University Times

Liver cancer research funded

Satdarshan P.S. Monga of pathology and medicine in the School of Medicine has been awarded $1.2 million by the National Cancer Institute to fund research into the role of beta-catenin in the development and growth of the most common form of liver cancer, hepatocellular cancer (HCC). Beta-catenin is a key protein in cellular interactions that is over-expressed in many cancers and thought to turn on genes involved in the development of HCC.

Monga’s project, based on a mouse model, will focus on the biological mechanisms of tumor formation, specifically those related to beta-catenin. According to Monga, the beta-catenin cell-signaling pathway is a very promising therapeutic target that may stop or slow the development of HCC in patients. Monga will use the data in pre-clinical models to examine the therapeutic effect of drugs proven to be safe in patients and known to inhibit this pathway.

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Government funds nursing education

Helen K. Burns, associate dean for clinical education and faculty member in health and community systems in the School of Nursing, received a $98,500 grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for her proposal, “Pennsylvania Nursing Education Initiatives.” Burns also received a $1.2 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration for her proposal, “Faculty Development Integrated Technology Into Nursing Education and Practice Initiative.”

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Prostate cancer treatment studied

The Prostate Cancer Foundation has awarded Denise O’Keefe of urology $98,900 for a project examining an epigenetic treatment for prostate cancer.

Epigenetics refers to reversible, heritable changes in gene regulation. The most frequent changes seen in the DNA of prostate cancers are epigenetic rather than genetic in nature and are maintained by the action of DNA methyltransferase I.

O’Keefe will use an animal model to determine whether a drug called decitabine, recently approved by the FDA for treatment of myelodysplastic syndromes, inhibits the action of DNA methyltransferase I and slows prostate tumor cell growth.

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Grant helps new docs treat geriatric patients

Neil Resnick and Chiara Ghetti have received two-year grants from the American Geriatrics Society aimed at better preparing specialty residents to care for the nation’s rapidly increasing population of older adults. Resnick is chief of the medical school’s Division of Geriatric Medicine and director of the Institute on Aging. Ghetti is a faculty member in obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences.

The program supports collaborations between surgical and related medical specialty faculty and geriatrics faculty at medical schools and hospitals. Working as a team, the faculty members develop, initiate and evaluate model initiatives that integrate geriatrics into surgical and related specialty residency training.

Pitt’s was one of 25 programs to receive the award.

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Grant to check adverse drug events

Sandra Kane-Gill of pharmacy and therapeutics, Steve Handler of medicine and Shyam Visweswaran of biomedical informatics have received a $30,000 UPMC Electronic Health Record Clinical Informatics, Quality and Safety grant.

The grant will support use of a clinical-event monitoring system as a tool to improve the detection of adverse drug events in the medical intensive care unit. The data will be used to develop “smart” alerts for the prevention of adverse drug events.

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Diabetes awareness project funded

The School of Pharmacy’s Phi Delta Chi fraternity received a grant for $1,500 from LifeScan to develop a service project aimed at promoting diabetes awareness.

The project consisted of educating members and pharmacists on various aspects of diabetes; raising public awareness of diabetes, diabetes testing and medications; obtaining grants for advertising and purchasing diabetes testing equipment, and providing diabetes risk assessment.

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Water testing detects risk of Legionnaires’

Researchers from the School of Medicine have determined that environmental monitoring of institutional water systems can help to predict the risk of hospital-acquired Legionella pneumonia, better known as Legionnaires’ disease.

Reported in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the 20-hospital study calls for reconsideration of the current national infection-control policy to include routine testing of hospital water systems for Legionella, the bacterial group associated with Legionnaires’.

“Only those hospitals that had high levels of Legionella bacteria in their water systems had patients who contracted Legionnaires’ disease,” senior author Victor L. Yu, professor of medicine, said of the study, which involved hospitals in 14 states. “Proactive monitoring of the hospital water supply alerted physicians to the hidden risk of Legionnaires’ disease.”

With an average fatality rate of 28 percent, Legionnaires’ is estimated to be responsible for up to 20,000 cases of pneumonia a year in the United States, many of them hospital-acquired.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommends that hospitals and other health care institutions monitor patients for pneumonia incidence before doing environmental surveillance of water systems that can harbor the bacteria.

Study first author Janet Stout of civil and environmental engineering said, “Based in part on our work, and in collaboration with the Allegheny County Health Department and the Three Rivers Association for Professionals in Infection Control, the development of proactive guidelines for hospital-acquired Legionnaires’ disease prevention has led to the virtual disappearance of this infection in Pittsburgh. We first reported the connection between hospital water supply and these infections in 1982.”

