{"id":4730,"date":"2015-02-16T16:55:07","date_gmt":"2015-02-16T21:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/?p=4730"},"modified":"2015-04-14T09:02:37","modified_gmt":"2015-04-14T13:02:37","slug":"falk-foundation-grant-advances-translational-research-in-scleroderma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/2015\/falk-foundation-grant-advances-translational-research-in-scleroderma\/","title":{"rendered":"Falk Foundation Grant Advances Translational Research in Scleroderma"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Steve Bjerklie<\/em><\/p>\n

Ground-breaking discoveries about a rare and debilitating family of diseases has earned Michael Whitfield, PhD, a translational genetics researcher at Dartmouth's\u00a0Geisel School of Medicine, a highly competitive Catalyst Award from the Dr. Ralph and Marian Falk Medical Research Trust. The $300,000 award recognizes Whitfield\u2019s accomplishments in research on scleroderma, a family of autoimmune diseases that affect the skin and, in severe cases, internal organs. His work focuses on systemic sclerosis, the most severe kind of scleroderma.<\/p>\n

Using gene expression techniques to develop molecular \u201cfingerprints,\u201d Whitfield has identified four subgroups of systemic sclerosis\u2014a critical development since physicians had been baffled by why drug therapies were effective for some patients with systemic sclerosis but not for others. Whitfield labels the four subgroups as Inflammatory, Fibroproliferative, Normal-like, and Limited.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the Falk grant, we\u2019ll be developing diagnostic techniques to easily identify these subtypes in patients and working to identify new therapies for each of the subsets, which will also help reposition existing drug therapies to be more effective,\u201d says Whitfield, an associate professor of genetics. His collaborators on this project include Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, Drexel University College of Medicine, Celdara Medical, and Stanford University. The subgroups are already being used to inform clinical drug trials, with the hope that they will become part of standard patient care.<\/p>\n

Falk Catalyst Awards provide seed funding to help investigators and their institutions lay the foundation for successful application to the Trust\u2019s Transformational Research Program in 2015 and beyond. The Falk family, which has a long history of supporting biomedical research, also has two endowments at Geisel\u2014one for operating expenses and one for scholarships. Ralph Falk was a 1942 graduate of Dartmouth College and a former member of the Geisel Board of Overseers.<\/p>\n

Systemic sclerosis afflicts about 50,000 Americans.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a terrible disease, and it has the worst fatality rate of any systemic autoimmune disease,\u201d says Whitfield. \u201cApproximately one in three people with scleroderma die within 10 years of diagnosis, with the cause of death most often being lung disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

Symptoms include hardening of the skin (fibrosis), usually on the arms, hands, and face, thickening skin on the fingers, dilated capillaries on the face, often accompanied by cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, pulmonary, musculoskeletal, and genitourinary symptoms. There is no cure and \u201cno real treatment, unfortunately,\u201d adds Whitfield. \u201cAt this point, we have a lot more questions than we do answers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Systemic sclerosis is fairly evenly distributed throughout the world, which supports the notion that genetic susceptibility is a risk factor and gives added importance to the gene-expression research being conducted in Whitfield\u2019s lab. That research may one day lead to development of drug therapies that will be able to identify the cause of the disease and give scleroderma patients hope for a longer, and relatively normal, life. That\u2019s what Whitfield is hoping for and why the Falk Foundation is investing in his research.<\/p>\n

Whitfield earned his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and did post-doctoral work at Stanford University in California. He came to Dartmouth in 2003. While at Stanford, he was researching genetics and cancer when he was asked by the Scleroderma Research Foundation<\/a> to analyze some data relating to genetic implications in scleroderma. \u201cThat\u2019s how I first got interested in this disease,\u201d he says. \u201cSometimes, serendipity is important.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in the case of Whitfield\u2019s Catalyst Award, it was hard work, top-notch science, and relevance to an important clinical problem\u2014not chance\u2014that was important.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Steve Bjerklie lives in New Hampshire and writes about medicine and health care.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ground-breaking discoveries about a rare and debilitating family of diseases has earned Geisel genetics researcher Michael Whitfield, a highly competitive Catalyst Award from the Dr. Ralph and Marian Falk Medical Research Trust. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":4731,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13,1],"tags":[523,519,522,520],"class_list":["post-4730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-donor-impact","category-news","tag-falk-foundation","tag-michael-whitfield","tag-scleroderma","tag-sclerosis","author-15"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2015\/02\/whitfield-cropped.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-1ei","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4730"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4734,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4730\/revisions\/4734"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}