The Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research recently elected Beverly W. Aisenbrey and Tyler Jacks, Ph.D., as trustees of the AACR Foundation for the Prevention and Cure of Cancer (AACR Foundation). Elected at the 2008 AACR Annual Meeting, each will serve a term of three years and may be re-elected. As a result of his status as AACR’s president-elect, Jacks joins the Foundation board as an ex officio member whose term coincides with his AACR leadership term.

Beverly W. Aisenbrey is a managing director in the New York office of Frederic W. Cook & Co., Inc. She has been with the firm since 1982, held the office of treasurer and continues to serve on its board of directors. An independent advisor to dozens of leading companies, Aisenbrey designs performance-based compensation programs and consults on change-in-control, severance and employment agreements. In this role, she most often works directly with the board of directors' compensation committee.

Aisenbrey is a trustee of Rutgers University, and a member of several advisory boards, including Rutgers Business School and the New Jersey Chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors and Compensation and Benefits Review. She belongs to the Founding Circle of the Rutgers Women’s Business Leadership Initiative. Aisenbrey received her B.A. from Douglass College and her M.B.A. in finance from Rutgers University.

Tyler E. Jacks, Ph.D., is the director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the David H. Koch professor of biology at MIT, and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Jacks’ research interests are in the genetic events that contribute to the development of cancer. His laboratory has engineered a series of novel, mutant mouse strains that accurately mimic human cancer and thus serve as animal models for exploring the cellular pathways regulated by cancer-associated genes.

Jacks is a long-standing member of the AACR, and has served in several leadership positions for the AACR, including as a board member from 2001-2004, as a member of the nominating committee from 2004-2006 and as a member of the Annual Meeting 2003 program committee. Jacks was previously senior editor of Molecular Cancer Research. Jacks received his B.S. in biology from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, San Francisco. He completed his post-doctoral training at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT.

AACR Foundation trustees work collectively to fulfill the Foundation’s mission to accelerate progress in the conquest of cancer by providing financial support for scientific research, education and communication. The Foundation funds programs deemed by the American Association for Cancer Research to be of the highest priority and impact.

For more information about the AACR Foundation for the Prevention and Cure of Cancer and to learn how you can help, please visit our website.

Editor’s note: High resolution photos of Aisenbrey and Jacks are available upon request.

The mission of the American Association for Cancer Research is to prevent and cure cancer. Founded in 1907, AACR is the world’s oldest and largest professional organization dedicated to advancing cancer research. The membership includes more than 28,000 basic, translational and clinical researchers; health care professionals; and cancer survivors and advocates in the United States and 80 other countries. AACR marshals the full spectrum of expertise from the cancer community to accelerate progress in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer through high-quality scientific and educational programs. It funds innovative, meritorious research grants. The AACR Annual Meeting attracts more than 17,000 participants who share the latest discoveries and developments in the field. Special conferences throughout the year present novel data across a wide variety of topics in cancer research, treatment and patient care. AACR publishes five major peer-reviewed journals: Cancer Research; Clinical Cancer Research; Molecular Cancer Therapeutics; Molecular Cancer Research; and Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. Its most recent publication and its sixth major journal, Cancer Prevention Research, is dedicated exclusively to cancer prevention, from preclinical research to clinical trials. The AACR also publishes CR, a magazine for cancer survivors and their families, patient advocates, physicians and scientists. CR provides a forum for sharing essential, evidence-based information and perspectives on progress in cancer research, survivorship and advocacy.

A sophisticated cognitive test suggests that physicians—like society at large—hold subconscious racial attitudes and stereotypes, which may contribute to racial disparities in medical treatment, reports a study in the July issue of Medical Care. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading provider of information and business intelligence for students, professionals, and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry.

The new study—only the second to use the test of subconscious bias in doctors—suggests that pediatricians have less "implicit race bias" than physicians in other specialties and the general public and that there was no relationship between subconscious bias and quality of care. "Further research is needed to explore whether physician implicit attitudes and stereotypes about race predict quality of care," according to the new study by Janice A. Sabin, PhD, MSW, and colleagues of University of Washington, Seattle.

Ninety-five pediatricians took an Internet survey called the Race Attitude Implicit Association Test (IAT). The test measures subconscious attitudes and stereotypes, based on how quickly the user makes connections between race and certain "good" versus "bad" concepts. Previous research in more than 1 million Internet users suggest that most people have some degree of "implicit preference" for whites relative to blacks—generally despite a lack of conscious (explicit) bias or prejudice.

Subconscious Bias Is Present, but Lower in Pediatricians
The pediatricians in the study also showed an implicit preference for whites. However, in this group of doctors—who worked at a large urban medical center—the subconscious bias was weaker than in the general population of Internet respondents. The pediatricians' implicit bias was also weaker than that found in a previous study of emergency room doctors. (That report, published last year in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, was the first study to use the Race Attitude IAT to test implicit bias in physicians.)

