NCI and FNL Researchers Turn Lessons Learned into Stepping Stones

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.