthritis.
Peter Durkee Meldrum was born on June 26, 1947, in Salt Lake City to Benjamin and Grace Durkee Meldrum. He received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1970 from the University of Utah, where he was on the cross-country team. After two years in the Army as a radiological officer, he returned to the university for graduate school, receiving a master’s degree in business administration in 1974.
Mr. Meldrum married Catherine Marie Roper in 1970. She survives him, as do a son, Christopher; a brother, Daniel; and three grandsons.
He started a venture capital firm, Founders Fund. In 1991 he joined forces with Dr. Skolnick, a genetics researcher and professor at the university, to start Myriad.
“The vision for the company was that we saw a paradigm shift in medicine,” Mr. Meldrum said in 2009, when he was inducted into the Utah Technology Council’s Hall of Fame. The shift was from treating diseases to preventing them, using the newly emerging tools of genetics.
“I told Mark when we started Myriad that the odds of us being successful were one in 10 in the technology field,” Mr. Meldrum recalled in 2016, “so this was probably going to go nowhere. But I told him it’s a fascinating science and it’s going to be fun.”
In response to critics of the BRCA patents, Mr. Meldrum and others argued that the ability to secure such patents was vital to encouraging biotech companies to pursue research.
“Obviously, it’s not only important for Myriad but to the biotechnology and agriculture industries to reinforce the fact that you can get patents on genes,” Mr. Meldrum said in 2011, when an appeals court ruled in the company’s favor in the case that eventually went to the Supreme Court. “That will only encourage innovation and development of products that can save lives and improve the quality of lives.”
As for the cost issue, he argued in a letter to the editor printed in The New York Times in 2013 that insurance made the cost of the test — about $3,000 at the time — negligible for most women, and that the company also had a patient assistance program that paid much or all of the cost for eligible women. More than a million women had used the company’s test at that point, the letter said.
In addition to his work at Myriad, Mr. Meldrum served on the boards of arts organizations like Ballet West and was noted for his philanthropic efforts on behalf of the arts. After retiring, he was chairman of the Meldrum Foundation, a family charity that supports the arts, education and humanitarian efforts.
