Charles Lee, director of science at the Jackson Laboratory, said he's been pretty tired lately. Between the grand opening of Jackson's Farmington facility and working on this week's first-ever science conference, he's had a lot on his plate.
On Monday morning when the Nobel Prize for medicine was announced, "I was sleeping pretty soundly," Lee said. That's surprising, since late last month, Lee was shortlisted for a Nobel Prize by Thomson Reuters. He didn't win the award, but "the amount of support that I've had from the community here in Connecticut about being put on this list has been absolutely outstanding," he said. "I really feel the warmth of the community. That's meant a lot to me."
Lee said the genomic research done at Jackson will have real impacts for patients in Connecticut. He mentioned immunology and George Weinstock, a Jackson scientist, who's working on the microbiome (that's the bacteria that live in us and on us). "The program that he's just launching with Connecticut Children's Hospital is taking stool samples from the babies in the NICU," Lee said. "When he does this every day, he can actually track which bacteria are increasing in levels and predict, days in advance, which child is going to come down with an infection."
Lee said the lab also has a cancer avatar project, where they've designed special mice that can accept human tumors. "The reason why we are doing this is we can have, for example, 30, 40, 50 mice that all carry a piece of a person's tumor in them," Lee said. "Then we can test different drug combinations on those mice, see which of those drug combinations are effective, and then feed that information back to the oncologist and the patient."
The avatar program has already begun at the Connecticut Children's Medical Center and Hartford Hospital.
