Cutting
Through the Smoke, continued
It was the phone call from Dr. John Glick that got things moving. As director of the Abramson Cancer Center at Penn, he was already quite familiar with Lerman’s work at Georgetown. When he heard she wanted to make a move, he pounced.
“When I heard that Caryn Lerman was in play, we called her up, and said, ‘Don’t take any other jobs—come to Penn!’” Glick recalls. “She came up, and it was an immediate, charismatic relationship. She has a national and international reputation in tobacco research, and in other aspects of cancer control, including behavioral research. We said, ‘Caryn, design your dream job, and we’ll make it happen.’”
In addition to acting as a “catalyst between many faculty and scientists on campus,” Glick says that Lerman “has great leadership skills, she’s brilliant, she’s very collaborative, and she’s also one of the most interactive people I ever met. This is a home run for the Cancer Center, for Caryn, for the psychiatry department, and for Annenberg.”
And the Type A free agent sounds pretty happy, too. “Penn is an amazing place in terms of the depth and breadth of the scientific activity here,” says Lerman. “So many smart and creative people who are open and willing to collaborate—and who really challenge me to do things in different and better ways.” In addition to being able to upgrade the center’s genetics research, she notes, “we’ve expanded in the areas of behavioral pharmacology, animal studies—areas in which we did not have research activities before.”
For Dr. Joseph Cappella, professor of communication, Lerman’s expertise in the genetic basis of risky behavior and her research in communication about genetic risk are “complementary” to the expertise of Annenberg Public Policy Center faculty members working on health-related issues.
“Personally, from the first informal meetings we had with Caryn, I found immediate and exciting connections between her work in genetics and my own in persuasion in health and political contexts,” he adds. “For example, information about genetic dispositions to disease (or toward risky behavior) can invite feelings of fatalism—or the desire to take control of one’s life, depending on how the information is presented.”
Nicotine addiction is a kind of Gordian knot, comprised of intricately entwined genetic and environmental strands. Unraveling it requires many things, not the least of which is better scientific tools.
“One of the real barriers to understanding the genetic basis of tobacco use is that the measures used to define tobacco use are really not well refined,” says Lerman. “And one of the directions in which we want to go is to do studies that better characterize patterns of tobacco use.”
That premise underlies the research projects underway at the TTURC, which include:
Genetic Influences on Smoking Cessation.
Lerman points to the GATOR study, in which principal investigator Janet Audrain-McGovern is trying to “define different trajectories or patterns of use, and understand, even create, typologies of smoking initiations.” Those phenotypes, she adds, “will provide much better measures for doing genetic studies.”
She wants to do the same thing for the science of kicking the habit—“Really understanding the relapse processes, not just doing a clinical trial and saying, ‘At six months or one year, how many people are abstinent and how many people aren’t?’” as she puts it. “So one key area is to better understand the phenotypes of addiction and use, and then to improve the way that we’re doing the genetic studies, taking advantage of the new advances in genomics. But if we were only using more advanced genomics techniques, but still dealing with the old crappy phenotypes, it wouldn’t be useful. So we’re trying to improve our genetic analysis and define much better phenotypes or ways to characterize tobacco use.
“We can certainly improve our ability to tailor treatments to individual smokers based on their biology, psychological background, and so forth,” Lerman adds. “But there will still be a great deal of error. So one of the challenges in translating this to actual clinical practice to the public is: What is the threshold of certainty for the tools that come out of this? And at what point are we ready to put this out in the clinic—knowing that it will never be 100 percent?
“Because it’s never going to be perfect,” she acknowledges. “It’s behavior, and behavior’s complicated. We’ll never have it completely figured out.”
Jan/Feb
Contents | Gazette Home
Copyright 2003 The
Pennsylvania Gazette Last modified 01/05/03