The Society Pages
Remembering Arthur Rosenberg (1935 – 2018)
Arthur Rosenberg,
MD, FRCPC
Arthur Rosenberg, MD, FRCPC, a former
chief of hematology at the Jewish General
Hospital (JGH) in Montreal, Quebec,
passed away on September 3, 2018.
Dr. Rosenberg practiced hematol-
ogy for nearly 50 years at JGH – the
same hospital where he was born.
He earned his medical degree from
Queen’s University in Kingston,
Ontario, then completed a one-year residency at JGH,
followed by a two-year stint at the Henry Ford Hospital
in Detroit and a two-year fellowship in hematology at
Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital.
He joined the staff of JGH in 1967, where he eventually
served as chief of hematology from 1974 to 1996. During
his tenure, he expanded the hospital’s palliative care
services and molecular biology laboratory. In recognition
of his lifelong dedication to his patients and to teaching,
JGH created the annual Arthur Rosenberg Clinical Lecture
in 2014.
Dr. Rosenberg was an associate professor in the de-
partments of Medicine and Oncology at McGill University,
where he explored abnormalities in red blood cells.
Remembered as a caring physician and teacher,
he is survived by his partner, two children, and three
grandchildren.
Source: JGH News.
Remembering Dorothy Tuan Lo (1940 – 2019)
Dorothy Tuan Lo, PhD, a researcher
who discovered one of the first tissue-
specific enhancers, a DNA sequence
that controls gene expression in the
tissue, and proved the existence of
regulatory transcripts in erythroid cells,
passed away on February 14, 2019.
Dorothy Tuan Lo, PhD
Throughout her career, Dr. Tuan Lo
worked to understand the chromatin
structure of the beta-globin locus, eventually enabling
additional exploration into red cell biology and genetics.
Dr. Tuan Lo was born in China but fled with her
family to Taiwan after the Chinese Revolution of
1949. She later came to California to conduct doctoral
Winship Cancer Institute
Names New Endowed Chair
Sagar Lonial, MD,
chief medical officer
of the Winship Cancer
Institute at Emory
University in Atlanta,
was presented with
the Anne and Bernard
Sagar Lonial, MD
Gray Family Chair in
Cancer, created in honor of Karen Am-
mons Howell, who died of breast can-
cer. Dr. Lonial also is chair of Emory’s
department of Hematology and Medi-
cal Oncology.
Dr. Lonial joined Emory University
more than 20 years ago. His work there
focuses on combining novel agents and
identifying new therapeutic targets
and treatment strategies for patients
with high-risk multiple myeloma (MM).
Recently, he served as principal inves-
tigator on two pivotal clinical trials of
monoclonal antibodies for the treat-
ment of MM.
The endowment will provide con-
tinued support for his research, which
includes leading a global genome se-
quencing study for patients with newly
diagnosed MM.
Source: Emory University press release, January 29, 2019.
14
ASH Clinical News
research at the California Institute of Technology. Dur-
ing her time there, she was introduced to chromatin
biology by studying plant systems. She shifted her
attention to cancer cells during her work as a postdoc-
toral fellow at Harvard University.
Next, she joined the laboratory of Bernard G. Forget,
MD, at Yale University, where she identified important
regulatory mutations that influence hemoglobin
switching and increase fetal hemoglobin expression.
This work contributed to shaping the treatment of
sickle cell anemia. She returned to Boston in 1981 to
work in the laboratory of Irving London, MD, at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During her ten-
ure there, she was the first to recognize the importance
Stand Up To Cancer
Announces T-Cell
Lymphoma “Dream Team”
Stand Up To Cancer
(SU2C) awarded $8
million to a “dream
team” of research-
ers who specialize in
developing chimeric
antigen receptor (CAR)
Helen Heslop, MD
T-cell therapies for the
treatment of T-cell
lymphoma.
The SU2C Meg
Vosburg T-Cell Lym-
phoma Dream Team
will be led by Helen
Heslop, MD, from
Gianpietro Dotti, MD
Baylor College of Medi-
cine in Houston. The team is named
in memory of Meg Vosburg, who died
from T-cell lymphoma in 2018 at the
age of 51. Gianpietro Dotti, MD, of
the University of North Carolina (UNC)
Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Cen-
ter, will serve as codirector.
The funding will support efforts
to create CAR T-cell therapies for the
entire spectrum of T-cell lymphomas,
including “off-the-shelf” products
that will provide a more accessible and
of hypersensitive site 2 (HS2) of the beta-globin locus
control region.
In the mid-1990s, Dr. Tuan Lo joined the faculty in
the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
at the Medical College of Georgia, where she continued
her work with HS2 and efforts to map and elucidate
the function of noncoding transcripts. Her discoveries
were applied to the generation of gene therapy vectors
to achieve erythroid-specific gene expression; this ap-
proach was successfully used to treat thalassemia.
Dr. Tuan Lo is survived by her husband and daughter.
Colleagues remember her as a gracious, honest, incisive,
thoughtful, and loving person.
Source: Augusta University.
affordable alternative to existing CAR
T-cell products. The team also will work
to identify biomarkers to monitor the
approaches’ effectiveness.
Drs. Heslop and Dotti will lead
a team of researchers hailing from
UNC Lineberger, Wake Forest Baptist
Medical Center Comprehensive Cancer
Center, Baylor College of Medicine, and
MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Source: Stand Up 2 Cancer press release, January 28, 2019.
Teen Scientist Wins
National Prize for
Developing Smartphone
Screening System for Blood
Diseases
Eshika Saxena, a
17-year-old senior from
Interlake High School
in Bellevue, Washing-
ton, recently earned a
$40,000 grant as part
of the 2019 Regeneron
Eshika Saxena
Science Talent Search
for inventing a smartphone screening
system to identify bloodborne diseases.
The national competition, spon-
sored by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
and the Society for Science & the
Public, awarded more than $1.8 million
in prizes to high school seniors who
conducted original research in a variety
of scientific fields.
Ms. Saxena’s submission, known as
HemaCam, is a smartphone screening
system that consists of a 3D-printed at-
tachment for a camera phone. With this
attachment, the phone’s camera can
capture microscopic images of blood
samples. These images are analyzed
and matched to blood diseases in a
custom, 7,000-image database for quick
identification. In one demonstration,
HemaCam identified sickle cell disease
from phone images at an accuracy rate
of 95 percent.
Ms. Saxena is involved with several
STEM programs in her school and com-
munity. She cofounded TakeKnowledGe,
a nonprofit organization designed to en-
courage young children to pursue STEM
fields, and also founded the Artificial
Intelligence and Machine Learning Club
at her high school to increase awareness
about the possibilities of AI. ●
Source: Society for Science & the Public press release, March 12,
2019; Bellevue Reporter, March 22, 2019.
May 2019