CAP@Your Service - April 2006

The CAP Foundation awards grants to residents to do elective rotations in advanced technologies that are not fully available in their residency institution.  The CAP Foundation Board of Directors is pleased to announce the first round of awardees. 

Molecular Pathology Rotations

Shuko Harada, MD, Drexel University, College of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, will conduct a one-month rotation that will focus exclusively on molecular oncology testing with an institute that has a volume of 3,100 cases.  Dr. Harada will learn more about the application of many state-of-the-art molecular pathology approaches to the diagnosis of neoplasms, including PCR (both real time and conventional), FISH/CISH, and microarray technology at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York.

Kun Ru, MD, PhD, England Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts will conduct a one-month rotation and learn to screen AMLs with normal cytogenetics, or without common translocations, fusion transcripts, for the presence of molecular abnormalities such as overexpression of WTI and FLT3 length mutations (LM) and to develop quantitative PCR assays of these abnormalities to track MRD at the University of Pennsylvania.

Marie Peddinghaus, MD, MCP Hahnemann University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, will participate in one-month rotation and gain an insight into the application of molecular pathology in diagnostic decision making at the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

Daniel Clayton Zedek, MD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will conduct a one-month rotation where he will conduct research using comparative genomic hybridization, which is a genome wide map to detect DNA sequence number variations at the University of California San Francisco.

Hematopathology Elective Recipients

John Christopher Lavelle, MD, UAB Hospital Laboratories, department of pathology, will conduct a one-month training rotation in Brentwood, Tennessee, under the direction of Bruce Davis, MD, FCAP, director of hematopathology for US Labs/Esoterix.

Jitakshi De, MD, University of Texas Medical Center, Houston, Texas, department of laboratory medicine and pathology, will conduct a one month rotation in Irvine, CA under the direction of Bruce Davis, MD, FCAP, director of hematopathology for US Labs/Esoterix.

Special thanks to Abbott Molecular, US Labs, and Esoterix for unrestricted educational grants to help fund these awards.

Telepathology Grants
The CAP Foundation issued its first grant in telepathology.  This grant is intended to develop an understanding for the use of telepathology in the practice of anatomic pathology, clinical pathology, and education. The CAP Foundation Board of Directors is pleased to announce that two grants will be awarded to the following:

Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Principal Investigator: Tesfu Lisanework Hailu, MD
The project will connect the departments of pathology and dermatology with specific application to the needs, readiness, and realistic goals of digital pathology and telepathology. Detailed and specific examples of comparison will be provided.

Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland, Ohio 
Principal Investigator: Nikolaj Paul Lagwinski, MD
The grant will be used to build an informatics and telepathology link between pathologists at satellite hospitals and the main campus.  The specific implementation is installation at a remote site that is staffed by one pathologist, who has need for a regular subspecialist consultation.

Special thanks to Olympus America for an unrestricted education grant to fund this grant opportunity.

There are two additional grant deadlines this year for residents to apply (the first Friday in May and October).  Up to 15 residents may be funded in 2006 to do outside elective training rotations.

Upcoming grant deadlines for residents and CAP Fellows, are available on the CAP web site.