Medicine & Health

The recent court ruling that allowed the School of Medicine to maintain control of tissue samples vital to cancer research was a victory for science as well as research participants’ rights, said Medical School Dean Larry Shapiro in a letter to the editors of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

YamaguchiWashington University orthopaedic surgeon Ken Yamaguchi, M.D., has been elected to the board of directors of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS). He will serve the academy as member-at-large.

The results of a new study at the School of Medicine could eventually have oncologists removing their specialties from their shingles by making therapy based on a tumor’s anatomical location obsolete. When the researchers compared eight different kinds of cancerous tumors, they saw that whether the tumor was, for instance, a breast tumor, lung tumor or colon tumor didn’t correlate to how the cancers interacted with a standard anticancer drug.

SchafferJean Schaffer has won a Clinical Scientists Award in Translational Research from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF) to support her work on understanding how diabetes contributes to heart failure. Schaffer, associate professor of medicine and of molecular biology and pharmacology, was one of only 10 physician-scientists in the country to receive this year’s award.

A newly opened clinical trial will evaluate the use of radioactive implants combined with surgical removal of small sections of lung to treat stage I lung cancer. The first patients are now being enrolled at the School of Medicine, and the trial will soon be opened at centers nationwide.

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • New pain management targets (week of Apr. 5) • Finding deadly cancer genes (week of Apr. 12) • Overweight adolescents study (week of Apr. 19) • Glucose-hungry tumors (week of Apr. 26)

Kelle H. Moley, M.D., an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, has been named vice chair for basic science research and director of the Division of Basic Science Research in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Researchers at the School of Medicine have added a gene in the bacterium Salmonella to the short list of genes regulated by a new mechanism known as the riboswitch.

The straightforward solution for many people living in poverty is building savings. For the 9 million disabled Americans living in poverty, the answer isn’t as simple. “The poverty rate among Americans with disabilities is nearly double that of persons without disabilities, and while there is a complex web of federal and state-based programs offering financial assistance to eligible persons with disabilities, policy rules often preclude the accumulation of assets, which are often key for exiting poverty,” says Michelle Putnam, Ph.D., assistant professor of social work at Washington University. “”New research and public policies have the potential to help people with disabilities to have greater economic resources and become more integrated into their communities.” More …

Neurons (shown here in green) fire more frequently in mice lacking Kv4.2 potassium channels.Studying mice, pain researchers at the School of Medicine have identified key components in the pain cascade that may provide targets for more effective analgesic drugs with potentially fewer side effects. Scientists have identified a potassium channel that plays a crucial role in what scientists call pain plasticity, the ability of molecules in the spinal cord to amplify or diminish the response to a painful stimulus.