John Wecker

Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute (PNDRI) announced today that John Wecker, PhD has been appointed president and CEO.

Dr. Wecker was most recently Global Program Leader, Vaccine Access and Delivery at PATH.

PNDRI is an independent non-profit biomedical and clinical research center that focuses on eliminating diabetes and its complications.

The Institute, which has a team of 85 physicians, scientists and technical staff, was founded in Seattle in 1956 by Dr. William Hutchinson, Sr., who also founded the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Before he joined PATH, Dr. Wecker worked for Boehringer Ingelheim, a global pharmaceutical company, where he led pharmaceutical product development teams and championed the company’s efforts to expand access to treatments for HIV/AIDS in the developing world.

During this time he established a program to provide medication for the prevention of mother-child transmission of HIV/AIDS, free of charge to over 120 countries around the world.

Dr. Wecker received his doctorate in Biological Psychology from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.

Dr. Wecker succeeds Dr. Jack Faris, who has been serving as acting CEO during the past eighteen months. Dr. Faris will remain part of the PNDRI team as a strategic advisor.

Dr. Wecker will begin at PNDRI on April 23^rd.

To learn more:

• For more information about PNDRI, visit www.pndri.org or call (206) 726-1200.

Davis

Seattle’s global health organization PATH announced today that Steve Davis has been appointed president and CEO.

In his new position Davis will oversee PATH’s annual budget of $305 million, a staff of nearly 1,200, and a portfolio of projects based in PATH offices in 22 countries.

PATH projects include the development of an affordable meningitis vaccine, improved screening and treatment for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and low-cost filters for safe drinking water.

Davis comes to PATH  from McKinsey & Company, where he was global director of social innovation.

In that position, Davis led a global team that consults for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), governments, and the private sector, with a focus on global health and development, research and development, and Asia and Africa.

Previously, Davis was a long-term CEO of Corbis, a global digital media leader, and served as interim CEO of the Infectious Disease Research Institute, a nonprofit biotech working on vaccines, diagnostics, and drug discovery for infectious diseases of poverty.

His previous experiences also include serving as interim director of PATH’s India program, practicing law with K&L Gates, and working on refugee and human rights issues.

Mr. Davis earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, his master’s degree from the University of Washington, and his juris doctor from Columbia University.

Davis will join PATH on June 11 and be based at PATH’s Seattle headquarters.

He succeeds former president and CEO Dr. Christopher J. Elias, who led PATH through significant growth for ten years.

Dr. Elias left PATH in January to become president of the Global Development Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Blood, placenta tissue and other specimens will be saved.

A Seattle Children’s project to reduce premature births and still births opens a new facility today to store tissue from pregnant women that researchers from around the world can use to study both normal and abnormal pregnancies.

The biorepository will be run by the medical center’s Global Alliance to Prevent Prematurity and Stillbrith (GAPPS).

Specimens stored at the facility will include maternal blood and urine, cervical vaginal swabs, placenta tissue, and cord blood.

Samples will are collected from the first trimester through the postpartum period.

The specimens will be linked with information about the mothers’ preconception history, course of her current pregnancy, environmental exposures, medical and reproductive history, mental health, nutritional intake, and behaviors.

Participation is voluntary, and the identity of participating mothers is kept confidential with the specimens being identified only by number.

“While pregnancy specimen biobanks have been developed before, this is the first time that specimens paired with information about mothers and their pregnancies have been made widely accessible,” said Dr. Craig Rubens, executive director of GAPPS.

The repository currently has more than 8,000 individual specimens available to scientists, with 800-900 specimens being added each month.

The collection includes contributions from women representing a wide range of racial, ethnic, regional, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Among the goasl of the GAPPS Repository project are to:

• Help researchers discover biomarkers and create screening tools to identify women and babies at risk for preterm birth and stillbirth

• Use those findings to develop diagnostic tests, treatments, and prevention strategies

• And to support research to identify the causes of poor birth outcomes and the fetal origin of adult diseases in the hope of developing cures.

