epidemiology

Postdoc Profile: Where the Climate Meets Community Health

Dr. Richard Remigio Studies the Health Repercussions of Changing Environmental Conditions

Dr. Richard Remigio

Summer 2023 started off on an ominous note. On June 7th, New Yorkers woke up to a deep orange skyline over Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, resembling a scene from a dystopian novel. Air quality indices there reached ‘code maroon,’ warning that being outdoors was dangerous even for healthy people. Americans and Europeans would subsequently endure some of the highest summer temperatures on record, and in August, wildfires devastated the Hawaiian island of Maui.

These and many other recent events have made it clear how much climate change already affects people’s lives. One of the people trying to combat those consequences is Richard Remigio, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch at the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

Examining Genetic Influences on Lung Cancer

IRP Research Investigates Disease’s Roots Beyond Smoking

magnifying glass examining DNA in the lungs

Today is World Lung Cancer Day, bringing increased awareness to a disease most commonly associated with smoking tobacco products. Yet even though cigarette smoking rates have decreased over the past few decades, this deadly disease remains responsible for more deaths than any other type of cancer — more than 125,000 per year in the U.S. alone. In fact, between 10 and 25 percent of lung cancers occur in people who never smoked.

IRP Stadtman Investigator Jiyeon Choi, Ph.D., has always been curious about how our DNA influences the traits we have and our risk for diseases. When it comes to genes’ contribution to cancer risk, the stakes are particularly high, but Dr. Choi noticed a gap in research when it came to understanding the role genetic variation plays in lung cancer risk. She and her research team aim to fill this gap using a battery of high-tech genomic studies to root out the genes and molecular processes that make some people more susceptible to the disease.

Symposium Celebrates Award-Winning Female Scientists

Three Young Women Honored at Annual Event

Dr. Brittany Lord

There’s no doubt that science flourishes when it welcomes individuals with different backgrounds and perspectives. In pursuit of that goal, NIH has put considerable effort into closing the gender gap in the biomedical sciences, a field in which men significantly outnumber women, especially as the heads of labs and in leadership positions. Those efforts have so far yielded promising progress, with the proportion of women in IRP senior investigator positions increasing from 22 percent at the end of fiscal year 2016 to 27 percent at the end of fiscal year 2022. Over that same time period, women went from comprising 38 percent of IRP tenure-track investigators to 44 percent.

Part of what makes the IRP a welcoming place for female scientists is the NIH Women Scientists Advisors (WSA), a group of IRP scientists elected to represent the interests of women in the IRP. Once per year, the WSA selects a few female postdoctoral fellows or graduate students conducting research at NIH as WSA Scholars. At a symposium on April 13 honoring the achievements of this year’s Scholars, the awardees presented their efforts to learn more about a devastating childhood neurological condition, decrease health disparities in breast cancer, and use stem cells to investigate the roots of a nerve-destroying disorder. Read on to learn more about this year’s WSA Scholars and the important work they’re doing in their IRP labs.

Predicting Risks and Benefits for Lung Cancer Screening

IRP Researchers Refine Tools to Maximize the Benefit from Life-Saving Tests

patient getting a CT scan

Eleven years ago, IRP senior investigator Hormuzd Katki, Ph.D., had a bit of an eureka moment during a press event announcing the results of the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial, which demonstrated that annual screenings cut the risks of dying from lung cancer in heavy smokers by 20 percent.

“It struck me as I read the trial results that not only was this a very important trial, but that it was possible that different people will have different benefits from lung cancer screening,” Dr. Katki remembers. “Even within this group of very high-risk smokers who were part of the trial, you can identify some people who get much more benefit than other people, and that has implications for who should be offered this kind of screening.”

Mining Medical Data to Improve COVID-19 Treatment

Study Reveals Medications Associated With Lower Odds of Severe Infection

doctor typing on laptop

Many researchers studying COVID-19 have spent the past two years poring over test tubes and isolated cells. However, large troves of data about people’s interactions with the healthcare system can also be a rich source of useful insights. Using one such database, IRP researchers found that older adults taking certain medications were less likely to catch COVID or experience severe repercussions from the virus.

