February 2018

With February coming to a close, Occupational Health Services (OHS) has wrapped up American Heart Month, a four-week-long series of events that raised awareness about heart disease and promoted heart-healthy habits.

The lunchtime dash to a nearby eatery is a daily ritual at NCI at Frederick, but Occupational Health Services (OHS) recently showed employees a different, healthy kind of DASH—Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. Employees who visited the educational lunch-hour event, called “DASH and Dine,” had the chance to speak with OHS staff about the benefits of the DASH Eating Plan, a diet developed by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI).

(Updated May 8) A study led by the Baylor College of Medicine and supported by NCI’s Center for Cancer Research (CCR) has demonstrated that chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy can be used to treat solid triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) tumors. The investigation is the first work using CAR T-cell therapy against TEM8, a cell surface protein that is frequently overexpressed both in TNBC cells and cells lining the blood vessels that sustain TNBC tumors.

Resource management in the form of “outsourcing” continues to be a valuable tool for the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) department. The O&M department uses this resource as an integral part of its approach to customer service.

This year’s Protective Services Chili Cookoff was marked by blazing-hot chili and fiery competition as 15 entrants contended for the attention and adoration of approximately 150 hungry attendees. The competition is a fixture at NCI at Frederick and regularly features an array of culinary concoctions, from which the visitors rank their choices for first, second, and third place.