BioHealth Innovation (BHI) Founder, President & CEO, Richard Bendis, hosts the BioTalk Podcast — conversations from the BioHealth Capital Region with some of the most accomplished and exciting business, academic, and government leaders in the biohealth industry. This episode, Mr. Bendis interviewed Dr. Michael Lenardo, co-founder of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. In this Podcast, you will learn more about the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Lenardo’s research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the impetus for starting the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program.
Listen now on Google Podcasts http://bit.ly/2Ws6L0v, Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/2WupsAq, and TuneIn http://bit.ly/2Pve2ex
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) announced the election of 90 regular members and 10 international members during its annual meeting. Michael J. Lenardo, Chief, Molecular Development of the Immune System Section, at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a founder of the NIH-Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program was inducted into NAM this week.
Dr. Lenardo is known for discoveries of molecular mechanisms of immunological tolerance, seminal work on programmed cell death, defining new inherited genetic diseases of immunity, and developing targeted therapies that have saved the lives of children suffering from certain of these devastating diseases. Dr. Lenardo was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019. Dr. Lenardo said, “It is a tremendous honor both for me and the NIH intramural program and recognizes not simply my efforts, but the many talented trainees and collaborators who worked with dedication on our research. It has been a wonderful adventure in scientific discovery and understanding.”
Election into NAM, which was previously known as the Institute of Medicine, is one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. The academy serves as a source of expertise by providing independent, evidence-based scientific and policy advice to inspire action across the private and public sectors regarding critical issues in health, medicine and science. Of those members, four faculty members of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been elected this year. Dr. Michael Lenardo joins Drs. Julie Segre, Luigi D. Notarangelo, Andre Nussenzweig.
In August, we shared with you a video made in 2009 highlighting the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. Where are those program alumni now, ten years later? How has the program and the support from the Alliance helped shape their careers? We reached out to each of the alumni interviewed in the original (somewhat fuzzy by today’s standards) video to share with you their continuing stories, starting with Kristina Cook.
Kristina Cook completed her DPhil in 2009 in Christopher Schofield’s lab (Oxford) and William (Doug) Figg’s lab (NIH/NCI). Her thesis focused on inhibiting an oxygen sensing pathway to develop novel anti-cancer drugs. Low-oxygen (hypoxic) environments are a universal hallmark of all solid cancers. Cancer cells exploit this environment to activate a transcription factor known as hypoxia inducible factor or HIF, which increases metastasis and chemotherapy resistance. Kristina’s collaborative DPhil project identified a new mechanism for inhibiting HIF and set up a high throughput screen at the NIH to identify a number of new HIF inhibitors.
During Kristina’s time in Oxford, she met her partner and now husband, who is Australian. When she finished her DPhil, Kristina moved to Sydney and took up a post-doc in a new area of research studying post-translational modifications of proteins.
Kristina explained: “I enjoyed the work and developed new skills, but ultimately my love of hypoxia came calling. I was lucky to secure fellowships and started my own lab in this area in 2017. In addition to continuing the work on tumor hypoxia and HIF inhibitors, my lab has an interesting project on obstructive sleep apnea (hypoxia!) and cancer. We’ve also started an exciting project on circadian rhythms and hypoxia. My nerdy side was really excited to see two Science papers come out this year on a new oxygen sensing pathway independent of HIF and we have started work in this area as well.”
“I absolutely loved my time in the NIH OxCam program. Studying alongside some the world’s greatest researchers at renowned institutions is hard to beat, but the NIH OxCam program is so much more than that. One unique aspect of the program was the leadership and mentoring components. Top-notch science isn’t the only important quality for running a lab, and skills in leadership, mentoring and team-building are equally important. The NIH OxCam program had a strong focus on developing these qualities and they have served me well as I build my team. It is fantastic that the NIH OxCam program prepares their students to be future leaders and mentors. When we build strong teams in a supportive environment, we have the best chance at making ground-breaking discoveries and changing clinical outcomes. I made many lifelong friends in the OxCam program and these friendships were essential to getting through graduate school. We still like to catch up through Skype today.”
Kristina lives in beautiful Sydney, Australia. Kristina, her husband, and their four-year-old son love going to the beach and spend every weekend there in the summer (making us all jealous as Australia’s summer is during our winter). They love to travel as a family and have been to many places including Vietnam, Thailand, Hawaii, Mexico, and the U.S.
Since 1945, the Lasker Foundation has highlighted how basic biological discoveries drive innovative clinical therapies and techniques and how science stokes our curiosity about the intricate and often beautiful processes that underlie all life forms.
Over the course of their seven decades, the Lasker Awards have come to be known as “America’s Nobels,” in part because of their standing as America’s most prestigious biomedical research awards, and in part because those selected so often go on to win the Nobel Prize. Eighty-eight Lasker laureates have received the Nobel Prize, including 41 in the last three decades. Today, that number has increased by three.
The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly awarded William G. Kaelin Jr, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza “for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability” today. They identified molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes in response to varying levels of oxygen.
In 2016, the NIH Oxford-Cambridge/Wellcome Trust (WT) scholars had the opportunity to attend the Lasker Awards which honored these three physician-scientists for their discovery of the pathway by which cells from human and most animals sense and adapt to changes in oxygen availability, a process that is essential for survival. Alumni David Bulger, Joanna Cross, Alexander Weiss, Andrew Breglio, Keval Patel and Huayu Ding conversed with the 2019 Nobel Laureates, along with Ralf F. W. Bartenschlager, Charles M. Rice, Michael J. Sofia, and Bruce M. Alberts who all received the 2016 Lasker Awards.
The Alliance congratulates William G. Kaelin Jr., Sir Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza, as well as, all of the winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize.
The Dr. Richard and Vera Siegel Translational Award was generously endowed by NIH MD/PhD Partnership Program Co-Founder, Dr. Richard Siegel and his wife, Vera. First awarded in 2016, this annual award recognizes advances in the field of medical science that move fundamental discoveries from the bench to the bedside. The recipient of the Translational Award for 2019 was NIH-Cambridge Scholar Zinan Zhang. Zinan is an OxCam Class of 2017 Scholar and MD/PhD student at the Harvard Medical School. He is mentored by Dr. Michael Lenardo of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Prof. Ken Smith of the Cambridge Department of Medicine.
Zinan coordinated a multinational collaboration between the United Kingdom, the United States, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, and France to collect a group of pediatric patients that all have a novel genetic disease that he discovered involving the deficiency of the IL-2 receptor beta (IL2RB) chain. In addition to defining this new disease and demonstrating the molecular mechanism of defective IL-2 signaling in different patients, he developed novel insights into receptor function in different immune cell subsets. He was able to show how three different IL2RB mutations can cause IL2RB deficiency by three distinct mechanisms. Interestingly, one hypomorphic IL2RB mutation differentially affected T cells and Natural Killer cell subsets. In addition, lentiviral gene transfer was able to rescue the disease phenotype in patient cells.
Zinan’s work has opened a new area for translational research for this primary immunodeficiency disease. To learn more about his research and findings, he recently published a first-author publication in The Journal of Experimental Medicine.
We congratulate Zinan on both his accolades, as he was also awarded the Best Talk at the Annual Workshop and wish him continued success in his doctoral career.
