Electron Kebebew

Naming a child can sometimes stamp a child.

So is it any wonder what an Ethiopian electrical engineer had in mind when he named his son Electron?

But while engineering may have been in the boy’s blood, this youngest of five children — with siblings named Positron, Neutron, Deutron and Proton — grew up to have medicine in his heart.
Now, as a UCSF endocrine surgeon and a research scientist, Electron Kebebew, MD, operates on both bodies and genes. He has become, well, a force, a man on the move, someone who commands attention as he strides the hallways of UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion.

“When you have a name like Electron, people notice you, and they have expectations of you,” he says. “But by and large, as I think back on my life, my name has been a positive influence.”
Positivism is what the 39-year-old Kebebew exudes. And why not? The former UCSF resident embodies the renewed bench-to-bedside spirit of today’s medicine.

“Translational medicine is the term that best describes my life right now,” says Kebebew, who has not one, but two clinical trials underway at UCSF’s Comprehensive Cancer Center. One pivots around his research into the genetic signatures of endocrine tumors. The second examines how to make aggressive thyroid cancer more responsive to treatment.

“Chemotherapy doesn’t work for most patients with aggressive thyroid cancer,” Kebebew explains. “And radioiodine treatment doesn’t work either because thyroid cancer cells don’t capture iodine like normal thyroid cells do. What we’re now testing is a diabetes drug, called rosiglitazone, which causes cancer cells to re-express the gene that takes up iodine. What is unique and exciting about the approach is that we’re not using cytotoxic drugs to kill cancer. We’re just retraining the cell to do something it has lost the ability to do.
“We’re not billing this as a cure. For most people, it could just mean that their life is prolonged. But in those patients where the response to radioiodine is complete across all tumor cells, a cure is at least possible.”

Call it an engineer’s hunch, but early results show that an eight-week dose of the drug restores iodine uptake in some patients. While Kebebew maps out his next steps in that trial, he also is recruiting patients for a diagnostic study.

“In about 30 percent of cases, we can’t tell if the thyroid is cancerous or not, so we end up operating on patients to get a diagnosis. I have been doing genetic array studies to find out if we can identify biomarkers for nonmalignant tumors that would make diagnostic surgeries unnecessary.” Kebebew thinks he’s on the right track: He filed a patent on the biomarkers last year and has now recruited one-quarter of the 600 patients he needs to prove the test’s worth.
Worth is a good word to use, too. There are some 150,000 diagnostic thyroid surgeries performed in the United States each year. Throw in the cost of care, and each one tallies about $15,000. This is not counting the expense of the second operation should the first prove that cancer has taken root.

“The study is designed around predictive value; we still need to prove that the biomarker test generates false negatives less than 2.5 percent of the time. All in all, we’re probably about three years away from being able to use it to make clinical decisions, assuming that everything works as we hope,” Kebebew adds, flashing a confident smile.

Others straddling the midline between research and the operating room might find smiles hard to come by. Kebebew, instead, enjoys the hands-on problem solving.

Watch out, adrenal tumors, another disease that can hide its cancerous nature from various scans. Kebebew is developing biomarkers for you, too, thanks in part to a 20-year-old UCSF Mount Zion tissue bank that has more than 100 tumor samples stored.

It’s an ambitious agenda for a chemical engineering undergraduate who never planned on attending medical school, let alone become a de facto spokesperson for a new kind of clinical research. “I think the NIH needs to better define — and fund — translational research, so that it includes not only the kind of basic science that might be many years away from a clinical application, but also the kind of basic research that has an immediate impact on patients.”
Kebebew understands, of course, that he is an anomaly. But he makes no apologies for how he sees the problem. Beneath the blue scrubs, an engineer still plans and plots.

“I became a doctor because I wanted to be able to have a major impact on another person’s life. My engineer’s training has made me more analytical. I think in terms of cause and effect.”
So far, the effects have all been promising. And if they stay that way, we might all have a reason to remember Electron Kebebew for more than his high-powered name.

source: http://www.ucsf.edu

Amharic Class

Gebisa Ejeta

Dr. Gebisa Ejeta is announced as the 2009 World Food Prize Laureate at a ceremony at the US State Department, featuring Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

He received the prize because he developed a plant whose sorghum hybrids resistant to drought and the devastating Striga weed have dramatically increased the production and availability of one of the world’s five principal grains and enhanced the food supply of hundreds of millions of people in frica.

OVERCOMING EARLY OBSTACLES THROUGH EDUCATION

Born in 1950, Gebisa Ejeta grew up in a one-room thatched hut with a mud floor, in a rural village in west-central Ethiopia.

His mother’s deep belief in education and her struggle to provide her son with access to local teachers and schools provided the young Ejeta with the means to rise out of poverty and hardship. His mother made arrangements for him to attend school in a neighboring town. Walking 20 kilometers every Sunday night to attend school during the week and then back home on Friday, he rapidly ascended through eight grades and passed the national exam qualifying him to enter high school.

Ejeta’s high academic standing earned him financial assistance and entrance to the secondary-level Jimma Agricultural and Technical School, which had been established by Oklahoma State University under the U.S. government’s Point Four Program. After graduating with distinction, Ejeta entered Alemaya College (also established by OSU and supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development) in eastern Ethiopia. He received his bachelor’s degree in plant science in 1973.

