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TeraShake simulation of shock waves

It’s been a long time since Chad Nusbaum has seen a conference room go so quiet so fast.

A speaker from Oxford Nanopore Technologies had just described the company’s new disposable device, which will sell for less than $900. The size of a USB memory stick, it reads individual chemical bases on a strand of DNA as it passes through a tiny hole, measuring differences in electrical conductivity to reveal their identity. A larger version of the device will stack in arrays that are projected to be able to sequence a human genome in 15 minutes.

When you speak with Kimberly Stegmaier about her work as a pediatric oncologist at Children’s Hospital Boston, it is clear that she loves treating patients, particularly children with hematological cancers like leukemia. Kim devotes her time to caring for children through the in-patient oncology service yet she also maintains long-term clinical relationships with patients she has been treating since completing her pediatric hematology oncology residency.

For several years, scientists have known that glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3), a protein kinase, is a key member of an important signaling pathway in cancer. Cancer cells mediate their responses to both internal and external stimuli through enzymes like GSK-3. Finding new potential therapeutic targets in these pathways is at the core of many cancer research efforts, including several at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and its partner institutions.