School of Medicine

DehnerLouis P. “Pepper” Dehner, a faculty member at the School of Medicine, received the Distinguished Pathologist Award of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP) at the academy’s 2009 annual meeting. Held in Boston March 7-13, the meeting is the largest annual gathering of pathologists, and the Distinguished Pathologist Award is its highest honor.

Funding from the Missouri Life Sciences Research Fund, part of the 1998 state tobacco settlement, will establish the St. Louis Institute of Nanomedicine Working Group, a collaborative regional effort to apply advances in nanotechnology to the treatment of human diseases.

Detectives on television shows often spray crime scenes with a compound called luminol to make blood glow. Researchers at the School of Medicine have applied the same compound to much smaller crime scenes: sites where the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues.

All animals, including humans, have an internal 24-hour clock or circadian rhythm that creates a daily oscillation of body temperature, brain activity, hormone production and metabolism. Studying mice, researchers at the School of Medicine and Northwestern University found how the biological circadian clock mechanism communicates with processes that govern aging and metabolism.

Nationally recognized StoryCorps will visit the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine April 17-21 as part of a collaborative project to better understand how parents with cancer discuss the diagnosis with their children. This visit is the first time that StoryCorps, the largest oral history project of its kind, has partnered to collect the stories of cancer survivors on a single topic.

The prostate cancer screening tests that have become an annual ritual for many men don’t appear to reduce deaths from the disease, at least among those with a limited life-expectancy, according to early results of a major U.S. study involving 75,000 men.

Exposure to a chemotherapeutic drug makes the branches of a normal nerve cell degenerate (left).Scientists have identified the first gene that pulls the plug on ailing nerve cell branches from within the nerve cell, possibly helping to trigger the painful condition known as neuropathy. The condition is a side effect of some forms of chemotherapy and can also afflict patients with cancer, diabetes, kidney failure, viral infections, neurodegenerative disorders and other ailments.

An enzyme researchers have studied for years because of its potential connections to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and stroke appears to have yet another major role to play: helping create and maintain the brain. When scientists at the School of Medicine selectively disabled the enzyme AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) in mouse embryos, overall brain size was reduced by 50 percent, the cerebrum and cerebellum were shrunken, and the mice died within three weeks of birth.

Researchers at the School of Medicine have linked a potential indicator of Alzheimer’s disease to brain damage in humans with no signs of mental impairment. Although their cognitive and neurological assessments were normal, study participants with lower levels of a substance known as amyloid beta 42 (A-beta 42) in their cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) had reduced whole brain volumes, suggesting that Alzheimer’s changes might already be damaging their brains.

SandellLinda J. Sandell, Ph.D., has been named the Mildred B. Simon Research Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the School of Medicine. “Linda Sandell is a very talented scientist who has contributed a great deal to Washington University and to our understanding of the basic cellular mechanisms behind diseases of the connective tissues,” said Washington University Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton.