School of Medicine

ColditzGraham A. Colditz, M.D., Dr.P.H., has been named the Niess-Gain Professor and associate director of Prevention and Control at the Siteman Cancer Center at the School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He will have overall responsibility for overseeing research, education, and community outreach in cancer prevention sponsored by the Center.

Scientists have identified a naturally occurring enzyme that can break down a key component of the brain plaques characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. The finding may provide researchers with new opportunities to understand what goes wrong in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and could one day help them seek new therapies.

The School of Medicine, a research leader in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, stroke and schizophrenia, will be among the first recipients of a major new National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to facilitate study of nervous system disorders. The NIH Blueprint for the Neurosciences Grant will provide $8 million to the University over five years.

FerkolThomas Ferkol, M.D., has been named director of the Division of Allergy and Pulmonary Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Ferkol, associate professor of pediatrics and of cell biology and physiology, will continue as director of the Pediatric Pulmonology Fellowship Program and as director of the Cystic Fibrosis Center.

School of Medicine researchers studied healing in the shoulders of 72 rats following rotator cuff surgery.

School of Medicine pediatric ophthalmologists surgically correct vision on some of the most profoundly impaired children.

Photo by Robert BostonJennifer Manly, John Morris, M.D., and Norman Seay at the first annual Norman R. Seay Lecture Sept. 19.

Election to the academy is among the highest honors U.S. medical scientists can receive.

C-TRAIN to open Oct. 20 in the Center of Research Translation and Entrepreneurial Exchange (CORTEX) Building.

DNA ligase encircles the DNA double helix.Scientists investigating an important DNA-repair enzyme now have a better picture of the final steps of a process that glues together, or ligates, the ends of DNA strands to restore the double helix. The enzyme, DNA ligase, repairs the millions of DNA breaks generated during the normal course of a cell’s life.