On Thursday, the International Biomedical Research Alliance announced that Harold Varmus, MD, former director of both the National Institutes of Health and more recently the National Cancer Institute, will be joining the alliance's board.
"The International Biomedical Research Alliance's goal is to help train a new generation of top biomedical researchers who are better equipped to investigate human diseases and develop new preventions, treatments, and cures," said Stephen M. McLean, chairman of the alliance's board of directors. "We want to increase the speed at which medical research occurs and also the efficacy of outcomes for patients. We warmly welcome Dr. Varmus to our board."
Dr. Varmus was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. Dr. Varmus also co-founded the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program 15 years ago. The program is a collaborative effort between the NIH and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England, dedicated to changing the way in which the most talented biomedical PhD and MD/PhD student in both the U.S. and European Union are taught. The IBRA provides both funding programming to this collaborative scholars program.
Dr. Varmus has met with many of the students from the scholars program and reportedly said he is joining the IBRA board "to promote the development of the scientific careers of these remarkably talented young people."
Michael Gottesman, MD, deputy director of intramural research at the NIH and chief of the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the NCI, said, "I can think of no one better than Harold Varmus to help the NIH-OxCam Program maintain its hallmark characteristics of intellectual freedom and flexibility that have made the program the success that it is."
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