Otto and Jeanne Ruesch, left, with Michael Kaiser

The Georgetown Medical Center recently received a $6.75 million gift to do research on colon, pancreatic and other gastrointestinal cancers, according to Blue and Gray.

The gift comes from Jeanne Ruesch, whose husband, local businessman and philanthropist Otto Ruesch, died of pancreatic cancer in 2004 at the age of 64.  Ruesch said that when her husband was diagnosed, she was shocked by how few treatments there were for pancreatic cancer.

The money will go towards creating the Otto J. Ruesch Center for the Cure of Gastrointestinal Cancers.  The center will focus on research, drug discovery and patient advocacy and will be part of the Medical Center’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Dr. John Marshall, Director of the new center and chief of hematology and oncology at the Georgetown University Hospital, told Blue and Gray that he thinks the new center will greatly further research on gastrointestinal cancers:

We have lost our way in gastrointestinal cancer research in this country. We have accepted that merely adding time to one’s life is adequate as a treatment goal and have gotten away from the charge of curing these cancers …

We are not going to solve everything within gastrointestinal cancer treatment within the walls of Georgetown. But we will provide a model for how to move forward.  If we’re right—and I believe we are—we will have a major impact on drug discovery and development and on bringing about a cure for these deadly cancers.

According to the awkwardly translated Bahrain News Agency, the Crown Prince of Bahrain visited campus on Wednesday and met with University President John J. DeGioia. The Bahrainis report that Sheikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa was looking in on the many Bahraini students at Georgetown and weighing the possibility of expanding post-graduate scholarships.

We got a tip that His Royal Highness had an 8:00 reservation for dinner at Morton’s and promptly dispatched a pair of paparazzi to grab a picture of the Prince with his reported team of nine body guards. The Prince was more clever, however, and snuck around into a back alley to enter through the restaurant’s kitchen.

University spokesperson Erik Smulson never got back to us to explain what the prince was doing on campus. What’s up with all these shadowy visits by Middle Eastern leaders, anyway?

Posted by Chris Stanton, News Editor