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What a difference a day can make.
Saturday, more than 90 doctors, scientists, researchers, clinicians, lab managers and assistants and graduate students got together in Indianapolis to share.
They shared research, they shared ideas, they shared theories, hypotheses, scientific findings and more - including information for future collaboration.
And they did this sharing at the fifth annual Amelia Project, jointly sponsored by the Catherine Peachey Fund Inc. and the Indianapolis affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Attendance was free for all registered participants.
The Amelia Project, which is named after the daughter of a Warsaw woman who died of breast cancer, is a scientific meeting designed to bring together scientists and clinicians working on breast cancer research at institutions across Indiana and to encourage collaboration across institutional boundaries.
This year's conference was the largest yet, with approximately 94 people attending from all over the state. Bad weather in the north delayed, but did not prevent, the arrival of the Notre Dame contingent, which spent twice as much time on the road Friday night because of icy conditions.
Was it worth it? They said they would do it again in even worse conditions to get to the conference in time for the first scientific session, "The Impact of Estrogen Receptor Degradation of Breast Cancer Cell Growth and Acquisition of Antiestrogen Resistance."
(The presenters and attendees Saturday also shared their own language, never blinking at phrases like "fidelity of breast cell DNA synthesome replication" and "signal transduction pathway profiling.")
The objective of getting together researchers working in the same field was met in more ways than one - when two separate groups sat together at lunch, they discovered they were both from Purdue University, neither group knowing of the existence, or work, of the other.
To further encourage collaboration, the Peachey Fund and the Indianapolis Komen affiliate offered for the first time this year a new grant program, the Inter-Institutional Exchange Program, which was introduced by Connie Rufenbarger, of the Catherine Peachey Fund Inc.
"In Indiana, we have a phenomenal wealth of institutional and scientific research going on, and they will never meet each other," Rufenbarger said, quoting Dr. George Sledge, from the Indiana University Medical Center, as the reason for the new program.
The grant will reimburse expenses for an Amelia Project attendee to travel to another institution to study for three days.
The first round of grants, which will begin to be reviewed in March, will fund 10 trips. "It's so new and so different to do something like this that it's evolving," Rufenbarger said.
