Community

With Expertise and Enthusiasm, SeroNet’s Hub Surges Ahead

The past year for Ligia Pinto, Ph.D., and her staff has been full of pressure and remote meetings at all hours of the day and night. It’s also been one of partnerships and progress. Pinto heads the Vaccine, Immunity, and Cancer Directorate, the group at the Frederick National Laboratory that’s leading the national SARS-CoV-2 Serological Sciences Network (SeroNet). At this time last year, her laboratories, which specialized in human papillomavirus, antibody science, and serology, had just been asked to help the Food and Drug Administration evaluate the quality of the new SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests that were flooding the market.

In Memoriam: George Vande Woude, Ph.D. (1935-2021)

The CCR community is profoundly saddened by the recent passing of George Vande Woude, Ph.D., longtime National Cancer Institute (NCI) colleague, former director of the Advanced Bioscience Laboratories (ABL)-Basic Research Program and former director of the Division of Basic Sciences at NCI. George made many important contributions to the current understanding of the molecular biology of cancer.

Echoes from the Past: BRMP, Bastion of Progress, Resonates Decades Later

Though it lasted just 15 years, Frederick’s first clinical oncology program answered multiple fundamental questions in the fledgling field of immunotherapy and primed the local medical community to become the oncology research hub it is today. The Biological Response Modifiers Program (BRMP) received formal recognition from the Department of Health and Human Services 40 years ago today, on April 27.

Annual Science Fair Continues Virtually, and Eight Interns Win Prizes

Eight Werner H. Kirsten student interns took home awards at this year’s Frederick County Science and Engineering Fair, a virtual competition between local middle and high school students with a passion for the sciences. The event hosted 70 students who created 64 projects, including 28 high school students who submitted 25 projects. Together, the WHK interns who won awards comprised nearly one-third of participating high schoolers.

New Facilities, Structure, and Opportunities Invigorate Frederick’s Science

Tucked away among NCI at Frederick’s various buildings, two facilities are quietly under development. In one, engineers are assembling a hulking Titan Krios electron microscope. In the other, equipment is slowly but surely being gathered for eventual installation. The microscope belongs to the newly minted Center for Structural Biology, formed from a merger of the Macromolecular Crystallography Laboratory and the Structural Biology Laboratory. It is the first of Thermo Fisher Scientific’s latest line of Krios microscopes to be installed outside of one of the company’s factories.

Welcome to Your Library: National Library Week 2021

From April 4–10, the Scientific Library invites you to celebrate National Library Week. This year’s theme is “Welcome to Your Library.” The Scientific Library staff is eager to greet you when in-person operations resume, but in the interim, they welcome you to explore the many services that continue beyond the four walls of the Library’s locations in Building 549 and at the Advanced Technology Research Facility.

An Ember in the Soul: A Tribute to Clinical Trial Participants

The National Cancer Institute is currently supporting more than 6,700 clinical trials. That staggering statistic is dwarfed by the number of participants in those trials, many of whom are cancer patients. Even more astounding is that these numbers are for just this moment in time. The thousands of trials currently recruiting or underway are themselves a mere fraction of the studies NCI has conducted or supported since its creation in 1937.

Digital Twins for Cancer Care: Exploring a Cross-disciplinary Innovative Approach

Used successfully in several industries, digital twins have the potential to forge a path toward advances in cancer care and research. Frederick National Laboratory is a lead organization in the strategic interagency collaboration between the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy and has been instrumental in the development of innovative technologies for creating a cancer patient digital twin.

Echoes from the Past: Program Pioneers a Path for Frederick’s Science, Part 3

Unsurprisingly, the new Basic Research Program at the Frederick Cancer Research Center took some time to gain momentum despite the preparations that had been made. Margaret Kripke, Ph.D., head of the program’s Immunobiology of Physical and Chemical Carcinogenesis Section at the time, recalls that her first year was dedicated to setting up her new laboratory, hiring staff, moving around, and finishing projects she had started in her former laboratory at University of Utah.