The newly formed Division of Biomedical Sciences will begin a seminar series for researchers on campus on Oct. 13 with speaker Chand Khanna, the head of the Tumor and Metastasis Biology Section and director of the Comparative Oncology Program at the Center for Cancer Research in the National Cancer Institute.
The seminar series will be the first public event sponsored by the Division of Biomedical Sciences, which was launched in August to coalesce the biomedical research on campus, consolidate resources and engage biomedical research at Illinois more effectively with external partners.
Lawrence Schook, the Gutgsell Endowed Chair and a professor of animal sciences, of pathobiology, of nutritional sciences, and of pathology and of surgical oncology in the College of Medicine, was selected as the inaugural director of the division.
Schook led the implementation team, comprising faculty members from across campus, which consulted with campus leaders and external advisers to create a mission statement and timetable for the division, and provided recommendations on the division’s structure, how it could engage campus support, its potential programmatic activities and its staffing and space needs.
“We’re identifying several areas and trying to capture different strengths on campus – including chemistry, work in the College of Veterinary Medicine, bioengineering, nanotechnology and information science,” Schook said. “Until this time, they’ve all been discrete centers of excellence, but we haven’t done a very good job of creating alignments so we can be assured that they have utility in health care.
“Without a large medical center here, a lot of the larger companies don’t really appreciate the scope of the biomedical research that’s done on campus,” Schook said. “So one of our charges is to communicate what is happening, and target and create some strategic partnerships with appropriate industry partners. We believe that’s also happening from the industry perspective – pharmaceutical companies and health care companies are looking for strategic partners because they are trying to gain access to creativity and innovation. Up to this point, it’s always been left up to individual faculty members to do that, and we’re trying to institutionalize it as a single portal of communication to the external world.”
In a June 18 newsletter announcing the formation of the division, Provost Linda Katehi wrote: “The DBS will provide a single portal for internal and external communications and the vision and infrastructure to translate Illinois’ strengths in basic sciences and engineering into innovative solutions to issues impacting human health and our communities. Essential to this mission is the establishment of an integrated and efficient infrastructure that will enable human-centric research, capture new research opportunities and expand international visibility of our translational research. This will be achieved through robust affiliations with internal departments and units and external partners like the University of Illinois at Chicago and Carle Foundation Hospital.”
In his Strategic Plan for the Urbana campus, Chancellor Richard Herman identified translational research in biomedicine as a campus priority for the years ahead. Additionally, the National Institutes of Health designated translational research a “roadmap initiative,” an area of research that holds major opportunities for advancing medicine in the 21st century.
Schook said the division soon will issue a call for proposals to researchers on campus to identify areas ”where we could begin to work with groups and make appropriate investments.”
“Equally important, what we’ve found in our initial analyses is that we have a lot of unintentional barriers that exist,” Schook said. “They’re not money or a lack of faculty expertise. Perhaps the incentives are misaligned or the lines of communication aren’t appropriate.”
Professional development and training programs for faculty and staff members and classes for students in related areas will be another focus.
Khanna’s seminar on Oct. 13 will be the first in a number of seminars that the division will sponsor during the next year or two, Schook said. “The intent in selecting these individuals (as speakers) is to show how we can begin building such linkages ourselves in different areas.”
Khanna, who is board-certified in oncology with the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine and holds a doctorate in pathobiology, will speak on the topic “Informing Cancer Biology and Therapy Through a Comparative Approach.” The seminar will begin at 3 p.m. in the auditorium of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Katehi, Schook and Ravi Iyer, interim vice chancellor for research, will offer introductory remarks.