Thomson Reuters announced their 2015 list of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds. How they create this list is based on several factors summarized below:

“The some 3,000 highly cited researchers listed in this report were selected by analyzing citation data over a recent 11-year period (2003-2013) and identifying those who published the greatest number of highly cited papers. We also identified hot researchers, authors of papers published in a recent two-year period (2013-2014) that were cited immediately after publication at extraordinarily high levels. Highly cited papers rank in the top 1% and hot papers rank in the top 0.1% of the citation distributions of comparable papers, those matched for field and age.”

Thomson Reuters’ list includes the following fourteen MSK researchers:

• Jose Baselga, MD, PhD – Medical Oncologist, Physician-in-Chief and Chief Medical Officer, Memorial Hospital
• Frederic Geissmann, MD, PhD – Researcher, William E. Snee Chair of Immunology, Sloan Kettering Institute
• Clifford A Hudis, MD – Medical Oncologist, Vice President for Government Relations and Chief Advocacy Officer; Chief, Breast Medicine Service
• Mark G Kris, MD – Medical Oncologist, William and Joy Ruane Chair in Thoracic Oncology
• Marc Ladanyi, MD – Molecular Geneticist, Chief, Molecular Diagnostics Service; William J. Ruane Chair in Molecular Oncology
• Joan Massagué, PhD – Researcher, Director, Sloan Kettering Institute
• Gregory J Riely, MD, PhD – Medical Oncologist, Vice Chair, Clinical Trials Office, Department of Medicine
• Alexander Y Rudensky, PhD – Chair, Immunology Program, Sloan Kettering Institute; Director, Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy, Memorial Sloan Kettering
• Chris Sander, PhD – Program Chairman and Director, Computational Biology Center, Sloan Kettering Institute
• Charles L Sawyers, MD – Internist and Hematologic Oncologist, Chair, Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program; Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravis Chair
• Howard I Scher, MD – Medical Oncologist, Chief, Genitourinary Oncology Service; D. Wayne Calloway Chair in Urologic Oncology
• Martin S Tallman, MD – Hematologic Oncologist, Chief, Leukemia Service
• Craig B Thompson, MD – President and CEO, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
• William D Travis, MD – Pathologist, Director, Thoracic Pathology

On Friday, March 4th, Joan Massagué, PhD, Director of Sloan Kettering Institute and the Alfred P. Sloan Chair at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was awarded the 2016 Pezcoller-AACR International Award for Cancer Research. He will be presented with this award in New Orleans at the AACR annual meeting, April 16-20.

Dr. Massagué is being recognized for his discoveries inTGF-β biology, now considered fundamental in the understanding of cellular physiology.

Massagué will present his lecture, “Latent Metastasis,” Sunday, April 17, 5:30 p.m. CT, in New Orleans Theater B of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

“In recognizing the work of my research group, it is reassuring that the Pezcoller Foundation and AACR Award selection committee continue to value basic research for its ability to reveal the basis of clinical problems,” Massagué said.

The Pezcoller-AACR International Award for Cancer Research was established in 1997 and is presented each year to a scientist of international renown who has made a major scientific discovery in basic cancer research or has made major contributions to translational cancer research.

MSK in the news this week…

The Gunner Rätsch Lab at Sloan Kettering Institute is working on training an artificial intelligence to identify similarities between cancer cases that human doctors might miss. The software algorithm combs through over 100 million sentences taken from anonymized clinical notes of 200,000 people with cancer, and sorts symptoms, medical histories, and doctors’ observations into clusters. These clusters are then analyzed to look for patterns and connections between different comments and treatments. “We’re looking to exhaust all that data to try to find something interesting” says Rätsch.

Previous studies showed a murine norovirus that can enhance intestinal immune system development. Researchers from the Eric Pamer Lab at Sloan Kettering Institute have identified a molecule that mimics this norovirus, which reduces Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE), a very serious hospital acquired pathogen, in mice. This molecule, a synthetic ligand called Resiquimod (R848) mimics the virus-derived RNA and binds directly to the protein TLR7 in the immune pathway. However, lead author Michael Abt warns, “It’s going to take a lot more research before it can get us to an actual therapeutic.”

M.C. Abt et al., “TLR-7 activation enhances IL-22 mediated colonization resistance against vancomycin,” Science Translational Medicine, doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf33802, 2016. Continue reading →