Great Study! Can You Do It Again?
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INSIDE 2 STARTUP BOOSTERS FastForward 1812 expands Johns Hopkins’ labs, offices and amenities for young companies. 3 TRAUMA CARE EXPERTS REACH OUT Six Johns Hopkins rapid-response nurses raise awareness about traumatic injuries and how to prevent them. 7 CIVILITY 101 Dan Buccino offers guidance on how respectful behavior can improve life—in and out of the workplace. INSIGHT NEW MUSCLE ANATOMY APP Johns Hopkins teams up with BioDigital to create a dynamic and accurate 3-D musculoskeletal app. DA publication for the Johns Hopkinso Medicine family mVolume 68 • Numbere 3 • May/June 2017 Doctoral student Donna Dang, left, is conducting cancer cell research in the MIKE CIESIELSKI lab of physiology professor Rajini Rao, director of the graduate program in cellular and molecular biology. iomedical research Great Study! illuminates the world and saves lives. It’s also messy, tedious and often Can You Do frustrating. Just ask Donna Dang. Working It Again? in Rajini Rao’s physiology lab, the school of medicine doctoral student spends about 60 hours Johns Hopkins is ensuring a week, including weekends, in a quest to figure out how a research reliability through certain protein, SPCA2, makes the HER2 breast cancer cell Bmultiply. education and better data It took her about two years to figure out how to grow cancer cells in Petri dishes and mix in just the right amount management. of protein. Four years and many failed experiments into her work, she now runs a makeshift assembly line, maintaining as many as 30 dishes at a time in an incubator set at human body temperature. Dang measures the growth, death and movement of cancer cells using a digital camera attached to a microscope. She sends the images to her computer, where they are converted to dense rows of numbers reflecting the quantity, activity and health of the cells. Dang is finally starting to see patterns. Too much of the protein seems to spur growth of the cancer cells, while too little appears to make them migrate. If she can find that Learn more about the strategic priority sweet spot, with just the right amount of protein to kill the for biomedical cancer cells, her work could eventually lead to breast cancer discovery online at therapies. hopkinsmedicine.org/ But only if her research proves reliable. strategic_plan . That’s why the young cellular and molecular medicine investigator repeats her most promising experiments several (continued on page 4) Published by Johns Hopkins Medicine Marketing and Communications CHIEF PERSPECTIVES BIOMEDICAL DISCOVERY Innovation in the Classroom PAUL B. ROTHMAN, M.D. DEAN OF THE MEDICAL FACULTY CEO, JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINE raduate education is one of the core Gmissions of Johns Hopkins Medicine. As times change for Matthew Davenport, lead researcher for Gemstone Biotherapeutics, shows material to research and development director Laura Dickinson and CEO George Davis. The company rented a lab in FastForward 1812 to commercialize academic medical a film that can be placed over wounds to permit healing. It was developed at The Johns Hopkins University. The centers, we want to exterior of 1812 Ashland Ave. is shown below, along with the entry of the new business accelerator. keep apace of the trends in medicine. That’s why, as part Johns Hopkins Opens a Bigger, Brighter Space of our Strategic Plan, we are surveying our teaching methods for Startups to make sure we continue to provide a modern, world-class education and produce highly successful FastForward 1812 provides labs, offices and amenities for young companies. graduates. One recent example of this work is the opening ebastian Seiguer, CEO of emocha, has requiring that patients be observed taking their of our STILE classroom, which stands for science, lots of ideas for growing his mobile health medication each day. With emocha, patients record transform, interact, learn and engage. startup. He’s chosen Johns Hopkins themselves taking their medication, then submit the About two years ago, after touring our Preclinical University’s new FastForward 1812 business footage to health care providers for review through a Teaching Building (PCTB) facilities for graduate incubator as the place to do it. HIPAA-compliant web portal. education, I requested a needs list and cost estimates SThe company rents two four-person offices in the Organizations around the world, including the for renovations that could begin immediately. We new seven-story East Baltimore building, plus desk Baltimore City Health Department and primary care formed the PCTB Design Committee to consider space for two additional employees. “We don’t need clinics in South Africa and India, now use emocha to how to remodel the first-floor space, with the goal of to worry about buying office equipment, signing promote adherence to regimens for illnesses including providing innovative and updated facilities to support long commercial leases, or hiring an office manager,” tuberculosis, hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS. The graduate