School of Medicine

Scientists at the School of Medicine have produced the first detailed images of a protein important to viral infection. The images, from Phyllis Hanson, MD, PhD, and her colleagues, are of molecular scissors that let viruses such as HIV bud from infected cells.

Arnold Bullock, MD, is highly regarded for his expertise in urology and his community outreach efforts, which are helping to reduce cancer disparities. He has been named the inaugural Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Urology at the School of Medicine.

Hundreds of thousands of American youth are following marijuana-related Twitter accounts and getting pro-pot messages several times each day, according to researchers at the School of Medicine. They said the tweets are cause for concern because young people are thought to be especially responsive to social media influences and because patterns of drug use tend to be established in a person’s late teens and early 20s.

Colin Nichols, PhD, the Carl F. Cori Endowed Professor and director of the Center for the Investigation of Membrane Excitability Diseases, has been elected to the Royal Society, an honorary English organization equivalent to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.

Matthew J. Matava, MD, has been recognized as one of the top knee surgeons in North America by Orthopedics This Week, a newsletter for professionals in the field.

The Shell Café in the McDonnell Sciences Building and the Farrell Café in the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center on the School of Medicine campus will be closed June 27 and 30. The cafes will reopen July 1 under new management.

New research from the School of Medicine raises the prospect that some cancer patients with aggressive tumors may benefit from a class of anti-inflammatory drugs currently in use against rheumatoid arthritis.

A novel antibiotic delivery system would exploit small molecules called siderophores that bacteria secrete to scavenge for iron in their environments. Each bacterium has its own system of siderophores, which it pumps across its cell membrane before releasing the iron the siderophores hold. If an antibiotic were linked to one of these scavenger molecules, it would be converted into a tiny Trojan horse that would smuggle antibiotics inside a bacterium’s cell membrane.

Signals from the immune system that help repel a common parasite inadvertently can cause a dormant viral infection to become active again, a new study from the School of Medicine shows. Pictured is a helminth parasite.

Vision researchers from 38 clinical sites, including the School of Medicine, have found that the eyesight of patients with an unusual vision disorder linked to obesity improves twice as much if they take a glaucoma drug and lose a modest amount of weight than if they only lose weight. Neuro-ophthalmologist Gregory Van Stavern, MD, led the study in St. Louis.