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Above, the Condor telescope in New Mexico which is a model for a similar telescope Lanzetta will be building this year in Chile as a Fulbright Scholar. Photo courtesy of Condor Team

By Daniel Dunaief

Five years later, Kenneth Lanzetta is bringing a telescope to Chile.

Professor Kenneth Lanzetta, PhD
Photo courtesy SBU

In 2019, Lanzetta, who is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, was planning to install a sophisticated state-of-the-art telescope in Chile that could look deep into the dark night sky for low-surface brightness and point sources. The onset of Covid in early 2020, however, disrupted that plan, as Chile closed its borders, leaving him scrambling to find a new site.

“I looked for an alternative I could drive to,” said Lanzetta, as flying was strongly discouraged.

He settled on the Dark Sky New Mexico observatory near Animas to set up a Condor Array Telescope.

Lanzetta had various manufacturers ship components to the site. At the end of 2020, he, his wife Robin Root, and his daughter Ciara drove across the country.

He had originally intended to spend about two weeks in the state. After many problems and delays, he and his wife stayed for more than four months, until early 2021. Ciara returned to college in London in the middle of January.

Lanzetta and Root moved every two weeks, expecting that they would be able to return to Long Island. Each time, delays in the project extended their stay. They figured they visited almost every airbnb in the area.

“I spent Covid in a very isolated part of New Mexico and I didn’t have to be back in Stony Brook,” Lanzetta said. “I had the ability to teach online.”

A view created by Condor and computer technologies of extremely faint shells of ionized gas surrounding the dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis.
Photo from Kenneth M. Lanzetta

While the New Mexico site worked out better than he could have imagined, producing enough information to leave him “awash in data” as he works to publish his findings, Lanzetta is planning to spend the next academic year in Chile. He will split his time between Concepción, Santiago, San Pedro and Cerro Taco, which is where he will install the new Condor telescope at an altitude of 5,200 meters, or 17,060 feet at Atacama National Park.

Lanzetta will serve as a Fulbright Scholar for the 2024-2025 academic year.

The Fulbright scholarship “recognizes the potential of the ‘Condor Array Telescope’ that is based on a possibly paradigm shifting astronomical telescope technology,” Chang Kee Jung, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, said in a statement. “Deploying Condor in Atacama, a premier site for telescopes, opens up a greater opportunity for discoveries.”

That altitude and the expected clear skies in the South American nation will give Lanzetta and his colleagues an opportunity to study extremely faint images that would otherwise be more challenging or even impossible to see from other locations. The good weather and dark conditions also help.

Kenneth Lanzetta in the Atacama Desert. Photo by Robin Root.

The park has a road for access and an optical fiber connection, which makes it possible for him to do what they want to do at the site.

The site is at a high enough altitude that Lanzetta will need to breathe bottled oxygen.

The Stony Brook scientist will build as much of the telescope as he can at a lower elevation, ship it to the site and bolt it in place.

The Condor telescope will use refracting optics from several smaller telescopes into the equivalent of one larger telescope that uses newer and faster complementary metal oxide semiconductor sensors.

Most, but not all, of the components of the telescope are off the shelf. The recent development of extremely capable CMOS sensors, which are used in cell phones, back up cameras for cars and in industry, were not available in an inexpensive commercial format as recently as five years ago.

What Lanzetta plans to do in Chile is replicate the successful effort in New Mexico to capture more light signals in space that are beyond the limits of what conventional telescopes can distinguish.

He plans to create a telescope that, when it functions as it should, can operate autonomously, allowing him to control it from anywhere in the world as it transmits data back to his computers at Stony Brook.

New Mexico results

Lanzetta recently returned from an international conference in Aspen, Colorado, where he presented several results.

Condor revealed intergalactic filaments, which might provide glimpses of the cosmic web. He is actively working on this.

Computer simulations of structure formation in the universe has shown how structure came to be from a universe that was initially smooth.

The simulations suggest dark matter is distributed in a hierarchical fashion, with superclusters, clusters and groups of galaxies connected by filamentary structures that resemble a cosmic web.

Lanzetta has been working to see glowing gas of the cosmic web and he and his colleagues believe it is within reach of the current and the new Condor Atacama.

Higher than Chile?

With the increased visibility at the higher altitude site in Chile, researchers recognize that gathering information even further up in the atmosphere increases the likelihood of finding images from faint objects.

At the Aspen conference, scientists discussed the possibility of launching telescopes designed to study the extremely faint universe on balloons, which might be faster and cheaper than attempting to do this from space.

A resident of Smithtown, Lanzetta lives with his wife Root, who is planning to spend the year in Chile with him. Lanzetta’s son Ryan is finishing his PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Washington, while his daughter Ciara is finishing her master’s degree in costume design at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

Growing up in Warminster, Pennsylvania, Lanzetta and his father Anthony used to build things together. When he was 13, Lanzetta had an advanced class radio license. His father helped put together a radio transmitter and receiver and they installed various antennas on the roof.

His father had an undergraduate degree in physics and worked as an engineer. With Ryan’s educational experience, the family has three generations of Lanzettas with degrees in physics.

