Press
Bick receives NIH Director’s Early Independence Award
Alexander Bick, MD, PhD, a new faculty member in the Division of Genetic Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has received a 2020 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Early Independence Award. The award will provide $250,000 in direct research costs annually for up to five years. It is part of the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, which supports “highly innovative and unusually impactful biomedical or behavioral research proposed by extraordinarily creative scientists.”
– Bill Snyder, VUMC Reporter, Full Article Here
Bick receives Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists
Alexander Bick, MD, PhD…is a recipient of the 2020 Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF) Career Award for Medical Scientists. The award provides $700,000 over five years to young physician-scientists committed to academic careers as they transition from fellowship and postdoctoral positions to faculty service. Recipients benefit from participating in biennial meetings and mentoring networks.
– Bill Snyder, VUMC Reporter, Full Article Here
Studies reveal mutations that boost blood stem cell growth and increase leukemia and heart disease risk
…two teams of scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have each discovered a set of inherited gene variants that increase the risk of accumulating these mutations in HSCs over people’s lifetimes. These mutations lead to one of two age-related blood disorders: myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) and clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP).
– Sarah C.P. Williams, Broad Institute News, Full Article Here
Hematopoietic Stem Cell Renewal Drives Myeloproliferative Neoplasms
Complementary studies by Bick, Weinstock, and colleagues and Bao, Nandakumar, Liao, and colleagues identified genetic factors and biological mechanisms underlying the heritability of CHIP and MPNs. Bick, Weinstock, and colleagues performed germ- and somatic-cell whole-genome sequencing of 97,691 people, identifying 4,229 participants with CHIP, whereas Bao, Nandakumar, Liao, and colleagues performed a genome-wide association study including 3,797 people with known MPNs and 1,152,977 control participants.
– American Association for Cancer Research Publications, Full Article Here