Breast Cancer Awareness | Nick Jacobs | An unlikely partnership: The United States Army Space and Missile Defense Command and the Joyce Murtha Breast…

When exploring the history of the Joyce Murtha Breast Care Center and the Windber Research Institute now the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Molecular Medicine Windber you see numerous phenomena that contributed to the amazing technological capabilities that came together to produce such a world-class operation.

The following is a depiction of one such unlikely scenario that combined not only happenstance, but also serendipity and, Im sure, some divine intervention.

The key connector in this story was Gen. Joseph M. Cosumano, whose business card read something like this: Supreme Commander of the Worlds Air and Space Missile Defense Command for the United States Army.

Anyone seeing that title for the first time had to have been impressed and humbled. This individual was in charge of missile defense for not only the continental United States, but for the entire world.

As a breast cancer survivor, Gen. Cosumanos wife, Lydia, was a passionate advocate and supporter of the Clinical Breast Care Project and the work that then Dr. Col. Craig Shriver was undertaking at both the previous Walter Reed Army Hospital and the research institute and breast center in Windber.

She often spoke at the off-site retreats held by Shriver during which the scientists, physicians and staff of both facilities would be apprised of the current research and updated on new treatments and surgical procedures that were substantiated by the discoveries being made by the more than 100 Ph.D.s, doctors and clinical providers working in the program.

Because of Shrivers clinical relationship with Lydia Cosumano, he was invited to a holiday party at the Cosumano home, where he mingled among the guests, both civilian and military. It was during one of those casual interactions that Shriver introduced himself to a senior engineer who is now an honoree of the U.S. Air, Space and Missile Defense Distinguished Civilian Wall of Fame Jess Granone.

Granone was the director of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Technical Center and, as the story goes, he casually said to Shriver, I am in charge of Star Wars.

That was the initiative that had been touted by President Ronald Reagan as a means of protecting the United States from a nuclear attack by any enemy.

After that brief introduction, Granone said to Shriver, What do you do?

At that point, Shriver replied, Im in charge of the Clinical Breast Care Project at Walter Reed.

That resulted in Granone taking a step back and becoming very serious while he explained to Shriver that his sister-in-law had recently died prematurely from breast cancer and how completely devastated the family was over this loss.

He went on to further explain that every day, he sat in front of multiple computer monitors watching simulations of a nuclear attack where hundreds of missiles were flying toward the United States, some with warheads and some as decoys.

He explained that the scientists and engineers under him were responsible for creating algorithms that would sort through the images of these missiles to attempt to determine which of them had the lethal-tipped hydrogen explosives.

This is when things became somewhat more intense.

Granone looked Shriver directly in the eye and said, I came to realize searching for these killer warheads was very much like what a radiologist must have been dealing with while exploring a digital mammography image.

After a short pause, he said, I will get as many of these algorithms declassified as possible and make them available to you for use in your research.

Months later, at a breast conference, the digital image of a mammogram was placed on a screen, and as the algorithms were applied to this image, unusual or potentially dangerous cells and lumps were identified.

Shriver and the teams at both Windber and Walter Reed went on to work with General Electric and the Space and Missile Defense Command in an attempt to perfect what was, in effect, a spell-check for mammography, a program that would double check the scan to ensure not even one malignant cell would be overlooked.

None of this, not one single part of this, could have been possible without the vision, commitment and dedication to our military that emanated from the late Rep. John P. Murtha.

At a ceremony recognizing an anniversary of the Windber Research Institute, when this program was explained, Murtha jokingly took a jab at one of his Republican friends by saying, Well, Im glad that trillion dollars from Star Wars finally resulted in something positive.

And indeed, positive it was as hundreds of thousands of breast cancer screens are now double-checked by the same algorithms used to find and stop nuclear missiles.

It was a partnership that will have a long-lasting impact.

Nick Jacobs, of Windber, is a health care consultant and author of the book Taking the Hell Out of Healthcare.

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

See the article here:
Breast Cancer Awareness | Nick Jacobs | An unlikely partnership: The United States Army Space and Missile Defense Command and the Joyce Murtha Breast...