“Many adult health problems can be traced to fetal development,” Dr. Rubens said. “With these specimens, researchers can begin to understand what causes adverse pregnancy outcomes, and develop novel interventions to prevent them.”

To learn more:

• Visit the GAPPS website: www.gapps.org.

• Go to the GAPPS Flickr page to see more photos of the repository.

“It is time to sound the alarm,” said Dr. Judy Wasserheit, vice chair of the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington, who wrote the article with Dr. Gail Bolan of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. P. Frederick Sparling of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill.

Gonorrhea bacteria - Photo CDC

Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease that can infect the genital tract, throat and anus.

There are more than 600,000 cases of gonorrhea a year in the U.S., making it one of the most common reportable infections in the country.

Untreated, gonorrhea can cause a number of serous complications, including infertility, a chronic painful pelvic condition in women called pelvic inflammatory disease, and ectopic pregnancy, a serious complication in which the fetus develops in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus.

In rare cases, the bacteria can travel through the bloodstream and infect joints, heart valves and the brain.

The bacteria that causes gonorrhea, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, has a history of quickly acquiring the ability to resist antibiotics. In the 1940s it became resistant to sulfa drugs, in the 1980s to penicillins and tetracyclines, and by 2007 to flouroquinolones.

Today, treatment with a class of antibiotics called cephalosporins is considered the most reliable option, but resistance to this class of drugs is on the rise both abroad and in the U.S., raising concerns that doctors here will soon begin seeing cases they cannot cure.

Untreatable cases have not yet been reported in the U.S., but they have appeared in Asia and Europe and a worrying number of strains in the U.S. are showing signs of resistance to cephalosporins.

Resistance to one of the cephalosporins has risen 17-fold in the U.S. over the past few years, Dr. Wasserheit and her colleagues write, increasing from just 0.1 percent of cases in 2006 to 1.7 percent in the first part of last year.

Resistance has been increasing even faster in the western U.S., reaching 3.6 percent of all cases last year and 4.7 percent of cases among men who have sex with men.

Although higher doses may overcome the ability of these strains to resist cephalosporins for a time, Dr. Wasserheit and her colleagues write, urgent action is needed now to prevent the spread of these strains and to develop new treatments.

“There is much to do, and the threat of untreatable gonorrhea is emerging rapidly,” they conclude.

 To learn more:

• Visit the National Library of Medicine’s Medline Plus information page on gonorrhea.

• Visit the Public Health – Seattle & King County’s page on Sexually Transmitted Infections.

The talks will be held 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. every Thursday of the month.

What’s Stress Got to Do with It? — February 2

Dr. Bonnie McGregor is a behavioral medicine pioneer interested in how psychological factors affect the health of our bodies and our minds. Hear how stress influences our vulnerability to disease, and how stress management techniques can help you reduce your own disease risk.

Stem-cell Therapy: The Hope, the Hype and the Real Potential – February 9

Join Drs. Beverly Torok-Storb, Tony Blau, Phil Horner and Chuck Murry in a discussion of stem-cell research. Learn about the different types of stem cells, common misunderstandings about stem-cell work, clinical therapies being explored and what these researchers envision for the future.

Cancer and Infectious Diseases: Making a Global Impact – February 16

Did you know that nearly a quarter of cancers around the world are infection caused or related? Meet Dr. Corey Casper, the force behind the Hutchinson Center’s research on infection-related cancers in Uganda. By focusing efforts in a country with a higher disease burden, we hope to understand how chronic infections lead to cancer, including why this happens in some of us and not in others.

Influenza: A Study in Evolution – February 23

Soon personal genomic sequences will be cheaper than personal computers. But genomic sequences don’t come with instruction manuals, so revealing what they tell us about evolution and disease remains a challenge. Dr. Jesse Bloom will take us on a journey along the evolutionary path followed by one influenza gene over the last 40 years, and reveal the obstacles and forces that shape genetic change as we attempt to understand evolution at the molecular level.

When:

Thursdays
February 2-23
7-8:30 pm

 Where:

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave. N., Seattle
Thomas Building
Pelton Auditorium

To Register go HERE.