UPDATE: Turns out Dr. Plenge isn’t the only Wellesley doctor involved in this competition. Wellesley resident Dr. Robert Green, of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine, is making his bid for the $100K prize with a project called “Exploring Genome Sequencing of Newborns.” You can see his video pitch at the same link below.
Wellesley’s Dr. Robert M. Plenge, who is director of genetics and genomics for Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Division of Rheumatology, Immunology and Allergy as well as a Harvard Medical School assistant professor of medicine, is a finalist for a $100,000 research prize from Brigham and Women’s and the public will have a say in who actually wins.
You can check out videos of Plenge and those pitching 2 competing projects here (Plenge video is also embedded below), and then can vote for your choice. Plenge’s study is called “Using Cutting-Edge Technology to Unravel the Mysteries of the Immune System.”
“My project is to understand how the immune system impacts human disease, and rheumatoid arthritis in particular. Ultimately, we want to develop a molecular ‘signature’ that can be used to diagnose and treat patients. We expect that this signature can be used to deliver the right drug to the right patient (personalized medicine) and can even be used to develop new drugs,” Plenge says.
