School of Medicine

Courtesy PhotoJeffrey Lowell, M.D., (left) and Eric Shirley, lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, perform clubfoot repair surgery on a child while on board the USNS Comfort.Jeffrey Lowell, M.D., was deployed on the military hospital ship USNS Comfort this month to serve as a general surgeon while the ship was in Central America.

A $5.7 million grant will establish a center at the School of Medicine that will investigate the underlying causes of kidney disease to speed the development of new treatments.

Photo by Robert BostonAyodele Adesanya, a University of Chicago undergraduate who took part in the summer Biomedical Research Apprenticeship Program (BioMed RAP), talks about his research poster, “Gene expression and polymorphism in the GAL1 promoter of Saccharomyces” with Yue Yun, a doctoral student in the Computational Biology Program.

School of Medicine scientists have identified the first gene for itching, which could rapidly lead to new treatments and relief for chronic and severe itching.

Project ARK has received a $6.7 million, five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Rosalind Kornfeld, a pioneer among women in science, died Friday, Aug. 10, after a long illness. She was 72.

Poor housing conditions contribute to the risk for diabetes in urban, middle-aged African-Americans, researchers have discovered.

The School of Medicine has joined the Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium (MMRC), an organization of 13 leading U.S. academic centers designed to speed the development of new myeloma therapies. Washington University School of Medicine serves as a major center for multiple myeloma treatment and research in the St. Louis area.

Mice developed in the laboratory of Zhou-Feng Chen don’t experience relief from pain when given opiate drugs such as morphine.For the first time, pain researchers at the School of Medicine have shown that it’s possible to separate the good effects of opiate drugs such as morphine (pain relief) from the unwanted side effects of those drugs (tolerance, abuse and addiction). The investigators, led by Zhou-Feng Chen, Ph.D., associate professor of anesthesiology, psychiatry and molecular biology and pharmacology, report their results online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that opiates like morphine don’t relieve pain as well in mice genetically engineered to lack neurons that produce a neurotransmitter called serotonin in the central nervous system.

Researchers hoping to better understand the development of the infant brain have long been stymied by a formidable obstacle: babies just don’t want to sit still for brain scans. “There have been some studies that obtained brain scans of infants while they were napping or sedated, but what we’d really like to do is to scan their brains when they’re sitting on a parent’s lap, seeing new things, hearing new words and interacting with the environment,” says Joseph Culver, Ph.D., assistant professor of radiology at the School of Medicine.