The Giovanni Armenise-Harvard Foundation
Eighth Annual Symposium
May 21-23, 2004
Certosa di Pontignano, Siena, Italy (see photos)

Cancer Biology, Genomics, and Post-Genomics

The Foundation Mission

To establish multidisciplinary, basic science research that will support leading scientists at Harvard Medical School and at foremost institutions in Italy, in the pursuit of knowledge and discovery for the benefit of humankind, in the fields of medicine and agriculture.

About the Symposium

In 2001, the Giovanni Armenise-Harvard Foundation devoted its 5th Annual Symposium to “Cancer Biology, Genomics, and Post-Genomics.” In May 2004, the 8th Annual Symposium revisited this topic and found the landscape much altered. “Using our meeting three years ago as a benchmark, clearly there have been significant advances,” said Peter M. Howley, chairman of the Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board and chairman of the HMS Department of Pathology. He co-organized both symposia with Philip Leder, professor and chairman of the Department of Genetics at HMS.

Post-genome technologies are developing so rapidly that some of the experimental results reported at this Symposium could not have been obtained three years ago, the organizers agreed. Now that complete genomes are available for humans and many animal models, researchers can devise “very imaginative and powerful screens which were not possible before,” Leder noted. Presentations by Norbert Perrimon of HMS and Enzo Medico of the University of Torino Medical School, for example, illustrate how new technologies can be used to understand the functional genomics of animal models and human tumors.

The Symposium began with a keynote address by Pier Giuseppe Pelicci, who chairs the Department of Experimental Oncology at the European Institute of Oncology and is affiliated with the FIRC Institute, both located in Milan. Pelicci has helped pioneer the understanding of oxidative stress and life span, and his work spotlights the intricate web connecting longevity and cancer risk. Howley predicts that new laboratory and computational tools are going to make this thriving area of inquiry even busier in the coming years.

This year’s Symposium was a hub of intellectual activity in an extraordinarily tranquil setting. It took place just outside Siena at the Certosa di Pontignano, a complex of stone buildings dating to the 14th Century. The Certosa was originally a Carthusian monastery, built for members of an order who pursued scholarly, meditative lives inside its quiet, graceful cloisters. Later sold into private hands, it was owned by two different families during the 19th and early 20th Century. When World War II erupted, this rural cloister once again became a refuge; not for monks, but for Jews and other persecuted peoples. In 1959, it was acquired by the University of Siena and transformed into an exceptionally beautiful conference center. In airy stone chambers where monks once pored over illuminated manuscripts, high-speed internet access is now available.

Nearly 80 scientific participants traveled to the Certosa for the Armenise-Harvard Symposium, which featured 20 invited lectures and 15 poster presentations. In attendance were representatives of Harvard Medical School and two of its affiliated hospitals, 11 Italian universities and research institutions, and two multinational pharmaceutical companies.

The Annual Symposium coincides with the announcement of grants and awards provided by the Armenise-Harvard Foundation. Each year, the Career Development Awards provide seed money for two young Italian scientists who are returning to Italy to launch their own research programs after studying abroad. Molecular biologist Davide Corona is relocating from the University of California at Santa Cruz to DIBIT, at San Raffaele University in Milan. There, he will use genetic and biochemical methods to study ATP-dependent chromatin remodeling, working with Professor Francesco Blasi. Luca Santarelli, who is interested in the biological determinants of mood disorders, augmented his training as a psychiatrist with molecular biology work at Columbia University in New York. The award will help him investigate neuropeptides and adult neurogenesis at Fondazione S. Lucia in Rome, guided by Professor Georgio Bernardi.

The 2004 Junior Faculty Grants are given each year to up-and-coming researchers at HMS. Grace Gill of the Armenise Center for Cancer Biology will use the grant to continue her work on regulation of gene expression in bone cells. David Rudner was honored for his work on regulation of proteolysis and signal transduction in Bacillus subtilis, which he pursues at the Armenise Center for Microbial Pathogenesis and the Host Response.

Symposium participants included winners of this year’s Armenise-Harvard Foundation Italian Science Writer Fellowships. Luca Barone, who has a Ph.D. in astronomy and a masters degree in science communication, freelances for RAI, Italy’s national public radio network, as well as several prominent newspapers and magazines. Guido Romeo, a trilingual reporter who received his masters in science journalism in France, is a staff editor at Macchina del Tempo, a monthly popular science magazine with a circulation of 90,000 and a spin-off television program. Later this summer, Barone and Romeo will come to HMS to gather material for additional stories. Each year, the fellowship yields significant coverage of Armenise-supported research in the Italian press.

Symposium Pages

: About the Symposium
: Presentations