Yu, Stout and colleagues evaluated samples of hospital system water at 20 facilities across the country from 2000 to 2002. When cases of Legionnaires’ were identified, patient urine and sputum samples from 12 of the hospitals were tested.

Researchers found 70 percent of hospital water systems tested positive for Legionella species, and that 43 percent of positive hospitals had high-level colonization. Legionnaires’ cases were among the 633 patients with hospital-acquired pneumonia whose urine or sputum samples were tested for Legionella bacteria. All were traced to hospitals with high-level colonization.

The study was funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

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Firefighter deaths targeted

Researchers at the School of Medicine’s emergency medicine department, in collaboration with the Allegheny County Fire Academy, have received a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant to develop ways of reducing firefighters’ acute cardiovascular risk resulting from exposure to heat stress on the job.

According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, sudden cardiac death represents the most common cause of line-of-duty deaths among firefighters, killing approximately 45 each year. It is suspected that many of these deaths are triggered by heat stress, which can be caused by exposure to the fire and the use of personal protective garments.

The report also found that coronary artery disease and sudden cardiac death in firefighters involve a combination of personal and work-related factors including age, gender, family history, diabetes, hypertension, smoking, high cholesterol, obesity and lack of exercise as well as exposure to fire smoke, heavy physical exertion, heat stress and other physical stresses.

The two-year study, known as the Fire Ground Rehab Evaluation (FIRE) Trial, will assess the best methods for maintaining the health and safety of firefighters while in the line of duty, called fire ground rehabilitation.

David Hostler, of the emergency medicine department, said: “We will be looking for the right threshold at which fire ground rehabilitation should be administered and investigating the efficacy of different methods of rehabilitation that can be administered at fire scenes.”

Allegheny County firefighters will undergo monitoring including pulse, heart rate, blood pressure and core body temperature while at rest, during exercise and while wearing the firefighter protective clothing. Blood samples will be taken before and after exercise to look for elevations in chemicals that promote blood clotting and are associated with increased cardiovascular risk. After exercise, various cooling and hydration treatments will be administered (e.g., oral fluids versus IV fluids, cooling blankets) to determine the most practical and effective method to reduce cardiovascular risk among firefighters.

Similar tests will be performed during exposure to fire, smoke and heat when the firefighters are training at the Allegheny County Fire Academy.

Pitt co-investigators are Joe Suyama of emergency medicine and Steven Reis, associate vice-chancellor for clinical research, Health Sciences and professor of medicine. Both Hostler and Reis are volunteer firefighters.

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Research development grants awarded

Awards from the Central Research Development Fund have been made for fiscal year 2008:

• Heather Bachman of the School of Education for “Child care instruction and growth in school readiness skills.”

• Donna Caruthers of the School of Nursing for “Translating an HIV medication adherence intervention: A first step.”

• Deborah Chapman of biological sciences for “Identification of Tbx6-interacting proteins.”

• Allen Cheng of electrical and computer engineering for “Automatic processor customization and synthesis framework: A low-cost solution for complex SoC designs in the ultra-deep nanoscale era.”

• Lillian Chong of chemistry for “Characterizing the conformational preferences of natively unfolded p53 peptides using computer simulations.”

• Marilyn Davies of nursing for “Predictors of weight loss in overweight children.”

• Dan Ding of the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS) for “Personalized wheelchair navigation.”

• Eric Donny of psychology for “Nicotine self-administration and dependence in rats.”

• Heidi Donovan of nursing for “Development and testing of the self-directed WRITE symptoms cancer symptom management module.”

• Melanie Dreyer-Lude of theatre arts for “German/American international theatre collaboration.”

• David Earl of chemistry for “Toward the computational design of porous materials.”

• Amanda Godley of education for “The effects of linguistics-based grammar instruction on the literacy skills of African-American adolescents.”

• Erin Graff-Zivin of Hispanic languages and literatures for “Textual conversions, figurative inquisitions, in modern Iberian and Ibero-American literature.”

• Guangyong Li of electrical and computer engineering for “Development of multi-functional AFM probe for fabrication of CNT based infrared sensor.”

• Steven Little of chemical and petroleum engineering for “Dissolvable, synthetic vasculature for growth factor delivery.”

