December 2008

As the year comes to a close, the IGSP would like to review our 2008 progress. We have hired 30 new employees at all levels. We also welcomed 10 new UPGG graduate students and nine new CBB graduate students this fall. Twenty-eight freshmen are enrolled in our Genome Revolution Focus Progam and 11 undegraduates are now registered for the Genome Sciences & Policy Certificate. The IGSP also added 15 new Members, two Associate Investigators and an Investigator.

We call special attention to the faculty members who have been officially added to our membership ranks since January. They are Susan Alberts, associate professor of biology; Joshua Socolar, associate professor of physics; Priscilla Wald, professor of English and women's studies; Bill Barry, from the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics; David Harpole, professor of surgery; Ken Kawamoto, assistant professor of community and family medicine; David McClay, professor of biology; John Chute, associate professor of medicine; Kelly Marcom, assistant professor of medicine; Thomas Schultz, director of the Marine Conservation Molecular Facility at the Duke Marine Lab; Steve Haase, assistant professor of biology; Christopher Woods, associate professor of medicine; Tom Mitchell-Olds, professor of biology; Scott Joy, associate professor of medicine; and Bernard Mathey-Prevot, professor in pediatrics.

The IGSP also welcomed Assistant Research Professors Kristin Scott and Kevin Shianna as its first Associate Investigators and Professor of the Practice Misha Angrist as its newest Investigator this year.

Gene Test Could Predict Colon Cancer's Return
IGSP researchers led by Anil Potti and Katie Garman have developed a model for predicting risk of recurrence in early stage colon cancer patients, and have used the model to predict sensitivity to chemotherapy and targeted therapy regimens. Their original paper appeared in an early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

IGSP Center Gets New Name
As of November 2008, the IGSP's Center for Population Genomics and Pharmacogenetics became the Center for Human Genome Variation. Under the direction of David Goldstein, the center's new mission is focused on the use of modern genomics to help understand how human genetic variation influences disease.

Duke Receives Gates Foundation Grant to Study HIV Resistance The IGSP's Center for Human Genome Variation has received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study HIV resistance by sequencing the complete genomes of 50 people with hemophilia who were exposed to the virus repeatedly without getting infected.

HHS Issues Second Report on Personalized Health Care
HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt released the second report from his Initiative on Personalized Health Care, examining the potential for new findings in genetics and other molecular-level medicine to improve health care. The IGSP’s Judd Staples, Bob Cook-Deegan and Geoff Ginsburg contributed one of seven commissioned white papers in the report on the role of the academic medical center in advancing personalized health care.

The Pitfalls of Tracing your Ancestry
In a Nature News Q & A, Charmaine Royal, who is co-chairing a task force looking at ancestry tests, says the perspective that genetics provides the truth about ancestry may need to be challenged. Royal was also featured in other stories about new ASHG recommendations on ancestry testing by GenomeWeb, Science News and New Scientist.

Protein Signature may Predict who Responds to Hepatitis C Treatment
In the first findings to emerge from a grant from real estate developer David Murdock, Duke Clinical Research Institute and IGSP researchers have discovered that a tell-tale set of newly-identified proteins may be able to predict who is most likely to respond to standard hepatitis C therapy.

Duke Scientist to Bare his DNA
In a News & Observer article, Misha Angrist, one of 10 early participants in Harvard's Personal Genome Project, says that "we have no illusions that anything from the 10 of us will be useful. The idea is to stick our flag in the ground and see if we can make this work."

Selective Testing
An article in the Canadian magazine The Walrus featuring IGSP member Allen Roses asks whether Big Pharma stands to gain the most from new genetic tests for drug therapy.

Organizational Improvements to Enhance Modern Clinical Epidemiology
In a JAMA commentary, Geoff Ginsburg and Robert Califf say that the success of personalized medicine depends on integrating once–isolated spheres of endeavor, including clinical epidemiology, biobanks, genomics and molecular profiling, imaging, bioinformatics, biostatistics and decision-making.

Certificates of Confidentiality and Compelled Disclosure of Data
In a Science Policy Forum, Laura Beskow, Lauren Dame and their colleague say that Certificates of Confidentiality are intended to help protect research participants privacy, but a recent case indicates that the protection they offer is uncertain.

Microsporidia Evolved from Ancestral Sexual Fungi
A Current Biology report including study author Fred Dietrich offers evidence from genome structure to support the idea that infectious microsporidia are "true fungi."

Reply to "Rapidly Evolving Human Promoter Regions"
In a Nature Genetics Correspondence, Ralph Haygood, Olivier Fedrigo and Greg Wray say their earlier finding that promoter regions of many neural- and nutrition-related genes have experienced positive selection during human evolution is unlikely to be a reflection of mutational acceleration of primate promoters in general. Read their original Nature Genetics paper here.

A Silencer Promotes the Assembly of Silenced Chromatin Independently of Recruitment
In the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology, Laura Rusche and Patrick Lynch say the ability of silencers to promote assembly of silenced chromatin over several kilobases is likely an important mechanism for maintaining what would otherwise be unstable chromatin at the correct genomic locations.

For full details and the latest updates on IGSP seminars and events, see the Events Calendar

A selection of upcoming events:

Monday, December 1st
Cancer Genomics Seminar
Andrew Berchuk and Susan Murphy present "Genomic Approaches to Ovarian Cancer."

Tuesday, December 2nd
Tuesday Seminar Series
Eric Lai from the Sloan-Kettering Institute presents "microRNAs and other small RNAs in Drosophila."

Tuesday, December 2nd
Genome Biology Meeting
Yutao Liu in the Hauser lab presents.

Wednesday, December 3rd
Systems Biology Seminar
Blanche Capel presents "Systems analysis of sex determination."

Wednesday, December 3rd
Computational Biology Seminar
A speaker will present "De novo genomic sequencing of the fungus Holleya sinecauda by paired end Solexa sequencing."

Thursday, December 4th
Genomic Medicine Forum
Joseph Lucas will present "Alternative Strategies for Analyzing High Dimensional Data."

The Wellcome Trust is seeking new proposals for its genome-wide association studies in disease initiative, building on the success of the Wellcome Trust Case Consortium. Teams must be led by investigators from the U.K. or Ireland.

The National Human Genome Research Institute will grant up to $8 million over two years to fund research that will analyze and characterize the masses of data that will be generated under the 1000 Genomes Project.

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute will give $20 million over the next five years to fund four sequencing centers and one data center that will study the microbes that reside in human lungs and airways in individuals with and without HIV.

The National Institutes of Health are seeking submissions for its Pioneer and New Innovator awards. NIH plans to fund between five and ten Pioneer award winners with up to $5 million, and it will grant up to $55.7 million over five years to as many as 24 New Innovator awardees in 2009.