Administration, HHS Officials Take NIH Tour

Reed Cordish, assistant to the President for intragovernmental and technology initiatives, and Mary Sumpter Lapinski, counselor to HHS Secretary Tom Price, visited NIH on May 31 for a brief tour. They met with NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, Clinical Center CEO Dr. James Gilman and NCI Surgery Branch chief Dr. Steven Rosenberg.

In tours of his office and lab, Rosenberg discussed research on immunotherapy, walking the group through computer scans and other tumor images before and after treatment.

He also introduced the officials to a 66-year-old patient with relapsed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma who’d had three lines of therapy prior to treatment at NCI. At NIH, he received low-dose chemotherapy followed by anti-CD19 CAR cells in September 2015 and was declared a complete responder 2 months after infusion. His scans remain clear now, 18 months after infusion, with no evidence of recurrent lymphoma.