• Matthew Luderer of chemistry for “Oxidation of select substrates using 4-acetylamino-2,2,6,6- tetramethylpiperidine-1-oxoammonium tetrafluoroborate in aqueous media.”

• Lisa Maillart Glovick of industrial engineering for “Optimal management of reprocessed single-use medical devices.”

• Patrick Manning of history for “Global studies over time.”

• Emily McEwon-Fujita of anthropology for “Gaelic in Scotland: An ethnography of language shift and revitalization.”

• Ravi Shankar Meenakshisundaram of industrial engineering for “Development of ideal engineering materials: Manufacture of thermally-stable and ductile nanostructured Al alloys.”

• Stephen Meriney of neuroscience for “Testing roscovitine derivatives on calcium current and transmitter release at the NMJ.”

• Anibal Perez-Linan of political science for “Judicial tenure and judicial independence in Latin America, 1900-2006.”

• Ketki Raina of SHRS for “Experiences of living with a left ventricular assist device for destination therapy: Patient and caregivers’ perspectives.”

• Piervincenzo Rizzo of civil and environmental engineering for “Advanced soil moisture characterization by stress wave program.”

• Elizabeth Skidmere of SHRS for “Examining cognitive and affective impairments in stroke rehabilitation.”

• Fengyan Tang of the School of Social Work for “Aging in place.”

• George Tseng of the Graduate School of Public Health for “A statistical framework for meta-analysis of multiple ‘-omics’ data set.”

• Mark Wheeler of the Learning Research and Development Center for “Child-care resources in low-income communities: Implications for the well-being of children and families.”

• Feifei Ye of education for “Developing multilevel item response model for longitudinal studies.”

• Haihui Zhang of the University Library System for “Chinese Poems in European languages from ancient to contemporary: Selected translations and extensive indexes.”

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More tobacco ads aimed at blacks

Compared with Caucasians, African-Americans are exposed to more pro-tobacco advertising, according to a study in the August issue of Public Health Reports.

Brian A. Primack of medicine and pediatrics in the School of Medicine and his colleagues evaluated data from both predominantly African-American and Caucasian markets using studies from peer-reviewed journals. By extracting from the number of total media messages the number of tobacco-related messages, combined with the number of residents living in each market area, they were able to calculate the concentration and density of tobacco advertising in each market.

“According to our data, the concentration of pro-smoking signage is approximately 70 percent higher for African Americans,” said Primack. “Our results also showed that there are about 2.6 times as many advertisements per person in African-American areas as compared to Caucasian areas.”

Primack noted that the findings suggest that African Americans may be special targets of the tobacco industry.

“This population may require specific public health interventions to counter the effect of unbalanced pro-tobacco promotion. Knowing that they may be targeted could motivate African Americans to refuse to fall prey to industry tactics and help them avoid smoking,” he said.

The studies included in the review focused on older forms of advertising and promotion such as billboards and magazines, the authors noted. This suggests that additional research is needed on current media portrayals of smoking, such as tobacco promotions and smoking in films.

Pitt co-authors of the study were James E. Bost of the Division of General Internal Medicine, Michael J. Fine of the Center for Research on Health Care and Stephanie R. Land of the Graduate School of Public Health.

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Sensor warns of asthma attacks

A sensor developed at Pitt could strip the element of surprise from some asthma attacks by detecting one before its onset. Researchers led by chemistry professor Alexander Star have created a sensor that can help asthmatics keep tabs on their condition by measuring changes in the levels of nitric oxide in their breath.

The sensor is a carbon nanotube — a rolled, one-atom thick sheet of graphite 100,000 times smaller than a human hair — coated with a polyethylene imine polymer.

The nitric oxide level in the breath of a person with asthma spikes as the airways grow more inflamed. High levels may precede an attack by one to three weeks or more, said Jigme Sethi of UPMC Montefiore, who plans to test Star’s sensor clinically.

Besides detecting attacks early on, Star’s device also provides an easy, portable method for patients and doctors to monitor symptoms regularly and tailor treatment accordingly, Sethi said.

Star’s research appears in the Aug. 22 online edition of the journal Nanotechnology and was presented this month at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting.

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Concussion research may aid young athletes

Concussions are common in young athletes but the underlying changes in brain function that occur have been poorly understood. A five-year School of Medicine study has linked changes in brain function directly to the recovery of the athlete. Results were published in the August issue of Neurosurgery, the journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons.

