OSUCCC – JAMES GRAND ROUNDS

The 2017-18 OSUCCC – James Grand Rounds series continues on selected Fridays throughout the academic year. All lectures take place from 8-9 a.m. in James L035 (Wasserstrom Family Conference Room on the Conference Level) unless otherwise noted, with breakfast available at 7:45 a.m. The next lecture will take place on Friday, March 16. Below are biosketches for the next presenters.

MARCH 16 – Sharyn Baker, PharmD, PhD, professor and chair of the Division of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry in The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy, will present “FLT3 Inhibitor Resistance: Novel Mechanisms and Combinatorial Treatment Strategies” at 8 a.m. on March 16 in L035 James.

Dr. Baker, who also holds the Gertrude Parker Heer Chair in Cancer Research and serves as associate director for shared resources at the OSUCCC – James, was recruited to Ohio State in 2015 from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where she was an associate member of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Before that, she was an assistant professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on cancer pharmacology and on translational therapeutics and drug resistance in acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

Dr. Baker has authored or co-authored more than 160 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and written or contributed to some 20 books, book chapters, reviews and editorials. She has previously served on the editorial boards of the journals Investigational New Drugs, Current Clinical Pharmacology and Journal of Clinical Oncology. She also has had peer-review activity with 17 scientific journals, including Blood, Clinical Cancer Research, New England Journal of Medicine, Leukemia and Nature Reviews Cancer.

Dr. Baker also has served on numerous National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant review panels and is a charter member of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Developmental Therapeutics Study Section.

Her current research funding support includes three grants from the NCI:

• “Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors for the Treatment of Childhood AML” (identifying optimal drug combinations with tyrosine kinase inhibitors in preclinical models, translating the findings to clinical trials and improving the long-term outcome of children with AML)

• “Solute Carriers and Oxaliplatin Neurotoxicity” (defining the role of solute carriers in modulating oxaliplatin disposition, tissue-specific uptake and in vivo relevance to oxaliplatin-induced neurotoxicity)

• “Therapeutic Strategies to Mitigate Toxicities of Platinum-Based Therapeutics” (defining the role of solute carriers in modulating cisplatin disposition, tissue-specific uptake and in vivo relevance to cisplatin-induced toxicity)

Dr. Baker earned her PharmD in 1991 from the University of California at San Francisco and her PhD in medicine in 2004 from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

MARCH 23 – Thomas Westbrook, PhD, professor of Molecular and Human Genetics, and of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), will present “From Genetics to Cancer Therapeutics: New Frontiers in the RNA World” on March 23 at 8 a.m. in L035 James.

Dr. Westbrook, who also directs the Therapeutic Innovation Center at BCM—an initiative to bridge discovery science to early therapeutic development through public-private partnerships—is a basic scientist with interests in mechanisms and models of breast cancer, and in cancer genetics and therapeutic discovery. His laboratory tackles fundamental problems in cancer biology and leverages discoveries into therapeutic approaches for patients. His team has developed genetic platforms for delineating principles and pathways that govern cancer genesis, metastasis and response to therapy.

Dr. Westbrook’s team focuses on four areas of gene discovery: finding oncogene-induced “stress pathways” and translating them into cancer therapies; repositioning anticancer therapies for triple-negative breast cancer; identifying oncogene/tumor-suppressor networks via functional gene screens; and understanding drug resistance in breast cancer.

Dr. Westbrook earned his PhD at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in Rochester, N.Y., and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. He has authored or co-authored articles in such prestigious scientific journals as Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Cell Biology, Science, Cell, Cancer Cell and Journal of Clinical Investigation.