School of Medicine

Researchers led by Gregory Storch, MD, have developed a diagnostic test to quickly detect enterovirus D68 (EV-D68), a respiratory virus that caused unusually severe illness in children last summer and fall. The outbreak caused infections at an unprecedented rate, with over 1,000 confirmed cases and 14 reported deaths nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

New insight into one of the most common inherited causes of brain tumors may help physicians diagnose and treat the learning disabilities that often accompany the condition, neurofibromotosis 1. The School of Medicine’s David H. Gutmann is the study’s senior author. 

Beginning this September, changes to the telephone system used on the Washington University Medical Center campus and at all BJC HealthCare facilities will require employees to “Dial 10” when placing calls to internal and external numbers.

The Pew Charitable Trusts have named two early-career faculty members at Washington University in St. Louis among their Pew scholars in the biomedical sciences. They are Qin Liu, PhD, of the School of Medicine, and Gary J. Patti, PhD, of Arts & Sciences.

A study published July 20 in JAMA Pediatrics provides even more compelling evidence that growing up in poverty has detrimental effects on a child’s brain. Dealing with this must become “our top public health priority,” writes the School of Medicine’s Joan Luby, MD, in an accompanying editorial.

Randall J. Bateman, MD, the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the School of Medicine, has received a MetLife Foundation Award for Medical Research.  Bateman, a leader in Alzheimer’s disease research, is the university’s fifth researcher to receive the prize.

A team of researchers, including neuroscientists from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has developed a wireless device the width of a human hair that can be implanted in the brain and activated by remote control to deliver drugs to brain cells. The technology, demonstrated for the first time in mice, one day may be used to treat pain, depression, epilepsy and other neurological disorders in people by targeting therapies to specific brain circuits.

Studying mice, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified two signaling molecules that are required for the proper development of a part of the inner ear called the cochlea. The study contributes to the understanding of inner ear development, a first step toward the goal of being able to recover lost hearing.

Yuntong Ma, a fourth-year medical student at Washington University School of Medicine, has received a 2015 Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Cambridge in England.

Applications for the K12 Clinical Hematology Research Career Development Program scholars are being accepted through Oct. 19. The K12 Career Development Program is aimed at clinical or research fellows, instructors or recently appointed assistant professors committed to research in nonmalignant hematology.