all Scott Armstrong stories

Flier hails new, cooperative era in Harvard science

404132862 — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:02:11 -0500

Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier Friday evening issued a call for new approaches to advance the fight against disease, embracing cross-institutional collaborations at Harvard as a way to bring new thinking to old problems.

Flier, the keynote speaker at the Fourth Annual Tony and Shelly Malkin Stem Cell Symposium at the Harvard Club of Boston, said he has spent a lot of time in his first months as Harvard Medical School Dean thinking about how and why the School does business. As he has gone through this process, Flier said, he’s given thought to who people mean when they speak of “we” at the Medical School.

Diagnosis by database shows promise

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:16:55 -0400

A relatively new approach to researching cancer involves looking at the actions of thousands of genes in cancer tumors. This technique just recently became possible because, using new applications of technology, researchers are able to make "diagnoses by database." At Harvard Medical School, several teams of researchers have recently discovered new types of cancer or new ways to diagnose known cancers by analyzing what are called the "gene expression patterns" of thousands of genes in diseased cells. The researchers involved in this work include postdoc Arindam Bhattacharjee in the Dana-Farber lab of pathologist Matthew Meyerson, Harvard Medical School (HMS) assistant professor of pathology; pediatric oncologist Scott Armstrong in the Dana-Farber laboratory of Stanley Korsmeyer; Dana- Farber oncologist Margaret Shipp, an HMS associate professor; Children's Hospital pediatric neurologist Scott Pomeroy, an HMS associate professor of neurology; Dana- Farber oncologist Sridhar Ramaswamy, an HMS instructor; Todd Golub, HMS assistant professor of pediatrics; and Eric Lander, director of the genome center at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists using gene chips identify unique form of leukemia

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:18:24 -0400

Currently, physicians diagnose and treat a rare form of cancer that strikes infants as a particularly aggressive form of the more common acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The cancer may respond to chemotherapy at first, but it tends to recur fatally. That's why the prognosis is so much worse than for most types of childhood leukemia, which today can usually be treated effectively. Using the relatively new technology of gene chips, scientists working at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have discovered that this rare leukemia is genetically distinct from other types of leukemia.