Bench to bedside and back
New grants enable lab scientists to see WCP patients
Dainel Silver and Shridar Ganesan
Physician-scientists who spend their time in the laboratory may come up with great discoveries at the lab bench, but contact with patients helps focus their ideas.
That's why The Gillette Company and the Egan Family of Hopkinton, Mass.,
have provided grants enabling three Dana- Farber physician-scientists to play
a more active role in the clinics of the Women's Cancers Program (WCP).
Learning about patients' illnesses firsthand, say the researchers, helps
them translate laboratory
discoveries into new treatments. "Having routine contact with patients
and other providers in the clinic is a great opportunity to learn about disease
from the best sources — our patients and the experts who see them,"
says Daniel Silver, MD, PhD, who studies breast cancer genes in the laboratory
of David Livingston, MD.
Dr. Silver and Shridar Ganesan, MD, PhD, who also works in the Livingston laboratory on breast cancer genes, were selected for the Gillette Young Investigators Award. Each will receive support over three years, enabling them to spend a half-day every week seeing patients in the Gillette Center for Women's Cancers. The third physician-scientist, Karen Anderson, MD, PhD, has received a grant from the Egan Family to see breast cancer patients in the WCP clinics. She does research on immunologic treatments for cancer in the laboratory of Lee Nadler, MD, senior vice president for Experimental Medicine at Dana-Farber.
In each case, the recipients said that without the financial support, they would find it very difficult to take time off from lab research to follow patients in the clinic."Clinical investigators represent a bridge between the laboratory and the patient's bedside," says J. Dirk Iglehart, MD, director of the WCP at Dana-Farber and chief of Surgical Oncology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. "Life-saving new treatments come from the interaction between clinical and laboratory sciences."
Karen Anderson
Laboratory or "basic" researchers pursue fundamental questions of biology, using chemicals, cultured cells, or animals for experiments. Clinical researchers are those who spend time with human patients and are interested in how potential treatments or preventive measures work in "real life."
Today, basic and clinical science are both fast-moving, competitive fields and require intense commitment, explains Eric Winer, MD, director of the Breast Oncology Center in the WCP. For a laboratory researcher to carve out time and financial support to see patients on a regular basis is increasingly difficult. "Thus, at a time when there is a tremendous need for scientists and clinicians to talk and develop projects leading to practical applications, the forces at play keep them apart," says Winer.
Without the Gillette and Egan grants, the researchers would not have enough financial support to take time away from their lab work to see patients. But now, says Dr. Ganesan, the funding "will give me the opportunity to be both directly involved in the care of women with breast cancer and continue to conduct basic breast cancer research. It enables me to fulfill the concept of being a physician-scientist."
Adds Anderson, "Seeing patients fosters new ideas for research from bench to bedside and back. Besides, I'm a physician — and I love seeing patients." Gillette, the Boston-based maker of razors, blades, and shaving preparations, as well as batteries and oral-care products, launched the Gillette Centers for Women's Cancers at Dana- Farber and Massachusetts General Hospital in 1996. "We're thrilled that Gillette continues its support of research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute," Iglehart says. Michael J. and Donna Egan have previously supported Iglehart's research in women's cancers.
