Pacific Film Foundation — Breaking the Code

April 12, 2012 / featured / joe hartnett

Breaking The Code – Oscar Winner on Future of Medicine

An important mission at Pacific Film Foundation (PFF) is to tell the world about Personalized Medicine, a new form of medicine being born. New, DNA-based therapeutics are being discovered, developed, researched (including via dramatic clinical trials, which we are filming), manufactured, distributed and delivered to patients. Our job as filmmakers is to show the dramatic stories of the pioneering physician-scientists, of the heroic patients enrolled in clinical trials and of the innovative biomedical institutions and companies providing these therapeutics. Our [...]

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April 12, 2012 / featured / joe hartnett

UBUNTU – Penitentiary Transformations

“A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?” Nelson Mandela “The fact [...]

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April 12, 2012 / featured / joe hartnett

A Delicate Balance

Directed by Steve Albrezzi and 3-time Oscar-winner Mark Jonathan Harris, this moving short documentary follows the desperate attempt by two young, pioneering physician-scientists seeking to save a woman’ s life using a novel form of gene therapy. Cheered on by her husband, children and mother, the courageous patient knows she is fighting not only for her own life but also for the lives of future generations through testing of this new gene therapy. We see [...]

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August 31, 2011 / featured / joe hartnett

Personalized Medicine is Here

As defined by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, “Personalized Medicine” refers to the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient…to classify individuals into subpopulations that differ in their susceptibility to a particular disease or their response to a specific treatment. Preventative or therapeutic interventions can then be concentrated on those who will benefit, sparing expense and side effects for those who will not. (Quote obtained from http://www.personalizedmedicinecoalition.org/about)

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May 13, 2011 / featured / joe hartnett

Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the NIH

May 20, 2010: This interview was conducted by the Pacific Film Foundation with Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the NIH (National Institutes of Health). The occasion was a Senate Briefing co-hosted by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and FasterCures.org, entitled, “Leveraging Federal Investment to Speed the Development of Promising Therapies for Patients.”

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May 13, 2011 / featured / joe hartnett

The Importance of Clinical Trials

Laurence Cooper, M.D., Ph.D., MD Anderson Cancer Center emphasizes the importance of Clinical Trials, which are conducted in a series of steps, called phases – each phase is designed to answer a separate research question. Phase I: Researchers test a new treatment in a small group of people for the first time to evaluates its safety, determine a safe dosage range, and identify side effects. Phase II: The treatment is given to a larger group of people to see if [...]

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BREAKING THE CODE: Personalized Medicine Videos

Corey Plays Little League: Give to The Foundation for Retinal Research

November 16, 2011 / Personalized Medicine Video

LEBER’S CONGENITAL AMAUROSIS Nancy Haas received a wonderful Mother’s Day Present, knowing her son, Corey could play Little League baseball without help – thanks to gene therapy! Under the direction of a team at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, led by Jean Bennett, MD, PhD, F.M. Kirby Professor of Ophthalmology and Katherine A. High, William H. Bennett Professor of Pediatrics, both at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, eight-year-old Corey Haas of Hadley, N.Y., received gene therapy for a rare [...]

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Dr. Cartier-Lacave Stops ALD: Give to the Stop ALD Foundation

November 16, 2011 / Personalized Medicine Video

LEBER’S CONGENTIAL AMAUROSIS: GIVE TO THE FOUNDATION FOR RETINAL RESEARCH Dr. Nathalie Cartier, Director of Research at INSERM, Hospital Saint Vincent de Paul, University Rene Descartes, Paris, led the team that arrested the progression of the rare and fatal degenerative disorder adnenoleukodystrophy (ALD), also known as “Lorenzo’s Oil” disease. The inherited disease keeps the body from breaking down fat molecules, which clog and then destroy nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. ALD, which affects about one in 20,000 [...]

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Big Zach’s Talking Sticks: Give to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

August 29, 2011 / Personalized Medicine Video

MITOCHONDRIAL AUTISM WITH DYSAUTONOMIA This wonderful video, part of our My Video Story library, shines a loving spotlight clearly and compassionately on the creative heart and lively soul beating inside “Big Zach” Haught. “Big Zach” uses simple ‘coffee sticks’ he picks up at his local Starbucks to tell stories, dramatize scenes from movies he has seen or video games he has played, create songs and enjoy his art. A 3D episode about Zach and his art is in development. Zach’s [...]