Lanzetta’s father had a telescope that they used to look at the moon and Saturn. In 1969, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the moon, he recalls his father telling him the astronauts were too small to see.

“This is what I was going to do from the time I was conscious,” he said. “It was always the way it was going to be.” 

Indeed, Lanzetta realizes how “lucky I’ve been to be able to spend my entire life” doing this work.

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Joshua Homer. Photo by Constance Burkin

By Daniel Dunaief

Even as some antibiotics and anti cancer treatments help beat back infections and diseases such as cancer, pathogens and diseases can develop resistance that render these treatments less effective.

Researchers at pharmaceutical companies and universities spend considerable time trying to ensure therapies continue to work. Companies make derivatives of existing drugs or they combine drugs to reduce resistance. They also develop new agents to combat drug-resistant tumors.

Using a chemical process that won his mentor K. Barry Sharpless a Nobel Prize, John Moses, a Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has deployed a new version of click chemistry to assemble biologically active compounds quickly and effectively, which could be used for further development into potential therapies.

Akin to fastening a seatbelt or assembling LEGO blocks, click chemistry benefits from an efficient system to create reliable end products, with the additional advantage of minimizing waste products or impurities.

Recently, Research Investigator Joshua Homer, who has been in Moses’s lab for over three years, published a paper in Chemical Science in which he created several libraries of over 150 compounds. He screened these for activity in anticancer or antibiotic assays.

The newer click process, called Accelerated SuFEx Click Chemistry, or ASCC, involves “less synthetic steps,” said Homer. ASCC can use functional groups like alcohols, that are naturally found in numerous commercially available compounds, directly. Homer can and has used commercially available alkyl and aryl alcohols as fragments in this application of ASCC.

This approach “allows us to explore chemical space so much faster,” Homer said.

In an email, Moses suggested that the paper “demonstrates that SuFEx chemistry can be a feasible and speedy approach compared to traditional methods.”

To be sure, the products could still be a long way from concept to bedside benefit.

“It’s important to note that while the chemistry itself shows promise, the actual application in drug development is complex and can take many years,” Moses added.

The research contributed to finding compounds that may be promising in treating various conditions and represent initial findings and potential starting points for further development, Homer added.

Specifically, Homer took inspiration from the structure of combrestastatin A4 when developing microtubule targeting agents.

The chemicals he produced had good activity against drug-resistant cancer cell lines that resist other treatment options.

Homer also modified the structure of dapsone, generating a derivative with greater activity against a strain of M. tuberculosis that is otherwise resistant to dapsone. 

“Strains of bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics,” said Homer. Derivatization of antibiotic structures can generate compounds that maintain activity.

Breast cancer

In creating these compounds, Homer bolted on different commercially available fragments and developed potential nano-molar treatments that could be effective against triple-negative breast cancer.

At this point, he has evaluated two lead agents in two dimensional cell culture and against patient-derived organoids. Homer did this work in collaboration with the lab of CSHL Cancer Center director David Tuveson.

Organoids can help gauge the potential response of a patient’s tumor to various treatments.

Homer found that eight of the microtubule targeting agents were more potent than colchicine against HCT-15. This cancer cell line, he explained, is known to have upregulated efflux, which is a major cause of drug resistance in cancer cells.

His compounds maintained a similar potency between two dimensional cell lines and organoids. Often, compounds are less potent in organoids, which makes this a promising discovery.

Making molecules and screening them for function to discover lead candidates is one of the first steps in the drug discovery process, with considerable optimization and regulatory steps necessary to generate a drug for the clinic.

Promising treatments sometimes also cause cellular damage in healthy tissue, which reduces the potential benefit of any new treatment. Effective cancer drugs are selective for cancer cells over normal cells.

At this point, the molecules Homer creates involve a search for function, he said. “Once we identify the reaction, we can remake our molecule to confirm it is our compound that is causing a reaction.”

Click chemistry doesn’t necessarily lead to solutions, but it enables scientists and drug companies to create and test molecules more rapidly and with considerably less financial investment.

Click solutions

Click chemistry has affected the way Homer thinks about problems outside the lab.

“I think more about doing things quickly and how to tackle the issues we face, rather than using brute force in one direction,” he said. “We can go in lots of directions and probe. We should be looking at all sorts of baskets at once to solve the issues we have.”

Originally from Tauranga, New Zealand, Homer enjoys traveling around the country, visiting new cities and interacting with different people. A resident of Huntington, Homer is looking forward to an upcoming visit from his parents Dave and Debbie and his aunt Carol, who are making their first trip to the continental United States.

“One of my favorite things about being a scientist is that I can bring my parents out of their comfort zone,” he said. His parents live on a small lifestyle block with several sheep and chickens.

Moses lauded the contributions Homer has made to the lab, including providing mentorship to other students.

As for click chemistry, Homer appreciates how the reactions create opportunities even for those without advanced backgrounds in chemistry.

Click chemistry creates the opportunity to help non-scientists understand scientific concepts more easily.

“I can give a high school student the reagents and substrates and they can reliably make biologically active anticancer agents or antibiotics,” he said. “That helps connect science and drug discovery with the community.”

