Research
Highlights...
 
 

Jeff Coderre’s work offers hope to brain cancer patients. See below.

 

Kansas.

Rolling prairies, wildflowers, farm fields. Thunderstorms, lightning, tornadoes. It is here that Mother Nature lets loose with a variety of weather phenomena and extremes like no other place on Earth.

That’s why researchers from around the world have come to the heart of the Midwest to study climate conditions. Their goal is to improve weather and climate models and to understand climate change. To do this they have turned 55,000 square miles across the Southern Great Plains of Kansas and Oklahoma into one big meteorological “laboratory.”

As part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program, scientists from Argonne National Laboratory are operating observational equipment placed among the plains’ agricultural fields and grasslands. This observational facility is called a Cloud and Radiation Testbed (CART) site.

The Southern Great Plains site is the largest of three primary field “laboratories” in the ARM program and was the first to begin operations—opening in 1992. A second CART site, the Tropical Western Pacific, operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory on Manus Island, Papua, New Guinea, began operations in the fall of 1996, and a third CART site, the North Slope of Alaska, operated by Sandia National Laboratories, began limited operations in the fall of 1997 According to Argonne meteorologist Doug Sisterson, who manages the Southern Great Plains site for the ARM program, the sites are located in strategic parts of the world where the most significant climatological and weather processes can be found.

The Southern Great Plains was the first field measurement site in part because, in the course of a year, the area plays host to nearly every kind of cloud system. It has both cold, dry winter weather and hot, muggy summer weather, providing climate models with the widest range of conditions possible at one location.

“It’s no accident this area is the heart of tornado alley,” says Sisterson. “Extreme differences in air masses produce a large range of meteorological conditions, making the Southern Great Plains one of the most attractive places in the world to do climate research.”

The heart of the Southern Great Plains site is the heavily instrumented Central Facility located on 160 acres of Oklahoma cattle pasture and wheat field southeast. Many of the 240 instruments at the Southern Great Plains site are the only one of their kind or the first of their kind.

Researchers are using the meteorological and solar radiation data collected at the CART sites to improve General Circulation Models (GCMs). These are the computer programs used by meteorologists to make climate change forecasts. Current GCMs leave much uncertainty in forecasting.

By improving GCMs, researchers in the ARM program hope to improve long-range forecasts of weather patterns in the next 50 years. As a result, they hope to answer important questions about climate change, including how much of it is caused by humans and how much is just the random behavior of Mother Nature at work.

Research at ARM/CART sites is a collaborative effort. Participants in the ARM program come from more than 40 organizations, including national laboratories, universities, private and federal agencies and foreign institutions.

Submitted by Argonne National Laboratory
 
 
 

These days are busy ones for Jeff Coderre. But when you’re offering one of the few rays of hope for people facing life-threatening brain tumors, that’s what happens.

First, there’s the clinical trial he runs at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Since 1994, patients have traveled from around the nation to receive the experimental enhanced-radiation treatment called boron neutron capture therapy, or BNCT. All have had deadly glioblastoma multiforme, an insidious brain tumor that kills within a year. Most have lived just as long after the single-session BNCT treatment as they would have after weeks of conventional radiation and chemotherapy, with virtually no side effects and a far better quality of life. The results are encouraging and hopes are high, but Coderre isn’t calling it a cure - yet. 

There’s still work to be done.
Just recently, he and his team began a new phase of the trial, expanding the admission criteria and increasing the radiation dose.

BNCT works from within cancer cells, killing them with a one-two punch. First, the patient is given an intravenous dose of BPA, a drug co-developed by Coderre using skills he learned at Yale while working toward his Ph.D. in chemistry. BPA carries the element boron to tumor cells, while largely avoiding normal cells.

Then, the patient receives a carefully aimed dose of neutron radiation from BNL’s small medical research reactor. When a neutron hits a boron atom in a tumor cell, the atom “captures” its energy, releasing radiation that kills the cell from within.

Even as the trial progresses, Coderre has the future in mind. He’s working to make BNCT better, through studies of new boron compounds and better neutron beams. In theory, BNCT could attack not only brain tumors, but virtually any cancer. And Jeff Coderre will help lead the charge to make that happen.

Submitted by Brookhaven National Laboratory