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Why Are You A Physician-Scientist?

April 30, 2011 / Personalized Medicine Video

Personalized Cancer Therapy is the new frontier of medicine and MD Anderson is at the cutting edge of this rapidly evolving movement of personalized therapies. Pacific Film Foundation (PFF) is inspired by a continuing relationship and growing admiration for Dr. Laurence Cooper and his work. PFF is working to create an intimate portrait of a physician-scientist, from the bench to the bedside, traversing the many newly created, interacting areas of a state-of-the-art personalized medicine institution and following a patient receiving [...]

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Grey’s Sister, Blair: Give to the Sanfilippo Research Foundation

April 12, 2011 / Personalized Medicine Video

Blair seemed perfectly healthy at birth. She passed all her newborn screenings. She sat up, and later crawled and walked, exactly on schedule. At preschool, she was behind in some skills but ahead in others. The staff assured Susan and Roger Chapin that it would all even out. But as the girl neared her fourth birthday, the gaps started to widen. Thinking that perhaps a persistent intestinal problem or allergies were affecting their daughter’s development, the Chapins took their daughter [...]

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A Delicate Balance: Give to the City of Hope

April 10, 2011 / Personalized Medicine Video

Directed by Steve Albrezzi and 3-time Oscar-winner Mark Jonathan Harris, this moving short documentary follows the desperate attempt by two young, pioneering physician-scientists seeking to save a woman’ s life using a novel form of gene therapy. Cheered on by her husband, children and mother, the courageous patient knows she is fighting not only for her own life but also for the lives of future generations through testing of this new gene therapy. We see the delicate balance influencing these [...]

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Gene Therapy Successes – Dr. Ted Friedmann, Gene Therapy Pioneer

April 5, 2011 / Personalized Medicine Video

When Ted Friedmann, M.D., M.A., and his laboratory team set up the experiment that led to the seminal paper in the field, published in the March 3, 1972 issue of Science Magazine, he anticipated a time when gene therapies might be available to humans, and even to provide hope and successful treatments for life-threatening diseases affecting humanity. That day has come, and in this short interview at the 2010 American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) Annual Conference, Dr. [...]

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McLeod Discovers How DNA Transforms Cells

April 4, 2011 / Personalized Medicine Video

Dr. Friedmann, a Gene Therapy pioneer describes how he was inspired in medical school by the work of Colin MacLeod who first combined two cells with a resulting change based upon one cell “donating” something to the other cell – it turned out to be DNA and this was the first proof that DNA was the way information is passed from once cell to another.

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The Cambridge Years with Crick, Watson & Sanger

April 3, 2011 / Personalized Medicine Video

Dr. Friedmann became a pioneer in the field of Gene Therapy after having worked in the Cambridge, England laboratories of Watson, Crick and Sanger, who discovered the double-helix of DNA in the 1950s. Here he talks of the inspiration and understanding he received working with this groundbreaking team.

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April 27, 2012

"Where do we come from? What are we doing? Where are we going?"

These three questions are posed in Paul Gauguin's final masterpiece. They are also the title of his legendary painting done at Punaauia on the island of Tahiti in 1897.

Pacific Film Foundation is seeking answers to these profound questions:

Breaking the Code - documenting the search for "The Forever Fix" following physician-scientists and courageous patients exploring the frontiers of gene and cell therapy. Where do we come from?

UBUNTU - Penitentiary Transformations - filmed inside prisons, the voices of inmates speak of their desire to rise above their past actions to bring peace, understanding and forgiveness into the lives of their victims, the lives of those around them in prison and their own lives. What are we doing?

Social Chips - Why do humans bully each other? Is bullying an evolutionary ‘holdover’ that ensured the survival of our fittest ancient ancestors on the grassy plains of Africa, but now has grown to be as irrelevant (and potentially dangerous) as our appendix? Could it be that all humanity needs is more empathy? Where are we going?