Broadway House for Continuing Care, an affiliate of UMDNJ, was named a Circle of Life Award® Honoree for its innovative programs that improve the care of patients near the end of life or with life threatening conditions. The award celebrates programs across the nation that have made great strides in palliative and end-of-life care.
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Thomas M. Jackson, Esq., of Morristown was sworn in on August 7 as chair of the new Board of Directors for UMDNJ-University Hospital. Jackson is Vice President and Chief Regulatory Counsel at Prudential Financial, Inc., where he coordinates federal and state regulatory matters with respect to insurance, annuity and securities products for the multi-billion dollar financial services firm. As attorney for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Jackson was part of a National Fraud Task Force charged with recovering $10 billion in Medicare overpayments.
Also sworn in was Blair MacInnes of Morristown. A lifelong educator, MacInnes previously served on the Board of Trustees at Drew University and at the Community Foundation of New Jersey.
Four members of the UMDNJ Board of Trustees will serve on the hospital board: Mary Ann Christopher; Dr. Kevin M. Barry; Dr. Jonathan Orenstein; and Eric S. Pennington, Esq. The hospital Board of Directors voted unanimously to appoint Christopher Vice Chair of the Board.
Dr. Antoinette Tan, assistant professor of medicine at UMNDJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, is the lead researcher on a clinical study that is testing the effectiveness of adding an investigational drug called lapatinib to the standard, approved type of chemotherapy treatment (capecitabine) for breast cancer.
Although not proven, it is believed that lapatinib may slow or stop the growth of cancer cells. The combination of the two drugs (lapatinib and capecitabine) may help stop cancer cells as well as or better than the standard chemotherapy treatment alone.
Dr. Wlodek Mandecki, an adjunct professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School, received a $1.6 million grant from the NIH-National Human Genome Research Institute to support the development of innovative technologies to dramatically reduce the cost of DNA sequencing.
DNA sequencing costs have fallen more than 50-fold over the past decade. However, it still costs as much as $5 million to sequence 3 billion base pairs – the amount of DNA found in the genomes of humans and other mammals. The grant will allow Mandecki to develop revolutionary technologies aimed at making it possible to sequence a genome for $1,000 or less, which could enable health care professionals to tailor diagnosis, treatment and prevention to each person's unique genetic profile.
