Medicine & Health

A program at the School of Medicine and St. Louis Children’s Hospital designed to increase awareness about sickle cell disease and the importance of blood donations within the African-American faith community led to a 60 percent increase in first-time blood donations, a new study has found.

InderTerrie E. Inder, M.D., Ph.D., has received a 2008 Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Inder is a pediatrician and researcher at the School of Medicine and St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

On Dec. 17 at the Duane Reed Gallery in Clayton, the Arts as Healing Program is hosting a public showing of art created by cancer patients. This reception, from 5:30 to 8 p.m., will celebrate these patients as artists and honor “their journey of hope.”

Douglas Mann has been named the Tobias and Hortense Lewin Professor and director of the Cardiovascular Division in the Department of Medicine at the School of Medicine. The appointment will be effective in March 2009. He will also become cardiologist-in-chief at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and director of the new Heart and Vascular Institute at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University.

For breast cancer survivors, the idea of taking estrogen pills is almost a taboo. In fact, their doctors give them drugs to get rid of the hormone because it can fuel the growth of breast cancer. So these women would probably be surprised by the approach taken by breast cancer physician Matthew Ellis, associate professor of medicine at the School of Medicine — he has demonstrated that estrogen therapy can help control metastatic breast cancer.

Researchers may have identified one of the body’s earliest responses to a group of parasites that causes illness in developing nations. In a paper published online in Public Library of Science Pathogens, scientists report that they tracked immune cells as they patrolled the second-shallowest layer of the skin in an animal model. Injections of a genetically modified form of the parasite Leishmania major caused the immune cells to turn from their patrols and move to intercept the parasites.

ManaryMark Manary has been named the Helene B. Roberson Professor of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine. “Mark Manary is an outstanding choice for the Helene B. Roberson Professor of Pediatrics,” said Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. “Dr. Manary has developed innovative approaches to improving the lives of children in Africa. He is a credit to his field and most deserving of this generous honor supported by an endowment gift from Helene B. Roberson.”

Washington University is in the spotlight for its pivotal role in the Genomics Education Partnership, a collaborative effort to provide research experience in genomics to undergraduate classrooms across the country.

A vaccine designed to prevent the recurrence of lung cancer is now being tested in centers around the world including the Siteman Cancer Center at the School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. The vaccine stimulates the immune system to destroy cells that carry a tumor-specific antigen called MAGE-A3. This antigen is not present in normal tissue but is found in several cancer types, including 35 percent to 50 percent of cases of the most common type of lung cancer, non-small cell lung cancer.

PikaardA team led by Craig Pikaard, Ph.D., WUSTL professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, has made a breakthrough in understanding the phenomenon of nucleolar dominance, the silencing of an entire parental set of ribosomal RNA genes in a hybrid plant or animal. Since the machinery involved in nucleolar dominance is some of the same machinery that can go haywire in diseases such as cancer, Pikaard and his collaborators’ research may have important implications for applied medical research. Click here for a podcast from Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News: Interview with Craig Pikaard.