Medicine & Health

A new cyclotron recently was installed at the East Building on the School of Medicine campus. The unit, in the works for more than a decade, is a particle accelerator that will produce radioactive compounds, many of which are used with positron emission tomography (PET) scanners to detect specific types of cancers.

Researchers at the School of Medicine have shown that providing women with free contraception does not increase the likelihood that they will have sex with multiple partners, as critics of the practice have suggested. Shown is the study’s first author, Gina Secura, PhD.

The Washington University Medical Center is undergoing the initial phases of a transformation that primarily will feature expansions of St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Siteman Cancer Center. It also will include more space for Washington University Physicians clinics and diagnostics and new facilities for women and infants, oncology and surgical services. If you’re curious about the expansion, renderings will be on display and staff will be on hand to answer questions March 10 and 11 at two campus locations.

Three promising biomarkers being studied to detect Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages appear to undergo a surprising shift as patients develop symptoms of dementia, researchers led by Anne Fagan, PhD, at the School of Medicine report.

Roger Tsien, one of three chemists who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein, will give the Leopold Marcus lecture at Washington University in St. Louis. His talk, “Fluorescent Molecules for Fun and Profit,” is intended for a general audience and will take place at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 12, in the Laboratory Sciences Building, Room 300. The talk is free and open to the public.

Tia Drake, executive director of Graduate Medical Education (GME) at the School of Medicine, has been honored with the GME Institutional Coordinator Excellence Award.

Washington University in St Louis chemist Timothy Wencewicz says we’ll stay ahead of antibiotic resistance only if we find drugs with new scaffolds, or core chemical structures. One promising candidate, an antibiotic made by a bacterium than infects plants, caught his attention because it contains an “enchanted ring,” the beta-lactam ring that is found in penicillin. In this drug candidate, however, it acts against a different target than the penicillins.

​John DiPersio, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Oncology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and Robert Schreiber, PhD, director of the school’s Center for Human Immunology and Immunotherapy Programs, will be honored in April by the American Association for Cancer Research.

Today, two-thirds of those ever reaching the age of 65 are on the planet. Further, university researchers may have the keys to help people live even longer, healthier and more productive lives — but is society ready?

Advice on a single topic gathered from across campus and across disciplines