biomedical education and student life. Seiguer says. “We can scale up or down if we need to, company has grown to offer additional mobile health though so far, we’ve never had to scale down.” The group identified two principal needs: So far, emocha is one of about 20 startups in • An active learning classroom to permit a more FastForward 1812, the Johns Hopkins Technology collaborative style of teaching Ventures business accelerator, at 1812 Ashland Ave., • A physical space that promotes interaction which celebrated its grand opening on April 26. among trainees, faculty members and staff “Biotech is one of our region’s great strengths, members, leading to a stronger community but for too long, Baltimore simply didn’t have the infrastructure in place to support biotech startups,” A few months ago, we celebrated the opening says Christy Wyskiel, senior adviser to the president of the STILE classroom, as well as renovations to of The Johns Hopkins University and head of Johns Mountcastle Auditorium and an adjacent classroom, Hopkins Technology Ventures. which represent the first phase of this work to create FastForward helps entrepreneurs like Seiguer more state-of-the-art teaching spaces. bring discoveries to market by providing affordable The STILE classroom offers a more engaging and space and support services, such as legal advice and interactive teaching environment. A “flipping the networking opportunities. As a result, Johns Hopkins classroom” instructional method enables students Technology Ventures supported 22 company launches to watch a lecture online at their own pace and then in the 2016 fiscal year. come to class prepared for deep discussion. A flipped To qualify for FastForward space, businesses tools, including ones to monitor disease outbreaks. classroom also enables information delivery to move must show they have a viable technology and The first FastForward incubator opened in 2013 in from lecture-based to interactive, which is why committed management team. Most are life science the Stieff Silver building near the Homewood campus. students come to Johns Hopkins—to interact with or information technology companies that use Two years later, the concept came to East Baltimore and learn from the best scientists in the world in a intellectual property licensed from The Johns Hopkins with the 6,000-square-foot FastForward East in the dynamic, intellectual environment. University, says FastForward senior director Brian John G. Rangos Sr. Building. The opening of the STILE classroom represents a Stansky. Startups based on innovations or discoveries The 23,000-square-foot FastForward 1812 sizable step forward toward the goals of our Strategic not developed at Johns Hopkins are also eligible, he innovation hub is designed for collaboration and Plan. It helps us ensure that biomedical education at says, though the bar for admission is higher. interaction, Stansky says, with shared spaces that Johns Hopkins is transformative, with creative and For emocha, Seiguer is building on a mobile health include a pantry and a sunny gathering space with innovative methods of instruction, and that we are education and data-collection platform he licensed in leather couches. Tenants also have access to conference building an effective culture and infrastructure for 2013, developed by infectious disease specialists Bob and meeting rooms, and don’t pay extra for utilities, learning across Johns Hopkins Medicine. Bollinger, Larry Chang and Jane McKenzie-White of office equipment, a receptionist, lab support or an A vital piece of our tripartite mission is setting the Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical Global Health endless coffee supply. a standard of excellence in education to produce Education. Prices range from $275 a month for a single desk to tomorrow’s leaders in health care. That is why we The company’s first focus was helping patients stick $6,000 for the largest labs. need to keep refining our methods and continuously with tuberculosis treatment, which has a protocol That lab space is important to Gemstone improving to lead this change. Biotherapeutics, which is developing a biosynthetic scaffold that can be placed Learn more about STILE classrooms at over wounds to encourage healthy cell bit.ly/stilemedjhm growth. Gemstone CEO George Davis rents a lab equipped with a chemical hood and ventilator, where researchers Matt Davenport and Laura Dickinson spend about 30 hours a week creating, testing and fine-tuning the product, which was developed by Sharon Gerecht, an associate professor in the Whiting School of Engineering. “This space has everything we need,” says Dickinson. —Karen Nitkin 2 • DOME • MAY/JUNE 2017 PEOPLE Teaming Up for Trauma Care Six Johns Hopkins nurses who manage trauma and burn center programs work to prevent injuries and improve the care process. he lunchtime crowd gathering at an information table outside the Kathy Noll, manager of the adult trauma program of The Johns Hopkins Hospital, helps steer MIKE CIESIELSKI cafeteria at The Johns Hopkins Hospital surgeon Alistair Kent through a virtual reality trip of distracted driving.