By Zack Anchors
Staff writer
    The Foundation for Blood Research (FBR), which was recently designated as Scarborough’s public-service company-of-the-year by the Scarborough Economic Development Corporation, has just been awarded a $1.24 million grant that will allow the biomedical research facility to create a new program for Maine high school science students. Dr. Walter Allan, a pediatric neurologist who heads the foundation’s “Scienceworks” educational programs, said in an interview last week that the new program will be geared toward anatomy and physiology or advanced biology students.
    “It’s a way of training young people who are studying medicine on how to read clinical trial literature,” said Allan. “We’re doing this through using evidence-based medicine, which came to medicine education in the nineties.”
    Evidence-based medicine is the practice of sorting through the resources of medical literature in order to base medical decisions on the best evidence available. The central focus of the new educational program, which is being called Biomedworks, will be a series of short films that feature doctors using evidence-based medicine.
    “We’ve made films at hospitals that feature short scenes using real doctors and actors as patients,” said Allen. “We set them up in a situation that involves a component of evidence-based medicine.”
    In the first film produced through Biomedworks, which was filmed by the audiovisual staff at Maine Medical Center, a young woman is being treated for asthma by a team of doctors. After speaking with the patient and her mother, the doctors huddle in the hall outside to develop a plan for how to apply evidence-based medicine to find a method of treatment for the patient. A resident then proceeds to the hospital library to search the medical literature from clinical trials to find the best evidence available.
    The films will eventually be taken into classrooms throughout Maine and incorporated into curriculums, but Allan said the program still has a long way to progress before that stage.
    “This is just the first film,” said Allan. “In two weeks we’ll bring in teachers, doctors and BSCS (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study) and talk about how the film could be used in the classroom. … Then in June we have a weeklong workshop with teachers and it will be revised over the summer. Teachers will pilot it next fall and then there will be two years of making films and tweaking the curriculum.”
    Biomedworks, which has been funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through 2011, will initially focus on just several schools in Maine, but it will eventually expand throughout New England and ultimately become a national program. The Biomedworks program was proposed in response to a NIH grant that was offered for projects that would educate the public about the importance of clinical research trials in medicine. The grant, which is called the Science Education Partnership Award, was awarded to 50 organizations around the country, but FBR was is the only group in Northern New England to receive it.
Allen said the schools that were chosen to participate in the initial pilot program naturally fell into place.
    “They were all schools with teachers who had already been involved with us,” said Allan. “They found us. They wanted to bring their kids to the labs here.”
    Biomedworks is only one element of a much broader educational mission that the Foundation for Blood Research pursues. Although the organization also focuses on research and clinical services, since it was founded in 1973 FBR has established a variety of educational collaborations. Allen said the labs typically receive visits from around 20 high school classes a year that come to use a lab at the facility that is devoted to educational uses. Scarborough schools are among the schools that visit FBR, but Allen said schools from as far away as Washington County have made trips to the lab. Allan recalled a school from Lubec that held a spaghetti dinner as a fundraiser to make a trip possible two years ago.
Another program, Ecoscienceworks, provides a curriculum for middle school students that teaches ways of using information technologies to explore scientific problems. One of the oldest educational-oriented programs at FBR is like a science-specific version of the Scarborough-based Ruth’s Reusable Resources, which provides school supplies to schools throughout Maine.
    “We have an equipment program that collects equipment from other biomedical research institutions – like test tubes or lab supplies – and distributes them to classrooms,” said Allan.
    Just recently, FBR received substantial donations from a biomedical company called Cambrex that will eventually be distributed to schools and used in FBR’s labs.
    “We took our van to Cambrex and loaded it up with all kinds of equipment,” said Allan.
    One of the central services offered by FBR is prenatal screening, a method of testing pregnant women to determine if their fetus will develop diseases such as cystic fibrosis or downs syndrome.
    “We do the prenatal screening for 75 percent of pregnant women in Maine,” said Allan. “This place innovated how to do the screening and now everyone does it that way.”
    Allan, who joined FBR in 1978, said FBR’s educational mission grew out of its prenatal screening services, in a sense.
    “The rationale was that if you’re going to interest people in the kinds of testing we’re doing you need to have an educated public,” he said. “So they started educating high school teachers who would educate students, which would lead to an educated electorate.”
    Besides coordinating education programs at FBR, Allan also works at Maine Medical Center and teaches classes at the University of New England and Saint Mathew’s Medical University.
    The Foundation for Blood Research is located off Route One across the street from the Maine Medical Center Research Institute.