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Kenneth Lanzetta. Photo from SBU

The US Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board have selected Stony Brook University Professor Kenneth Lanzetta, PhD, in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, as a Fulbright US Scholar for 2024-2025. Professor Lanzetta will spend the next academic year in Chile, where he will collaborate with the Astronomy Department at the University of Concepción (UdeC) and deploy a new telescope in the Atacama Astronomical Park.

The “Condor Array Telescope Atacama” – or Condor Atacama – is an expanded version of Professor Lanzetta’s “Condor Array Telescope,” which was deployed in New Mexico three years ago and has since detected several galactic and extragalactic phenomena too faint for other telescopes to pick up on. His new, enhanced version will take advantage of the Atacama Desert’s extreme altitude, clear weather conditions, and dark environment, which make it highly suited to astronomical observation. According to Lanzetta, Condor Atacama could potentially become the world’s most sensitive astronomical imaging telescope.

“I am delighted by the selection of Professor Lanzetta as a Fulbright US Scholar for 2024-2025. This recognized the potential of the ‘Condor Array Telescope’ that is based on a possibly paradigm shifting astronomical telescope technology,” said Chang Kee Jung, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.  “While almost all modern astronomical research telescopes use reflecting optics and charge-coupled device (CCD) sensors, Condor uses refracting optics, and newer and faster complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors, which allow it to see things that are missed by conventional telescopes. Deploying Condor in Atacama, a premier site for telescopes, opens up a greater opportunity for discoveries. I am looking forward to receiving exciting news that Professor Lanzetta will deliver from Chile.”

UdeC Professor Rodrigo Andrés Reeves Díaz, PhD, a local expert with experience deploying astronomical instrumentation in the Atacama Desert, will provide guidance on the project and serve as Professor Lanzetta’s host at the university. In exchange, Lanzetta will present a series of seminars to Astronomy Department faculty and graduate students, as well as a public seminar on the department’s behalf.

This project looks to fulfill the Fulbright mission of promoting international collaboration by fostering a partnership between Stony Brook and UdeC. Astronomical communities across the US and Chile will benefit from the deployment and operation of Condor Atacama, and the telescope’s unique imaging capabilities are poised to leave a legacy on the field of astronomy at large.

“I am very much looking forward to spending the next academic year in Chile on a Fulbright Scholar award,” said Professor Lanzetta. “Condor Atacama is a very exciting project, and this visit will allow me to work on deploying the telescope to the Atacama Astronomical Park, which is among the very best astronomical sites in the world. And I am especially looking forward to meeting new people and forming new friendships among my new colleagues at the University of Concepción.”

Professor Lanzetta has been part of Stony Brook’s Department of Physics and Astronomy for more than 30 years. Previously, he was a Hubble Fellow in the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. He has a BA in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Physics from the University of Pittsburgh. He completed his postdoctoral research at the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge.

Lanzetta is among roughly 800 faculty members, researchers, administrators and established professionals selected for the 2024-2025 Fulbright US Scholar Program. Also offering opportunities abroad for students and recent graduates, Fulbright is the flagship international academic exchange program sponsored by the United States government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the Fulbright Program, which operates in more than 160 countries annually.

 

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Brookhaven Lab biologist Meng Xie and postdoctoral fellow Dimiru Tadesse with sorghum plants like those used in this study. Note that these plants are flowering, unlike those the scientists engineered to delay flowering indefinitely to maximize their accumulation of biomass. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/ BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

A traffic light turns green and a driver can make a left turn. Similarly, plants on one path can change direction when they receive a particular signal. In the case of the sorghum plant, the original direction involves growth. A series of signals, however, sends it on a different trajectory, enabling the plant to flower and reproduce, halting the growth cycle.

Brookhaven Lab biologist Meng Xie and postdoctoral fellow Dimiru Tadesse in the lab. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/ BNL

Understanding and altering this process could allow the plant to grow for a longer period of time. Additional growth increases the biomass of this important energy crop, making each of these hearty plants, which can survive in semiarid regions and can tolerate relatively high temperatures, more productive when they are converted into biomass in the form of ethanol, which is added to gasoline.

Recently, Brookhaven National Laboratory biologist Meng Xie teamed up with Million Tadege, Professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Science at Oklahoma State University, among others, to find genes and the mechanism that controls flowering in sorghum.

Plants that produce more biomass have a more developed root system, which can sequester more carbon and store it in the soil.

The researchers worked with a gene identified in other studies called SbGhd7 that extends the growth period when it is overexpressed.

Validating the importance of that gene, Xie and his colleagues were able to produce about three times the biomass of a sorghum plant compared to a control that flowered earlier and produced grain.

The plants they grew didn’t reach the upper limit of size and, so far, the risk of extensive growth  that might threaten the survival of the plant is unknown.

Researchers at Oklahoma State University conducted the genetic work, while Xie led the molecular mechanistic studies at BNL.

At OSU, the researchers used a transgenic sorghum plant to over express the flowering-control gene, which increased the protein it produced. These plants didn’t flower at all.

“This was a dramatic difference from what happens in rice plants when they overexpress their version of this same gene,” Xie explained in a statement. “In rice, overexpression of this gene delays flowering for eight to 20 days — not forever!”

