School of Medicine

Daniel Stier / GQ, September 2006El Hombre vs. The BabeBaseball purists, especially those of Yankee allegiance, might argue that St. Louis Cardinals homerun-hitting superstar Albert Pujols is simply not in the same league as legendary New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth. Science may never settle that argument, but researchers at Washington University in St. Louis can offer some sense of how Pujols stacks up to the Babe in terms of skills necessary to hit the long ball. Pujols visited WUSTL to take part in a series of lab tests similar to those conducted on Ruth in 1921.

Washington University researchers are tracking the source of a mysterious new tick-borne disease. They’re searching throughout the Midwest for ticks that carry the illness, with the hope of also identifying the animals responsible for spreading the disease. Called Southern tick-associated rash illness, the pathogen causes rashes and flulike symptoms.

A new St. Louis-based company will use a novel technology to rapidly screen thousands of drugs for their effectiveness against two of the biggest health threats in the United States — diabetes and cancer.

The Children’s Discovery Institute, which will begin research later this year, named an executive director and scientific director.

Patrick WinterIn laboratory tests, one very low dose of a drug was enough to have an effect on notoriously tenacious artery-clogging plaques. What kind of drug is that potent? It’s not so much the drug itself as how it was delivered. Fumagillin — a drug that can inhibit the growth of new blood vessels that feed atherosclerotic plaques — was sent directly to the base of plaques by microscopically small spheres called nanoparticles developed by School of Medicine researchers.

The MRI scans on the left show normal gray matter. The two on the right are abnormal.A Washington University pediatrician at St. Louis Children’s Hospital has found that performing MRI scans on pre-term infants’ brains assists dramatically in predicting the babies’ future developmental outcomes. Researchers studied 167 preterm infants in New Zealand and Australia and at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. The findings are a breakthrough because previous technology — cranial ultrasounds — did not show the abnormalities in the infants’ brains.

Asthmatx illustrationA bronchoscope delivers thermal energy to airways during a bronchial thermoplasty treatment.Researchers at the School of Medicine are seeking participants for the AIR2 (Asthma Interventional Research) international, multi-center clinical trial, which explores whether a new asthma treatment improves asthma care. The trial, the first test of the procedure in the U.S., focuses on a procedure called bronchial thermoplasty to treat asthma.

Abnormal blood vessels and hemorrhage under the retina in wet macular degenerationAlthough some recent studies have suggested that inflammation promotes retinal damage in age-related macular degeneration (AMD), new work from Washington University ophthalmology researchers has found that a particular type of inflammation, regulated by cells called macrophages, actually protects the eye from damage due to AMD.

Photo by Robert Boston Jean Audrain in the Department of Internal Medicine receives the Dean’s Distinguished Service Award from Larry J. Shapiro, M.D., executive vice chancellor and dean of the School of Medicine.

Skip Virgin, M.D., Ph.D., has been named head of the Department of Pathology and Immunology at the School of Medicine, succeeding Emil R. Unanue, M.D.