School of Medicine

A documentary-style series highlighting patients, faculty physicians and other staff at St. Louis Children’s Hospital will debut Saturday, March 16, on KSDK. “The Frontline for Hope” will air Saturday nights for the next six weeks. Shown is one of the camera crew taping outside the hospital.

A new food-service area on the north campus of Barnes-Jewish Hospital will open at 6 a.m. Wednesday, March 13. It will replace the Kingshighway Building’s north cafeteria, which will close permanently Tuesday evening, March 12.

Sleep is disrupted in people who likely have early Alzheimer’s disease but do not yet have the memory loss or other cognitive problems characteristic of full-blown disease, researchers at the School of Medicine report. Shown is first author of the study, Yo-El Ju, MD,  an assistant professor of neurology.

Carl Rovainen, PhD, professor emeritus of cell biology and physiology, died of cancer March 1, 2013, in Brookings, Ore. Rovainen retired from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis in 2001, after 34 years as a faculty member.

Michael Mullins, MD, associate professor of emergency medicine at the School of Medicine, recently shared his expertise with doctors, nurses and paramedics in Bolivia. He and other U.S. health-care workers trained Bolivians through Project Helping Hands, an organization that provides health care and education to people in developing countries. Shown is a roomful of paramedics who sought the training.

Nanoparticles carrying a toxin found in bee venom can destroy human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) while leaving surrounding cells unharmed, researchers at the School of Medicine have shown. The finding is an important step toward developing a vaginal gel that may prevent the spread of HIV.  Shown are nanoparticles (purple) carrying melittin (green) that fuse with HIV (small circles with spiked outer ring), destroying the virus’s protective envelope.

Viruses often spread through the brain in patchwork patterns, infecting some cells but missing others. New research at the School of Medicine helps explain why: Natural immune defenses that resist viral infection are turned on in some brain cells but switched off in others. The white arrows in the picture highlight infected cells in a mouse brain.

Although peripheral neuropathies afflict some 20 million Americans, their underlying causes are not completely understood. Now, scientists have shown that damage to energy factories in Schwann cells, which grow alongside neurons and enable nerve signals to travel from the spinal cord to the tips of the fingers and toes, may play a central role. Shown is a Schwann cell surrounding nerve axons, shown in green.

The Human Connectome Project, a five-year endeavor to link brain connectivity to human behavior, has just released a set of high-quality imaging and behavioral data to the scientific community. Shown is a map of the average “functional connectivity” in the human cerebral cortex, collected on healthy subjects while “at rest” in the MRI scanner.

Ralph. G. Dacey Jr., the Henry G. and Edith R. Schwartz Professor and chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery at Washington University, has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He traveled to Dublin earlier this month to receive the honor.