In addition to examining the effect of changing the concentration of the protein produced, Xie also explored the way this protein recognized and bound to promoters of its targets to repress target expression.

Xie did “a lot of molecular studies to understand the underlying mechanism, which was pretty hard to perform in sorghum previously,” he said.

Xie worked with protoplasts, which are plant cells whose outer wall has been removed. He inserted a so-called plasmid, which is a small piece of DNA, into their growth medium, which the plants added to their DNA.

The cells can survive in a special incubation/ growth medium, enabling the protoplasts to incorporate the plasmid.

Sorghum plant. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/ BNL

Xie attached a small protein to the gene so they could monitor the way it interacted in the plant. They also added antibodies that bound to this protein, which allowed them to cut out and observe the entire antibody-protein DNA complex to determine which genes were involved in this critical growth versus flowering signaling pathway.

The flowering repressor gene bound to numerous targets. 

Xie and his BNL colleagues found the regulator protein’s binding site, which is a short DNA sequence within the promoter for each target gene.

Conventional wisdom in the scientific community suggested this regulator protein would affect one activator gene. Through his molecular mechanistic studies, Xie uncovered the interaction with several genes.

“In our model, we found that [the signaling] is much more complicated,” he said. The plant looks like it can “bypass each [gene] to affect flowering.”

Regulation appears to have crosstalk and feedback loops, he explained.

The process of coaxing these plants to continue to grow provides a one-way genetic street, which prevents the plant from developing flowers and reproducing.

These altered plants would prevent any cross contamination with flowering plants, which would help scientists and, potentially down the road, farmers meet regulatory requirements to farm this source of biomass.

Ongoing efforts

The targets he found, which recognize the short sequence of DNA, also appears in many other flowering genes.

Xie said the group’s hypothesis is that this regulator in the form of this short sequence of DNA also may affect flowering genes in other plants, such as maize and rice.

Xie is continuing to work with researchers at OSU to study the function of the numerous targets in the flowering and growth processes. 

He hopes to develop easy ways to control flowering which might include spraying a chemical that blocks flowering and removing it to reactive reproduction. This system would be helpful in controlling cross contamination. He also would like to understand how environmental conditions affect sorghum, which is work he’s doing in the lab. Down the road, he might also use the gene editing tool CRISPR to induce expression at certain times.

Honing the technique to pursue this research took about four years to develop, while Xie and his students spent about a year searching for the molecular mechanisms involved.

Rough beginning

Xie departed from his post doctoral position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in March of 2020, when he started working at BNL. That was when Covid altered people’s best-laid plans, as he couldn’t come to the lab to start conducting his research for about six months. 

Born in Shanxi province in China, Xie and his wife Jingdan Niu live in Yaphank and have a two-year old son, Felix Xie.

When he was growing up, Xie was interested in math, physics, chemistry and biology. As an undergraduate in Beijing, Xie started to learn more about biology and technology, which inspired him to enter this field.

Biotechnology “can change the world,” Xie said.

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Suffolk County Community College’s Stem Day is dynamic annual event that spotlights the ingenuity and talent of students and faculty engaged in the STEM disciplines. Photo from SCCC
Suffolk County Community College’s Stem Day is dynamic annual event that spotlights the ingenuity and talent of students and faculty engaged in the STEM disciplines. Photo from SCCC
Suffolk County Community College’s Stem Day is dynamic annual event that spotlights the ingenuity and talent of students and faculty engaged in the STEM disciplines. Photo from SCCC
Suffolk County Community College’s Stem Day is dynamic annual event that spotlights the ingenuity and talent of students and faculty engaged in the STEM disciplines. Photo from SCCC
Suffolk County Community College’s Stem Day is dynamic annual event that spotlights the ingenuity and talent of students and faculty engaged in the STEM disciplines. Photo from SCCC
Suffolk County Community College’s Stem Day is dynamic annual event that spotlights the ingenuity and talent of students and faculty engaged in the STEM disciplines. Photo from SCCC

Suffolk County Community College’s libraries and STEM departments held its annual STEM Day on each of its three campuses on April 10. The college’s STEM Day is now in its ninth successful year.

This dynamic annual event spotlights the ingenuity and talent of students and faculty engaged in the STEM disciplines at Suffolk. From experiments to impressive technology demonstrations, attendees were treated to a diverse range of presentations by students learning under the guidance and direction of their faculty advisors. The event program also allowed faculty members to feature the essence of their program disciplines and the approaches utilized in the college’s classes and labs.

“Each year, the underlying spirit of this event remains constant – fostering engagement and excitement for STEM disciplines among students and the wider community,” said Dr. Edward Bonahue, President, Suffolk County Community College.

One noteworthy aspect of STEM Day is its role in preparing students for future academic endeavors. Suffolk provides a unique, educational enrichment environment for students pursuing careers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. As one example, through the National Science Foundation’s I-SUCCESS Program, the college sponsors 18 scholars annually with tuition and enhanced supports to increase their continued academic and career success in the STEM fields.

