George Rebane

Our granddaughter Elizabeth received her PhD last Friday after seven years of research at the Department of Oncology of UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine.  She is one of the school’s research stars having developed a ground-breaking method for treating glioblastoma patients.  Glioblastoma is the most virulent and deadly form of brain cancer that took the life of Elizabeth’s cousin and our granddaughter Ellen at the age of fourteen after her clinically historic fight for survival.  Elizabeth dedicated her work to Ellen.

Elizabeth presented a summary of her research and defense of her dissertation to the gathered in one of the medical school’s amphitheaters, attended by her doctoral committee, research colleagues, medical students, and, of course, her family.  The hour-long presentation was followed by a Q&A session and then a reception at the school, with a big dinner later in the evening.  Her accolades delivered by the director of her research lab and the head of the school’s oncology department were impressive.  She now has a choice on whether to stay in academe, preferred by UCLA, or go into the commercial sector as an oncology researcher.

For those interested, I’ll describe a bit of her research.  The forbidding title of her dissertation and published work is ‘Integrating molecular and functional profiling to identify therapeutic vulnerabilities in glioblastoma’.  The easiest way to understand what Elizabeth has developed is a methodology for screening glioblastoma patients as to their receptivity to what promises to be a new standard of care procedure involving a unique cocktail of bio-chemicals (think of chemo) that will either destroy the glioblastoma cells or shrink the tumor into remission.  (The current standard of care for glioblastoma is virtually a death sentence within eighteen months from diagnosis.)

Elizabeth’s treatment destroys glioblastoma cells either by utilizing the body’s apoptosis process or invading the cell itself and destroying a couple of its components critical for its continuing survival.  Apoptosis is a type of programmed cell death that naturally goes on in our bodies, killing old or diseased cells, to make room for new cells and thereby maintain the body’s state of homeostasis (think balance).  Elizabeth’s research developed a method of intervention that initiates apoptosis against glioblastoma cells with a high likelihood of inducing the immune system to kill them.

The added and critical attribute of the method is that it is computable.  This means that the cost of its application to patients will be reduced as such therapeutic software becomes part of the dreaded disease’s standard of care.  Those of you with an entrepreneurial bent can foresee the manifest benefits of all this.

Congratulations to Elizabeth for the years of hard work and pulling it off!