Martin G. Sanda, MD, has been appointed Chair of the Department of Urology at Emory University School of Medicine and Service Chief for Emory Healthcare. He will start next month, and also serve as Director of the Prostate Cancer Center, which will be established within Emory's Winship Cancer Institute.
Thomas W. Feeley, MD, has been appointed head of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center's Institute for Cancer Care Innovation, a program he helped organize in 2008 to define, measure, and improve value of care, and share results with other health care providers. The institute's projects span cancer economics, patient safety, quality improvement, information technology, education, and outreach. He will also remain head of the Division of Anesthesiology and Critical Care.
Paul Goodfellow, PhD, has joined Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center-Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute as Professor in the College of Medicine to lead a gynecologic oncology research team there. He was most recently at Washington University School of Medicine as Professor of Surgery, Genetics, and Obstetrics and Gynecology.
William Y. Kim, MD, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Genetics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, and James W. Mier, MD, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, have each been chosen to receive the American Association for Cancer Research-Kure It Grant for Kidney Cancer Research, a $250,000 two-year grant that supports translational kidney cancer research.
Kim's project, "Defining the Renal Cell Carcinoma Kinome for Target Discovery and Individualized Therapy," aims to personalize kinase therapy to the patient's kidney tumor. Mier's project, "HDM2/HDMX as a Therapeutic Target in Renal Cell Carcinoma," explores the mechanism by which HDM2 antagonists and vascular endothelial growth factor-targeted drugs act together to block tumor angiogenesis and induce disease regression in renal cell carcinomas. They will receive the awards at the AACR Annual Meeting in April in Washington, DC.
Giorgia Saporiti, MD, a PhD candidate in the Experimental Hematology program the University of Milan-Fondazione, received the 2012 Young Investigator's Award from the Cutaneous Lymphoma Foundation. The award recognized her research, "Analysis of Chromosomal Alterations by Array-Based Comparative Genomic Hybridization in 25 Patients with Sezary Syndrome."
Robert J. Ignoffo, PharmD, Professor of Pharmacy at Touro University California and Clinical Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, will receive the Award of Excellence from the Hematology/Oncology Pharmacy Association to recognize his contributions and leadership in the field of hematology/oncology. The award will be presented at the HOPA Annual Meeting next month.
Children's Hospital Los Angeles has received an $11 million gift from the estate of filmmaker Billy Wilder and his wife Audrey. Of the donation, $1.5 million will be distributed to the endowed chair of the newly established interdepartmental Neuro-Oncology Program under the direction of Jonathan Finlay, MD, Director of the Children's Hospital Los Angeles Neural Tumors Program within the Children's Center for Cancer and Blood Diseases.
The remainder of the donation will support the new Billy and Audrey Wilder Endowed Chair in Neurosurgery and the Billy and Audrey Wilder Endowment in Neurosurgery; the Hay Edward Baher Chair in Pediatric Rheumatology, and the hospital's underfunded and unreimbursed hospital programs that help more than 96,000 young patients annually.
Clarification
The article in the January 10 issue, "Restrained Enthusiasm for Information Technology in Medical Care," by Joseph V. Simone, MD, contained unfounded comments about Eric Topol, MD, related to the topic of financial conflicts of interest. Oncology Times apologizes for those characterizations, and the article has been removed from our online and iPad edition archives.
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