About Suffolk County Community College

Suffolk County Community College is the largest community college in the State University of New York (SUNY) system, enrolling approximately 21,000 students at its three campuses in Selden, Brentwood and Riverhead. Suffolk offers the Associate in Arts (A.A.), Associate in Science (A.S.), and Associate in Applied Science (A.A.S.) degrees, as well as a variety of certificate programs. Offering affordable college tuition, a highly respected Honors program, workforce training programs, extensive extracurricular activities, championship athletic teams, and numerous transfer programs, Suffolk is a first-choice college for Long Island students. Visit them online at sunysuffolk.edu.

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Tobias Janowitz and Hassal Lee. Photo by Caryn Koza

By Daniel Dunaief

Before treatments for any kind of health problem or disease receive approval, they go through a lengthy, multi-step process. This system should keep any drugs that might cause damage, have side effects or be less effective than hoped from reaching consumers.

In the world of cancer care, where patients and their families eagerly await solutions that extend the quality and quantity of life, these clinical trials don’t always include the range of patients who might receive treatments.

Hassal Lee. Photo by Caryn Koza

That’s according to a recent big-picture analysis in the lab of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Tobias Janowitz. Led by clinical fellow Hassal Lee, these researchers compared where clinical trials occurred with the population near those centers.

Indeed, 94 percent of United States cancer trials involve 78 major trial centers, which were, on average, in socioeconomically more affluent areas with higher proportions of self-identified white populations compared with the national average.

“We should test drugs on a similar population on which we will be using the drugs,” said Lee. In addition to benefiting under represented groups of patients who might react differently to treatments, broadening the population engaged in clinical trials could offer key insights into cancer. Patient groups that respond more or less favorably to treatment could offer clues about the molecular biological pathways that facilitate or inhibit cancer.

Janowitz suggested that including a wider range of patients in trials could also help establish trust and a rapport among people who might otherwise feel had been excluded.

The research, which Lee, Janowitz and collaborators published recently as a brief in the journal JAMA Oncology, involved using census data to determine the socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds of patient populations within one, two and three hour driving distances to clinical trials.

The scientists suggested researchers and drug companies could broaden the patient population in clinical trials by working with cancer centers to enlist trial participants in potential life-extending treatments through satellite hospitals.

Project origins

This analysis grew out of a study Janowitz conducted during the pandemic to test the effectiveness of the gerd-reducing over-the-counter drug famotidine on symptoms of Covid-19.

Janowitz generally studies the whole body’s reaction to disease, with a focus on cancer associated cachexia, where patients lose considerable weight and muscle mass. During the pandemic, however, Janowitz, who has an MD and PhD, used his scientific skills to understand a life-threatening disease. He designed a remote clinical trial study in which participants took famotidine and monitored their symptoms.

While the results suggested that the antacid shortened the severity and duration of symptoms for some people, it also offered a window into the way a remote study increased the diversity of participants. About 1/3 of the patients in that population were African American, while about 1/4 were Hispanic.

Lee joined Janowitz’s lab in early 2022, towards the end of the famotidine study. 

“The diverse patient population in the remote trial made us wonder if commuting and access by travel were important factors that could be quantified and investigated more closely,” Janowitz explained.

Lee and Janowitz zoomed out to check the general picture for cancer clinical trials.

To be sure, the analysis has limitations. For starters, the threshold values for travel time and diversity are proof of concept examples, the scientists explained in their paper. Satellite sites and weighted enrollment also were not included in their analysis. The cost other than time investment for potential clinical trial participants could present a barrier that the researchers didn’t quantify or simulate.

Nonetheless, the analysis suggests clinical trials for cancer care currently occur in locations that aren’t representative of the broader population.

The work “leveraged freely available data and it was [Lee’s] effort and dedication, supported by excellent collaborators that we had, that made the study possible,” Janowitz explained.

Since the paper was published, Cancer Center directors and epidemiologists have reached out to the CSHL scientists.

Searching for clinical research

After Lee, who was born in Seoul, South Korea and moved to London when she was five, completed her MD and PhD at the University of Cambridge, she wanted to apply the skills she’d learned to a real-world research questions.

She found what she was looking for in Janowitz’s lab, where she not only considered the bigger picture question of clinical trial participation, but also learned about coding, which is particularly helpful when analyzing large amounts of data.

Lee was particularly grateful for the help she received from Alexander Bates, who, while conducting his own research in a neighboring lab in the department of Neurobiology at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, offered coding coaching.

Lee described Bates as a “program whiz kid.”

A musician who enjoys playing classical and jazz on the piano, Lee regularly listened to music while she was in the lab. Those hours added up, with Spotify sending her an email indicating she was one of the top listeners in the United Kingdom. The music service invited her to an interview at their office to answer questions about the app, which she declined because she had moved to the United States by then.

The top medical student at Cambridge for three years, Lee said she enhanced her study habits when she felt unsure of herself as a college student.

She credits having great mentors and supportive friends for her dedication to work.

Lee found pharmacology one of the more challenging subjects in medical school, in part because of the need to remember a large number of drugs and how they work.

She organized her study habits, dividing the total number of drugs she needed to learn by the number of days, which helped her focus on studying a more manageable number each day.

