Santa Clara University

Implementing Personalized Medicine for Poor and Marginalized Communities

• Wednesday, Feb 17, 2010 from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM (98 spots remaining)

  While research clinics and healthcare practitioners worldwide are experimenting with revolutionary genetic techniques to tailor treatments for human illness, critical issues remain as to whether and how sound solutions can reach relatively poor and marginalized communities.   For example, how does poverty affect and give rise to the specific health problems of a community that would also appear to be genetically defined?  How does poverty preclude access to specific treatments?  The U.S. Indian Health Service is actively investigating ways by which the frontiers in genomic discovery and treatment can be best translated into a low-cost, high-efficacy reality for native American populations, which suffer not only from distinctive health problems but also from barriers to market entry.  The colloquium features a speech by Theresa Ann Cullen, M.D., M.S., Assistant Surgeon General and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Director of the Office of Information Technology for the Indian Health Service (IHS), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services.  Dr. Cullen will be joined by discussant Professor Sally Lehrman, a journalist who specializes in covering race relations, identity, and gender within the context of medicine and science.

  CSTS Colloquium featuring:
  
  Dr. Theresa Cullen, Chief Information Officer – Federal Indian Health Service
  
  In conversation with Discussant: Sally Lehrman – Knight Ridder – San Jose Mercury News Endowed Chair in Journalism and the Public Interest, Communication Department - Santa Clara University
  
  Speaker Biographies:

  

  Theresa Ann Cullen, M.D., M.S., is the Assistant Surgeon General, Chief Information Officer (CIO), and Director of the Office of Information Technology for the Indian Health Service (IHS), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. As CIO, Dr. Cullen oversees a diverse range of agency functions in information systems planning, development, and management. Dr. Cullen is a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service and holds the rank of Rear Admiral. Dr. Cullen began her IHS career in 1984 as a General Medical Officer. She served as the Tucson Program Area Maternal Child Health Coordinator and Area HIV Coordinator and as a General Medical Officer and Clinical Director where she managed clinical performance improvement activities. Dr. Cullen has also served as an IHS Senior Medical Informatics Consultant, RPMS Program Manager, Physician/Clinical Advisor, and the IHS lead on interagency agreements. Among Dr. Cullen's numerous honors are the Meritorious Service Medal; Outstanding Service Medal; Achievement Medal; Commendation Medal; Unit Citation Medal; the IHS Director's Award, and was Program Manager when RPMS received the Davies Award for Public Health from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). The Indian Health Service mission is to work in partnership with American Indians and Alaska Native people to raise their physical, mental, social, and spiritual health to the highest level, ensuring that they have comprehensive, culturally acceptable personal and public health services. IHS operates 31 hospitals, 59 health centers, and 30 health stations, and employs a staff of over 15,000 and a clinical staff of over 4800.

   

  Sally Lehrman is Santa Clara University’s Knight Ridder – San Jose Mercury News Endowed Chair in Journalism and the Public Interest. Also an independent journalist, Lehrman specializes in covering race relations, identity, and gender within the context of medicine and science. Her byline credits include Scientific American, Health, Salon.com, Nature, The Boston Globe and The DNA Files, which has produced three series of public radio documentaries on genetics distributed by National Public Radio. Her honors have included the 1995-96 John S. Knight Fellowship; a 2002 Peabody award, Peabody/Robert Wood Johnson Award for excellence in health and medical programming, and Columbia/Du Pont Silver Baton (for the DNA Files).

  Lehrman is deeply committed to the goal of a U.S. news media that represents the voices and perspectives of all of America. She is author of News in a New America, a fresh take on diversity in coverage and staffing, and served for a decade as national diversity chair for the Society of Professional Journalists. She is an Institute for Justice and Journalism Senior Fellow on race (http://www.justicejournalism.org/). Lehrman was a staff writer and editor for the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner.

  Lehrman is at work on Skin Deep, a book for general audiences that will provide an accessible overview of contemporary race science, its roots, and its social implications at a time when U.S. society is struggling to address disparities in health. Claims that link race, genes and medicine are increasing in the scientific literature, yet most are disturbingly fuzzy. Through compelling stories and jargon-free explanations, Skin Deep will show the historical, economic, and scientific underpinnings of a racial system that may indeed shape health in the body – but probably as much from the outside in, as from the inside out.

   

  RSVP Deadline: February 17, 2010
  Location: Nobili Hall
       Dining Room

Point of Care Diagnostics

• Thursday, Mar 4, 2010 from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM

  CSTS Colloquium featuring:

  Dr. Helen Lee, Associate Professor of Medical Biotechnology – University of Cambridge

  

  Helen Lee received her PhD from Cornell University and MSc from Oxford University. After post-doctoral training at Churchill Hospital in Oxford, the University of Geneva and St Louis Hospital in Paris, she began her career in diagnostics at the Centre National de Transfusion Sanguine in Paris where she was responsible for developing monoclonal blood typing reagents, the first widely used liquid blood typing reagents in Paris. Another major accomplishment of her group was one of the first monoclonal antibody based assays for hepatitis B surface antigen, which was subsequently licensed to the Pasteur Institute as the MONLISA HBsAg assay and is still on the market today.

  She then joined Abbott Laboratories to be responsible for Research & Development, and was promoted to General Manager of the Probe Diagnostics Business Unit where she managed over 100 people and an annual budget of >$20 million. She was also responsible for production of instruments as well as chemistry, marketing, quality and regulatory affairs of the product line. After leaving Abbott she founded a biotech company, Sentinel Biosciences Inc. in Palo Alto, CA, developing technologies for virus discovery. The company was successfully sold to one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. In 1996, she left industry for the University of Cambridge in order to focus on the development of technology and diagnostic assay for resource-poor settings. To commercialise the technologies developed at Cambridge, she founded the spin off company, Diagnostics for the Real World Ltd (DRW), in 2002.

   

  
  Location: Nobili Hall
       Dining Room

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