IRP Pushes Forward in Fight Against Pandemic Virus

Many NIH Labs Remain Focused on COVID Research

SARS-CoV-2 virus particles

Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, IRP researchers have been hard at work learning about the virus and developing ways to prevent and treat infections. That research remains as important as ever, particularly as the new Omicron variant of the virus continues to spread rapidly.

Fortunately, NIH’s Intramural Targeted Anti-COVID-19 Program (ITAC) has been providing IRP scientists with millions of dollars to support their research on the pandemic virus, known as SARS-CoV-2. Last week, the “I Am Intramural” blog discussed ITAC-funded efforts to learn about the biology of the virus and how it affects the body. This week, we’ll look at IRP projects focused on ways to track, treat, and prevent infections.

Postdoc Profile: An Engineer Among Epidemiologists

Dr. Shuai Xie Brings a New Perspective to Research on Environmental Exposures

Dr. Shuai Xie

“Engineering is about solving problems,” says IRP postdoctoral fellow Shuai Xie, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Dr. Xie speaks from experience. One of the problems she was interested in solving during her graduate studies in chemical and environmental engineering was how to accurately measure the way airborne contaminants adhere to and release from indoor building materials. This is a particularly important problem to solve because those interactions can affect measurements of indoor air pollution, potentially rendering them inaccurate. Of course, Dr. Xie was not trying to solve this engineering problem for its own sake; accurately gauging contamination of indoor air is important for human health.

IRP’s Gary Gibbons and Eliseo Pérez-Stable Receive Government Award for COVID-19 Response

Pair Leads Public Health Efforts Focused on Underserved Communities

Dr. Gary Gibbons (left) and Dr. Eliseo Pérez-Stable (right)

In the spring of 2020, as the U.S. government implemented public health measures to address the COVID-19 pandemic, it quickly became clear that people in Black, Latino, and American Indian communities were significantly more likely to be hospitalized or die from the new disease than White, non-Hispanic Americans. While the work many scientists did to understand the virus and devise vaccines, diagnostic tests, and treatments made the news regularly, efforts to study and address racial disparities in COVID-19’s impacts were equally important.

When called to lead efforts to shrink those gaps, Gary H. Gibbons, M.D., and Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, M.D., rose to the challenge. The two IRP investigators, who respectively lead the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), helped direct two federal programs dedicated to providing underserved communities with information about, and access to, COVID-19 testing, clinical trials, and vaccines. In recognition of their life-saving work, Drs. Gibbons and Pérez-Stable have been awarded the COVID-19 Response Medal, a special honor bestowed this year as part of the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals. Also known as the “Sammies,” these annual awards recognize and celebrate exceptional work by government employees

The Virus vs the Machine

IRP Leverages Supercomputing to Combat Coronavirus

rows of computer servers

Over the past six months, a tiny virus has completely upended life in the United States and many other countries. To combat this microscopic threat, some IRP researchers have turned to a tool the size of a small building.

Biowulf, the NIH’s supercomputer, is supporting more than a dozen different IRP research projects focused on the novel coronavirus. As the world’s most powerful supercomputer solely dedicated to biomedical research, Biowulf allows scientists to analyze data and run simulations at unprecedented speed. Two weeks ago, a blog post described how IRP investigators are using Biowulf to elucidate the structure of the novel coronavirus and simulate how potential therapeutics might interact with it. Picking up where that post left off, this blog will explore the application of Biowulf to important questions about the spread of COVID-19 and the way that its genes, along with our own, might influence its impact on the body.

A Multi-Front Effort to Combat Coronavirus

IRP Research Examines Pandemic From All Angles

scientist working in the lab

The sheer number of labs and wide variety of scientific perspectives in the IRP make it particularly well-suited to combating a disease like COVID-19, which is affecting patients’ health and the world around them in a huge number of ways. IRP researchers specializing in psychology, genetics, epidemiology, and many other disciplines are pursuing an array of strategies to learn more about the novel coronavirus.