Lee will be a resident at Mt. Sinai Hospital later this year and is eager to continue her American and New York journey.

As for the work she did with Janowitz, she hopes it “really helps people think about maintaining diversity in clinical trials using data that’s already available.”

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Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Grace Auditorium, One Bungtown Road, Cold Spring Harbor hosts a lecture titled Tomatoes in Space on Wednesday, April 10 from 7 to 9 p.m. HHMI Investigator, and CSHL Director of Graduate Studies Zachary Lippman leads the audience on a captivating journey as he reveals how CRISPR gene-editing technology is shaping the future of agriculture.

From making crops grow in busy cities to reaching for the stars so plants can grow in space, Dr. Lippman’s lecture walks listeners through the importance of diversifying our agricultural system here on Earth, and beyond. Q&A will follow the lecture. Light refreshments will be served. Free but registration required at www.cshl/edu. For more information, call 516-367-8800.

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Winners in the 3D printed category: pictured from left, Jashmin Futch of TFCU; third place winner Stella Bond, Bridgehampton School; second place winner Landon Tully, Accompsett Middle School; first place winner Srihas Mandava, Accompsett Middle School; and Robert Caradonna of BNL Photo by Jessica Rotkiewicz/Brookhaven National Laboratory

A big blue shark, an array of pirate ships, and a propeller-driven water bottle were among student-made magnetic levitation vehicles that floated down the tracks at the 2024 Maglev Competition hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton on March 20.

Students from middle schools across Long Island became engineers at the annual contest, designing and refining their maglev creations to log their fastest travel time. A total of 150 students from 10 local middle schools including Accompsett Middle School and Great Hollow Middle School of Smithtown submitted vehicles in hopes of earning top spots in eight categories judging speed and appearance.

The competition is inspired by technology pioneered by two Brookhaven Lab researchers, the late Gordon Danby and James Powell, who invented and patented superconducting maglev — the suspension, guidance, and propulsion of vehicles by magnetic forces.

“The Maglev Contest is unique in the way it provides students with an open environment to tinker, tweak, and test their vehicle designs in order to achieve the best possible outcome,” said competition coordinator Jonathan Ullmann, a senior education programs representative for the Lab’s Office of Educational Programs. “This process is very similar to how the scientists and engineers work on big research projects here at Brookhaven Lab.”

During the awards ceremony, the students heard from Robert Caradonna, a federal project manager at the DOE-Brookhaven Site Office, about his role in overseeing large design and construction of scientific research facilities including the current project to construct the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) — a new discovery machine that physicists will use to explore the building blocks of matter — and the previous effort to construct the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a DOE Office of Science user facility where interdisciplinary researchers explore materials.

Students use math, science, and technology principles to optimize the design of their vehicles. The competition day also brings out their creativity and resourcefulness on the fly: one student fixed their math homework to their vehicle to use as a sail on the contest’s wind-powered track; another student attempted to fill a disposable glove with air to propel their vehicle down a flat track after their original balloon broke.

“That’s what it’s all about — for them to troubleshoot and figure it out,” said David Driscoll, a technology teacher at Albert G. Prodell Middle School. “They’re learning to have patience, think through things, change things up, and make adjustments.”

Students who opted to compete in this year’s appearance categories went for unique and eye-catching designs that included a leek (the vegetable) used as a vehicle body, hand-painted artwork from a favorite show, and color-changing lights. A host of 3D-printed creations traveled down the tracks, too, including train cars, a racecar, and an intricate lizard.

This was the first year that the Bridgehampton School’s STEAM Team — a before-school club — entered 3D-printed vehicles into the competition after learning how to use 3D printers and a modeling program.

“We’ve been using MakerBot 3D printers and Tinkercad; the kids have been having a blast on it,” said Lou Liberatore, a fifth-grade teacher at Bridgehampton.

Mallory Dougherty, also a fifth-grade teacher at Bridgehampton, added: “We’re really excited to be in that category. They really picked up on it. They impressed us with how they were about to figure out how it all works.”

Congratulations to the following winners:

Speed categories

Self-propelled (balloon)

First place: Andrew Oliveri, Bay Shore Middle School; Second place: Ghaleb Rashid, Bay Shore Middle School; and Third place: Landon Wernersbach, Bay Shore Middle School

Self-propelled (other)

First place: Owen Huber, Bay Shore Middle School; Second place: Caleb Leichtman, Bay Shore Middle School; and Third place: Indigo O’Neill, Bay Shore Middle School

Electrified track

First place: Chase Harrison, Bay Shore Middle School; Second place: Jordan Patron, Bay Shore Middle School; and Third place: Ethan Rodriguez, Bay Shore Middle School

Wind power

First place: Jordyn Lusak, Albert G. Prodell Middle School; Second place: Brody Morgan, Great Hollow Middle School; and Third place: Alex Manessis, Accompsett Middle School

Gravity

First place: Jonah Maraglio, Albert G. Prodell Middle School; Second place: Eva Cabrera, Bay Shore Middle School; and Third place: Doris Lu, Great Neck South Middle School

Appearance categories

Futuristic

First place: Aylin Tucksonmez, Albert G. Prodell Middle School; Second place: Jeremy Schember, Great Hollow Middle School; and Third place: Alexander Radek, Great Hollow Middle School