The pediatricians actually expressed an explicit attitude in favor of African-Americans. However, in addition to their implicit preference for whites, they held a subconscious bias that white patients would be more compliant (co-operative) with medical treatment. Surprisingly, there was also an implicit link between black patients and receiving "preferred" (as opposed to "adequate") medical care.

The pediatricians were also presented with hypothetical case vignettes of white or black children with common medical problems and asked what treatment they would recommend. Only one of the four vignettes showed a significant racial difference between the treatment recommendations (a higher hospitalization rate for white children with urinary tract infections). This lack of evidence that implicit bias affects medical treatment was in contrast to the study of emergency room doctors, in which the recommended treatments for suspected heart attack were less aggressive when the patient was black.

Many studies have shown racial and ethnic disparities in medical care that are not explained by other factors, such as income or access to health care. Researchers are interested in knowing whether bias on the part of health care providers could help to explain these racial/ethnic discrepancies. Some commentators have suggested that unconscious bias might be a more important factor than overt prejudice.

Much More Research Needed
The new study has some key limitations; the number of pediatricians taking the IAT was relatively small, and they were not a representative sample. However, the study provides intriguing clues for further research, including the possibility that implicit bias may vary among different groups of health care providers.

Like the previous study, it suggests that doctors may have an implicit association with black patients as less compliant with medical care, which might affect their treatment recommendations in various ways. "Future research is needed to gain a better understanding of the complex psychological interactions that exist between physician implicit and explicit attitudes and stereotypes about race, physician perceptions of patient characteristics, physician characteristics, organizational characteristics and quality of medical care," Dr. Sabin and coauthors conclude.

"The IAT is an emerging technique for investigating potential subconscious bias in the medical care setting," comments Dr Jeroan J. Allison of University of Alabama-Birmingham, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Medical Care. "The number of studies is limited and the current study has its own limitations. However, the initial findings are provocative though tentative: unconscious racial bias may impact decisions physicians make about patient care."

About Medical Care
Rated as one of the top ten journals in health services research and healthcare administration, Medical Care is devoted to all aspects of the administration and delivery of healthcare. This scholarly journal publishes original, peer-reviewed papers documenting the most current developments in the rapidly changing field of healthcare. Medical Care provides timely reports on the findings of original investigations into issues related to the research, planning, organization, financing, provision, and evaluation of health services. In addition, numerous special supplementary issues that focus on specialized topics are produced with each volume. Medical Care is the official journal of the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association. Visit the journal website at http://www.lww-medicalcare.com.

About Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (www.LWW.com) is a leading international publisher for healthcare professionals and students with nearly 300 periodicals and 1,500 books in more than 100 disciplines publishing under the LWW brand, as well as content-based sites and online corporate and customer services. LWW is part of Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading provider of information and business intelligence for students, professionals and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry.

Wolters Kluwer Health is a division of Wolters Kluwer, a leading global information services and publishing company with annual revenues (2007) of €3.4 billion ($4.8 billion), maintains operations in over 33 countries across Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific and employs approximately 19,500 people worldwide. Visit www.wolterskluwer.com for information about our market positions, customers, brands, and organization.

Scientists at Georgia Tech have developed a potential new treatment against cancer that attaches magnetic nanoparticles to cancer cells, allowing them to be captured and carried out of the body. The treatment, which has been tested in the laboratory and will now be looked at in survival studies, is detailed online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

"We've been able to use magnetic nanoparticles to capture free-floating cancer cells and then take them out of the body," said John McDonald, chair of the School of Biology at Georgia Tech and chief research scientist at the Ovarian Cancer Institute. "This technology may be of special importance in the treatment of ovarian cancer where the malignancy is typically spread by free-floating cancer cells released from the primary tumor into the abdominal cavity.”

The idea came to the research team from the work of Ken Scarberry, a Ph.D. student in Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Scarberry originally conceived of the idea as a means of extracting viruses and virally infected cells when his advisor, Chemistry professor John Zhang, had another idea. He asked if the technology could be applied to cancer. Scarberry suggested it might be an effective means of preventing cancer cells from spreading.

They began by testing the therapy on mice. After giving the cancer cells in the mice a fluorescent green tag and staining the magnetic nanoparticles red, they were able to apply a magnet and move the green cancer cells to the abdominal region.
“If the therapy is able to pass further tests that show it can prevent the cancer from spreading from the original tumor,” Scarberry said, “it could be an important tool in cancer treatment.”
This technology holds more promise than solely using antibodies to fight cancer because there seems to be less potential for the body to develop an immune response due to the unique peptide-targeting strategy, and the composition of the magnetic nanoparticles.

"If you modify the nanoparticle and target it directly to the tumor cells using a small peptide, you are less likely to generate an undesirable immune response and more accurately target the cells of interest,” said Research Scientist Erin Dickerson.

In addition to testing magnetic nanoparticles, the research team is collaborating with other groups at Georgia Tech to determine how peptide-directed gold nanoparticles and nanohydrogels might also be used in fighting cancer.