In 1973, his college mentor introduced Ejeta to a renowned sorghum researcher, Dr. John Axtell of Purdue University, who invited him to assist in collecting sorghum species from around the country. Dr. Axtell was so impressed with Ejeta that he invited him to become his graduate student at Purdue University. This invitation came at a time when Ethiopia was about to enter a long period of political instability which would keep Ejeta from returning to his home country for nearly 25 years.

Ejeta entered Purdue in 1974, earning his Ph.D. in plant breeding and genetics. He later became a faculty member at Purdue, where today he holds a distinguished professorship.
Developing Drought-Tolerant Crops for Africa.

Upon completing his graduate degree, Dr. Ejeta accepted a position as a sorghum researcher at the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) office in Sudan. During his time at ICRISAT, Dr. Ejeta developed the first hybrid sorghum varieties for Africa, which were drought-tolerant and high-yielding.
With the local importance of sorghum in the human diet (made into breads, porridges, and beverages), and the vast potential of dryland agriculture in Sudan, Dr. Ejeta’s drought-tolerant hybrids brought dramatic gains in crop productivity and also catalyzed the initiation of a commercial sorghum seed industry in Sudan.
His Hageen Dura-1, as the hybrid was named, was released in 1983 following field trials in which the hybrids out-yielded traditional sorghum varieties by 50 to 100 percent. Its superior grain qualities contributed to its rapid spread and wide acceptance by farmers, who found that yields increased to more than 150 percent greater than local sorghum, far surpassing the percentage gain in the trials.
Dr. Ejeta’s dedication to helping poor farmers feed themselves and their families and rise out of poverty propelled his work in leveraging the gains of his hybrid breeding breakthrough. He urged the establishment of structures to monitor production, processing, certification, and marketing of hybrid seed—and farmer-education programs in the use of fertilizers, soil and water conservation, and other supportive crop management practices.
By 1999, one million acres of Hageen Dura-1 had been harvested by hundreds of thousands of Sudanese farmers, and millions of Sudanese had been fed with grain produced by Hageen Dura-1.
Another drought-tolerant sorghum hybrid, NAD-1, was developed for conditions in Niger by Dr. Ejeta and one of his graduate students at Purdue University in 1992. This cultivar has had yields 4 or 5 times the national sorghum average.

Using some of the drought-tolerant germplasm from the hybrids in Niger and Sudan, Dr. Ejeta also developed elite sorghum inbred lines for the U.S. sorghum hybrid industry. He has released over 70 parental lines for the U.S. seed industry’s use in commercial sorghum hybrids in both their domestic and international markets.

Defeating the Scourge of Striga

Dr. Ejeta’s next breakthrough came in the 1990s, the culmination of his research to conquer the greatest biological impediment to food production in Africa – the deadly parasitic weed Striga, known commonly as witchweed, which devastates yields of crops including maize, rice, pearl millet, sugarcane, and sorghum, thus severely limiting food availability. A 2009 UN Environmental Programme report estimated that Striga plagues 40% of arable savannah land and over 100 million people in Africa.
Previous attempts by African sorghum farmers to control the deadly weed, including crop management techniques and application of herbicides, had failed until Dr. Ejeta and his Purdue colleague Dr. Larry Butler formulated a novel research paradigm for genetic control of this scourge. With financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation and USAID, they developed an approach integrating genetics, agronomy, and biochemistry that focused on unraveling the intricate relationships between the parasitic Striga and the host sorghum plant. Eventually, they identified genes for Striga resistance and transferred them into locally adapted sorghum varieties and improved sorghum cultivars. The new sorghum also possessed broad adaptation to different African ecological conditions and farming systems.

The dissemination of the new sorghum varieties in Striga-endemic African countries was initially facilitated in 1994 by Dr. Ejeta, working closely with World Vision International and Sasakawa2000. Those organizations coordinated a pilot program, with USAID funding, that distributed eight tons of seed to Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. The yield increases from the improved Striga-resistant cultivars have been as much as four times the yield of local varieties, even in the severe drought areas.

In 2002-2003, Dr. Ejeta introduced an integrated Striga management (ISM) package, again through a pilot program funded by USAID, to deploy in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Tanzania along with the Striga-resistant sorghum varieties he and his colleagues had developed at Purdue. This ISM package achieved further increased crop productivity through a synergistic combination of weed resistance in the host plant, soil-fertility enhancement, and water conservation.
Empowering Farmers, Inspiring Young Scientists.

By partnering with leaders and farmers across sub-Saharan Africa and educational institutions in the U.S. and abroad, Dr. Ejeta has personally trained and inspired a new generation of African agricultural scientists that is carrying forth his work.

Dr. Ejeta’s scientific breakthroughs in breeding drought-tolerant and Striga-resistant sorghum have been combined with his persistent efforts to foster economic development and the empowerment of subsistence farmers through the creation of agricultural enterprises in rural Africa. He has led his colleagues in working with national and local authorities and nongovernmental agencies so that smallholder farmers and rural entrepreneurs can catalyze efforts to improve crop productivity, strengthen nutritional security, increase the value of agricultural products, and boost the profitability of agricultural enterprise – thus fostering profound impacts on lives and livelihoods on broader scale across the African continent.

Source: http://www.worldfoodprize.org/