Scale model

First place: Quentin Lennox, Marcus Chang, & Lucas Chang, Great Neck South Middle School; Second place: Owen Anderson, Albert G. Prodell Middle School; and Third place: Brendan D’Agostino, Berner Middle School

3D printed

First place: Srihas Mandava, Accompsett Middle School; Second place: Landon Tully, Accompsett Middle School; and Third place: Stella Bond, Bridgehampton School

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From left, Juan Jimenez and Sanjaya Senanayake in front of CO2 and Methane Conversion Reactor Units in the Chemistry Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

If we had carbon dioxide glasses, we would see the gas everywhere, from the air we, our pets, and our farm animals exhale to the plumes propelled through the smokestacks of factories and the tail pipes of gas-powered cars.

Juan Jimenez. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/BNL

A waste product that scientists are trying to reduce and remove, carbon dioxide is not only a part of the photosynthesis that allows plants to convert light to energy, but it also can be a raw material to create usable and useful products.

Juan Jimenez, a postdoctoral researcher and Goldhaber Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been working with carbon dioxide for the last 10 years, in his undergraduate work at CUNY City College of New York, for his PhD at the University of South Carolina and since he arrived at BNL in 2020. 

Jimenez contributed to a team led by engineers at the University of Cincinnati to create a way to improve the electrochemical conversion of this greenhouse gas into ethylene, which is an important ingredient in making plastics as well as in manufacturing textiles and other products.

University of Cincinnati Associate Professor Jingjie Wu recently published work in the journal Nature Chemical Engineering in which they used a modified copper catalyst to improve the electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide into ethylene.

“I’m always looking out to collaborate with groups doing cutting edge research,” explained Jimenez, who spearheaded the research at the National Synchrotron Lightsource II. “Since the work on CO2 is a global concern we require a global team” to approach solutions.

Jimenez is fascinated with carbon dioxide in part because it is such a stable molecule, which makes reacting it with other elements to transform it into something useful energy intensive.

A modified copper catalyst helped convert more carbon dioxide, which breaks down into two primary carbon-based products through electrocatalysis, into ethylene, which has been called the “world’s most important chemical.”

“Our research offers essential insights into the divergence between ethylene and ethanol during electrochemical CO2 reduction and proposes a viable approach to directing selectivity toward ethylene,” UC graduate student Zhengyuan Li and lead author on the paper, said in a statement.

A previous graduate student of Wu, Li helped conduct some of the experiments at BNL.

This modified process increases the selective production of ethylene by 50 percent, Wu added.

The process of producing ethylene not only increases the production of ethylene, but it also provides a way to recycle carbon dioxide.

In a statement, Wu suggested this process could one day produce ethylene through green energy instead of fossil fuels.

Jimenez’s role

Scientists who want to use the high-tech equipment at the NSLS-II need to apply for time through a highly competitive process before experimental runs.

Jimenez led the proposal to conduct the research on site at the QAS and ISS beamlines.

Several of the elements involved in this reaction are expensive, including platinum, iridium, silver and gold, which makes them prohibitively expensive if they are used inefficiently. By using single atoms of the metal as the sites, these scientists achieved record high rates of reaction using the least possible amount of material.

The scientists at BNL were able to see the chemistry happening in real time, which validated the prediction for the state of the copper.

Jimenez’s first reaction to this discovery was excitement and the second was that “you can actually take a nap. Once you get the data you’re looking for, you can relax and you could shut your eyes.”

Working at NSLS-II, which is one of only three or four similar such facilities in the United States and one of only about a dozen in the world, inspires Jimenez, where he appreciates the opportunity to do “cutting edge” research.

“These experiments are only done a few times in the career of the average scientist,” Jimenez explained. “Having continuous access to cutting edge techniques inspires us to tackle bigger, more complicated problems.”

In the carbon dioxide research, the scientists drilled down on the subject, combining the scope of what could have been two or three publications into a single paper.

Indeed, Nature Chemical Engineering, which is an online only publication in the Nature family of scientific journals, just started providing scientific papers in the beginning of this year.

“Being part of the inaugural editions is exciting, specifically coming from a Chemical Engineering background” as this work was published along with some of the “leading scientists in the field,” said Jimenez.

New York state of mind

Born in Manhattan, Jimenez lived in Queens near Jamaica until he was 11. His family moved into Nassau County near the current site of the UBS Arena.

During his PhD at the University of South Carolina, Jimenez spent almost a year in Japan as a visiting doctoral student, where he learned x-ray absorption spectroscopy from one of the leading scientists in the field, Professor Kiyotaka Asakura. Based in Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, Jimenez enjoyed touring much of the country.

A resident of Middle Island, Jimenez likes to run and swim. He enjoys cooking food from all over the world, including Spanish, Indian and Japanese cuisines.

As a scientist, he has the “unique luxury” of working with an international audience, he said. “If you are having lunch and you see someone eating amazing Indian food, you can talk to them, learn a bit about their culture, how they make their food, and then you can make it.”

As for his work, Jimenez explains that he is drawn to study carbon dioxide not just for the sake of science, but also because it creates a “pressing environmental need.”