Principal investigator Mark Lovell, of orthopaedic surgery and neurological surgery, said: “We found that abnormal brain activity in children and adolescents on functional MRI (fMRI) was clearly related to their performance on neuropsychological tests of attention and memory and to their report of symptoms such as headaches.

“These results confirm crucial objective information that is commonly obtained by neuropsychological testing to help team doctors and athletic trainers make critical decisions about concussion management and safe return to play,” added Lovell, who is the founding director of the UPMC Sports Medicine Concussion Program.

The research project compared 28 concussed high school athletes and 13 age-matched controls. The athletes had an fMRI evaluation within a week of injury and again when they met criteria for clinical recovery. During their exams, the athletes were given working memory tasks to complete while the brain’s activity was observed and recorded.

As a group, athletes who demonstrated the greatest degree of hyperactivation at the time of their first fMRI scan also demonstrated a more prolonged clinical recovery.

“We identified networks of brain regions where changes in functional activation were associated with performance on computerized neuropsychological testing and certain post-concussion symptoms,” said Jamie Pardini, a neuropsychologist with the UPMC concussion program and co-author of the study. “Also, our study confirms previous research suggesting that there are neurophysiological abnormalities that can be measured even after a seemingly mild concussion.”

Other Pitt co-authors were Michael (Micky) Collins, assistant director of the UPMC program, and a faculty member in psychiatry and psychology.

The study was funded by a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

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Few older women want AIDS testing

Few older women are interested in being tested for the virus that causes AIDS despite having significant risk factors for lifetime exposure, according to a study published in the July/August edition of the Journal of Women’s Health. The risk is especially great among African-American women, who represent 73 percent of new HIV cases in women over age 50.

“Older people largely have been overlooked in HIV prevention and testing programs, and consistently have lower HIV testing rates as compared with younger adults,” said Aletha Akers of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences and the study’s lead author. “Those who are tested tend to do so late in their disease, when they are more likely to have overt symptoms such as opportunistic infections. Often, they progress more rapidly to AIDS and die within a year of HIV diagnosis, which leaves little opportunity for treatment or secondary prevention for their partners.”

Akers and her colleagues analyzed data collected from 514 women 50 and older who visited a hospital-based general internal medicine clinic in Atlanta. The women, most of whom said they were not sexually active currently, participated in individual face-to-face interviews that evaluated attitudes concerning lifetime HIV infection risk and interest in HIV testing.

More than 60 percent had never been tested for HIV, although more than half of them could be described as moderate- to high-risk for lifetime exposure to the virus based on sexual history and other factors.

Only 22 percent of participants were interested in HIV testing. Their most often cited reasons were curiosity and concern about a current or past sexual partner’s behaviors.

About a third of women already had been tested. They were more likely to be younger, sexually active, better educated about HIV and tested at the suggestion of a health care provider.

Most, however, felt little need for testing. “Those who lacked interest were more likely to be older, African American and not sexually active,” said Akers, who also is an assistant investigator at Magee-Womens Research Institute. “These women had a low perceived risk, which was not always accurate based on their histories. A third of all the women who were not interested in HIV testing reported lifetime risk factors for the disease.”

Women with little HIV knowledge and low perceived personal risk were less interested in HIV testing, a finding that is consistent with attitudes in much younger, high-risk adults, the study found.

The study was funded by the Emory Medical Care Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Foundation.

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Race linked to vaginal infection risk

Risk of a common vaginal infection linked to preterm birth appears to escalate when even one partner is African American, according to a School of Medicine study presented at the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society for Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is an infection that affects up to 50 percent of women in some populations. BV is characterized by an increase in vaginal alkalinity and an overgrowth of abnormal bacteria. In pregnant women, BV is linked to preterm birth.

Hyagriv Simhan of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences and a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Magee-Womens Hospital, said: “Clinicians have thought of BV infection as a minor problem, but in addition to increasing the risk for preterm birth, other studies have shown that women who have BV also are more likely to get herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.”

Simhan and his colleagues studied 325 women who were in their first trimester of pregnancy. Of the women, 39.7 percent were white female/white male partnerships, 10.8 percent were white female/black male couples, 3.7 percent were black female/white male couples, and 45.9 percent were black female/black male partnerships.

“Generally, BV was less common among white women compared to black women in the group. But notably, partner race also showed an influence on BV risk,” Simhan said. “Our results showed that when one partner is black — whether male or female — risk of BV goes up two-fold.

“We found that paternal race is an independent risk factor for BV during pregnancy, and that this is at least as important a risk factor as maternal race,” said Simhan.

