A Virtual Book Club for Professional Development in Emergency Medicine.

Introduction: Professional development is an important component of graduate medical education, but it is unclear how to best deliver this instruction. Book clubs have been used outside of medicine as a professional development tool. We sought to create and evaluate a virtual professional development book club for emergency medicine interns.

The diverse surgeons' initiative: longitudinal assessment of a successful national program.

Background: The Diverse Surgeons Initiative (DSI) is a program that was created to provide underrepresented minority surgical residents with the clinical knowledge and minimally invasive surgical skills necessary to excel in surgical residency and successfully transition into surgical practice. The early success of the graduates of the program has been published; however, a more longitudinal assessment of the program was suggested and warranted. This study provides a 5-year follow-up of the 76 physicians that participated in the DSI from 2002 to 2009 to determine if the trend toward fellowship placement and academic appointments persisted.

Decoupling of tumor-initiating activity from stable immunophenotype in HoxA9-Meis1-driven AML.

Increasing evidence suggests tumors are maintained by cancer stem cells; however, their nature remains controversial. In a HoxA9-Meis1 (H9M) model of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), we found that tumor-initiating activity existed in three, immunophenotypically distinct compartments, corresponding to disparate lineages on the normal hematopoietic hierarchy--stem/progenitor cells (Lin(-)kit(+)) and committed progenitors of the myeloid (Gr1(+)kit(+)) and lymphoid lineages (Lym(+)kit(+)). These distinct tumor-initiating cells (TICs) clonally recapitulated the immunophenotypic spectrum of the original tumor in vivo (including cells with a less-differentiated immunophenotype) and shared signaling networks, such that in vivo pharmacologic targeting of conserved TIC survival pathways (DNA methyltransferase and MEK phosphorylation) significantly increased survival.