He has also been looking more at methane, which is another potent greenhouse gas that is challenging to activate.

Ideally, at some point, he’d like to contribute to work that leads to processes that produce negative carbon dioxide use.

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Jacob L Houghton, PhD, in his Stony Brook Cancer Center laboratory. Photo by John Griffin

Stony Brook University signs licensing agreement with Perspective Therapeutics

Image-guided radionuclide therapy uses radioactive molecules designed to specifically target and kill cancer cells while sparing non-cancerous tissues. This form of targeted therapy can be effective against cancer, but traditional methods for applying this therapy can also result in significant adverse effects related to off-target radiation toxicity. A team of Stony Brook University researchers developed a new method for image-guided radionuclide therapy that uses a two-step process with specially-modified antibodies to target the cancerous tumors, followed by a radioligand designed to bind specifically to the modified antibody.

Preliminary studies have shown that the approach can drastically reduce adverse effects while remaining extremely effective at targeting and killing the cancer cells. The promise of this technology has led to an exclusive licensing agreement with Perspective Therapeutics, Inc., headquartered in Seattle, WA.

The licensing agreement with Perspective Therapeutics is through the Research Foundation for State University of New York’s (SUNY), a private, non-profit,  education corporation that manages research administration and intellectual property for and on behalf of SUNY.

Nuclear imaging and targeted radionuclide therapy with biological molecules are a rapidly growing approach for the diagnosis, staging, and treatment of cancer and other pathologies such as inflammation and infection. Traditionally, the therapy has primarily been used in specific diseases such as thyroid cancer, bone cancer metastases, and neuroendocrine cancer. However, a major potential drawback of existing technologies is a resulting high radiation dose to healthy tissues from the combination of long-lived radionuclides and long biological half-life of the targeting molecules.

Stony Brook University radiology researchers Jacob L. Houghton, PhD, and Vilma I.J. Jallinoja, PhD, developed a new technology that overcomes these hurdles to more widespread use of radionuclide therapy. The platform involves using a small molecule that is labeled with a therapeutic radionuclide known as a radioligand, along with a modified monoclonal antibody – such as those used in immunotherapies to target cancer cells – in a two-step process. The platform enabled them to use the specificity of monoclonal antibodies to target cancer  and take advantage of a small molecule radioligand in a manner that retains the efficacy of the therapy while substantially improving the safety through a reduction in radiation toxicity.

Houghton, an Assistant Professor in the Department Radiology in the Renaissance School of Medicine (RSOM), and researcher in the Stony Brook Cancer Center, conducts research on targeted radionuclide therapy for diagnosing and treating cancer. He will continue to collaborate with scientists at Perspective Therapeutics as they further develop the technology. Jallinoja is no longer at Stony Brook.

“Our technology allows the use of such molecules for imaging and therapy while abrogating the concerns of radiation toxicity by using a pre-targeting technique which enables us to ‘label’ the biological molecule after it has been delivered to the target tissue and cleared from peripheral tissues,” explains Houghton.

Specifically, the pre-targeting radionuclide approach involves these steps: an antibody that has been modified to include an artificial binding group is administered to target to the tumor; then the radioligand carries the radionuclide to the tumor which binds specifically to the artificial binding group on the antibody. The radioligand rapidly accumulates in the tumor via this highly-specific interaction, and the unbound radioligand clears the body quickly. This process allows for optimal delivery of the radioactivity to the tumor, with little interaction with healthy tissue and organs.

This method differs from traditional approaches to targeted radionuclide therapy that directly attaches the radioactive payload to the targeting antibody, which can take days to accumulate in the tumor, leading to increased exposure to healthy tissues.

“By embracing a strategy that leverages the precision of monoclonal antibodies and the versatility of small molecules, Perspective is poised to redefine the landscape of radiation therapy,” says Thijs Spoor, Chief Executive Officer at Perspective Therapeutics. “One of our core missions as a company is to deliver safe and effective radiotherapies to patients.”

The team at Stony Brook University’s Intellectual Property Partners (IPP) worked to create the license with Perspective and develop a partnership to bridge new radiopharmaceutical technologies into eventual diagnostics and treatments.

“We are excited to partner with Perspective Therapeutics to advance this novel CB7-Adma pre-targeting platform toward clinical use. The combination of Perspective’s propriety radionuclide chelators and our pre-targeting platform has the potential to significantly improve clinical outcomes in a variety of cancer indications,” says Sean Boykevisch, PhD, Director of the IPP. “This partnership is a great example of how IPP works with Stony Brook inventors, helping them bridge their innovations with societal benefit in collaboration with industry partners.”

Perspective Therapeutics is a radiopharmaceutical development company that is pioneering the delivery of powerful radiation specifically to cancer cells via specialized targeting peptides. The Company is also developing complementary imaging diagnostics that incorporate the same targeting peptides. This “theranostic” approach  is designed to see the specific tumor and then treat it to potentially improve efficacy and minimize toxicity associated with cancer treatments.

 

Caption: Jacob L Houghton, PhD, in his Stony Brook Cancer Center laboratory.

Credit: John Griffin

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