School of Medicine

A Toyota Prius WeCar is available through the car-sharing program at the School of Medicine students, faculty and staff.

Photo by Ray MarklinGraduate students cut a rug at the 12th annual Med Ball March 8 at the Millennium Hotel.

Michael Avidan, M.D.; William Clutter, M.D.; and Stanley Misler, M.D., Ph.D., received the 2007 Samuel R. Goldstein Leadership Awards in Medical Student Education.

The Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis now offers a major in healthcare management. Professors from both the medical and business schools will teach courses to both business and non-business majors. The degree will help develop a strong grounding in all aspects of the healthcare industry as well as in the science behind medicine.

The School of Medicine has received a five-year, $3.9 million grant to lead an international research effort designed to improve outcomes for children undergoing lung transplants. Lung-transplant patients are subject to more frequent infections, organ rejection and other complications than patients with other transplanted organs.

Anesthesiology researchers at the School of Medicine have found that a device used to ensure that surgery patients have no memories of their operations may not lower the risk of the phenomenon known as anesthesia awareness — an extremely rare but distressing occurance.

Human diseases and social networks seem to have little in common. However, at the crux of these two lies a network, communities within the network, and farther even, substructures of the communities. Weixiong Zhang, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of computer science and engineering and of genetics, along with his Ph.D. student, Jianhua Ruan, has published an algorithm (a recipe of computer instructions) to automatically discover communities and their subtle structures in various networks.

A better drug for osteoporosis wouldn’t just preserve patients’ old bone structure; it would help fortify their weakened bones with new bone material. Such a drug could be on the horizon because of research at the School of Medicine that has uncovered new information about how to amplify the bone formation process. In an upcoming […]

A team of scientists led by Washington University has begun to unlock the genetic secrets of corn, a crop vital to U.S. agriculture. The researchers have completed a working draft of the corn genome, which should accelerate efforts to develop better crop varieties to meet society’s growing demands for food, livestock feed and fuel.

When platelet activity was blocked (right), bones had much smaller tumors.Cancer cells get a helping hand from platelets, specialized blood cells involved in clotting. Platelets shelter and feed tumor cells that stray into the bloodstream, making it easier for cancer to spread, or metastasize. Research at the School of Medicine suggests that inactivating platelets could slow down or prevent metastasis.