University Times

As part of his 2012 State of the Medical School address, Arthur S. Levine, senior vice chancellor for the Health Sciences and dean of Pitt’s School of Medicine, highlighted the work of a number of medical school faculty members and centers:

• Angela Gronenborn, chair of the structural biology department, who is working on structurally modeling the HIV virus’s capsid (protein coat), an attractive target for drug discovery.

• The Center for Vaccine Research, which is attempting to develop vaccines against the influenza, dengue and encephalitis viruses in the Regional Biocontainment Lab in Biomedical Sciences Tower 3 and working with the Graduate School of Public Health’s public health dynamics laboratory.

• Elodie Ghedin, a faculty member in computational and systems biology, whose study of the genomes of parasitic worms that cause morbidity and mortality in hundreds of thousands of people in less-developed parts of the world resulted in a MacArthur genius grant.

“The idea of applying the most sophisticated and cutting-edge molecular biology to parasites that hurt many, many people was obviously attractive to MacArthur grantors,” Levine said.

• D. Lansing Taylor and colleagues at Pitt’s Drug Discovery Institute, who are working on a conservative drug discovery strategy in which information from current literature is modeled in tandem with cellular pathways in which the molecules may be acting in order to predict how a drug might bind to a target before conducting experiments.

• Andrew B. Schwartz of neurobiology, whose brain-computer interface strategy allowed a primate to use its thoughts to move a prosthetic limb. The electrocorticography technique now is being applied in human patients in trials led by Wei Wang of physical medicine and rehabilitation.

• William Klunk of psychiatry and Chester Mathis of radiology, whose Pittsburgh Compound B, an agent that can show beta amyloid deposits in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, has been licensed to GE Healthcare.

• Neurosurgery chair Robert Friedlander, who is working with Walt Schneider of psychology and others in radiology on diffusion tensor imaging to distinguish fiber tracts in the brain. The technique was used to help surgeons remove a patient’s brain tumor without cutting fiber tracts, which would have resulted in paralysis. More recently, the technique was used to view differences in the brain hemispheres in a patient with traumatic brain injury and to map the brain of agricultural economist Temple Grandin, who has autism.

• Peter Strick, whose work has focused on identifying how parts of the brain communicate and how human brains differ from those of other animals, particularly those that lack fine motor skills. Strick injects muscle with rabies then follows the transmission of the virus to the brain to illuminate connections between cells and layers in the brain.

• Colleen McClung and colleagues from psychology who have studied a transcription factor produced by the clock gene in an effort to better understand why lithium and valproic acid are effective in some patients with bipolar disorder.

• Laura Niedernhofer of microbiology and molecular genetics and colleagues, who showed that progeria patients lack a nucleotide excision repair pathway that prevents them from repairing DNA. Niedernhofer made a mouse model for the deficiency in which the factor was knocked out in dose-dependent fashion. If completely knocked out, the mice aged faster; if 25 percent was expressed, they aged prematurely and also developed cancer.

She and Johnny Huard, director of the Stem Cell Research Center, injected progeroid mice with stem cells from young animals and found the treatment made them youthful.

• National Academy of Sciences electees Yuan Chang of pathology and Patrick Moore of microbiology and molecular genetics, who have discovered two of the seven viruses known to cause human cancer and set the stage for developing drugs and vaccines.

• Pediatric surgeon David Hackam, who showed the link between the pathway captained by toll-like receptor 4 and necrotizing enterocolitis, which causes the death of gut tissue in premature babies.

• Cecelia Lo, chair of the Department of Developmental Biology, who is studying the mutations that cause congenital heart defects in mice, whose heart anatomy is nearly identical to humans. The strategy could be used with defects in other organs, Levine said.

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The dean said, “This institution became strong over the last 20 or 25 years in particular by having a collectivist and collaborative culture.

“And although those words sound like clichés, they have true reality in our medical school. I think much of the work I showed you today has nothing to do with departments. It’s scientists who have one question that they wish to address with different habits of mind, different technologies, different reagents, different strategies.

“But it’s the connectedness of our faculty, and in my deanship I’ve tried to promote that in every imaginable way. I think it’s that interdisciplinary and interdependent collectivist culture which has allowed us to have tremendous momentum in the first place and which I think will sustain us.”

—Kimberly K. Barlow