A recent study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that preterm birth contributed to more than a third of infant deaths — twice as many as previously thought, making it the leading cause of infant deaths — yet the underlying causes of premature birth are not well understood.

Reasons for the observed variance in BV rates among racial groups also are not well understood, Simhan said. “More study is definitely needed.”

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Clues on cause, course of sepsis found

A broad-based study led by Pitt researchers may yield some clues that could lead to better understanding of the body’s immune response and better treatments for sepsis. Sepsis, a result of the body’s inflammatory response to an infection, is the 10th leading cause of death in Americans, killing more than 30 percent of its victims.

While rates of sepsis have been increasing steadily, little is known about the condition. Investigational treatments have been based on data from small studies, and most of these therapies have failed.

The Pitt researchers believe that these treatments failed, at least in part, because of insufficient data to fully understand the complexity and variability of the inflammatory response to sepsis.

Their analysis, part of the genetic and inflammatory markers of sepsis study (GenIMS), evaluated data from 1,886 of the study participants who were hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), the leading cause of severe sepsis. More than 30 percent of the subjects developed severe sepsis; 26 percent of them died.

Researchers elevated cytokin levels in 82 percent of the participants with CAP. Levels were highest when the subject presented at the emergency room, tapered down over the first few days, but remained elevated throughout the first week of hospitalization — even after the clinical signs of infection had subsided. Levels were highest in those with fatal severe sepsis, lowest in those with CAP but no sepsis.

John A. Kellum, of critical care medicine in the School of Medicine, said: “Our data show that much of what we previously thought about the role the inflammatory response plays in sepsis was wrong or incomplete. We had thought the inflammatory response to infection was relatively short-lived, just a few days, and that it was similar in patients with similar clinical signs. Instead, we found that the inflammatory response was extremely variable across patients — more than 50-fold differences were seen in some markers. Additionally, we found that the inflammatory response extends past the outward symptoms, far longer than previous data would suggest, and far longer than the courses of therapies used in unsuccessful clinical trials of experimental agents. We also found that the difference between the inflammatory response in a patient with a good outcome and a patient with a bad outcome is only a matter of degree.”

In light of the results, it appears that treatments that abolish a specific component of the inflammatory response would be ineffective, and perhaps dangerous, since the inflammatory response is needed to address the underlying infection. Instead, the researchers believe that therapies that address the chronic inflammatory response after sepsis and those that act more broadly on multiple components may yield better results.

Other Pitt researchers involved in the study were Derek C. Angus, Mitchell P. Fink, Russell L. Delude and Michael R. Pinsky of the School of Medicine’s Department of Critical Care Medicine, Lan Kong and Lisa A. Weissfeld of biostatistics and Donald M. Yealy of emergency medicine.

Alexander Krichevsky, formerly of Pitt’s critical care medicine department, was among the co-authors.

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Pharma ads triple in decade

Spending on direct-to-consumer advertising by the pharmaceutical industry has increased dramatically over the past decade despite a growing chorus of criticism and regulatory actions leveled against it, according to a study published in the Aug. 16 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The study, conducted by researchers at the Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) with collaborators at the Harvard School of Public Health and Vanderbilt University, suggests that a longer moratorium on such advertising for new drugs would represent a dramatic departure from current practices.

Julie Donohue, of health policy and management at GSPH, said: “Our analysis found that the trend toward increasing spending on direct-to-consumer advertising is likely to continue and efforts to enforce more stringent guidelines on such practices would require not only significant changes by the pharmaceutical industry but by the FDA as well.”

Donohue and colleagues found that the pharmaceutical industry’s total real spending on drug promotions almost tripled — from just over $11.4 billion to almost $30 billion — between 1996 and 2005. They found that most drug advertising was targeted to physicians, but over the past nine years, spending on direct-to-consumer advertising and free samples has risen while promotional investment in professional journals fell. Real spending on direct-to-consumer advertising increased by 330 percent from 1996 to 2005, rising to 14 percent of total promotional expenditures in 2005 compared to less than 9 percent in 1996.

Spending on direct-to-consumer advertising was concentrated among a relatively small number of brands. The 20 drugs with the highest spending made up more than 54 percent of total industry spending on advertising in 2005. Most of these were for new drugs used to treat chronic conditions.

Two agencies calling for increased FDA oversight of direct-to-consumer advertising are the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Legislation has been proposed in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives that would give the FDA the power to screen all drug ads before they are broadcast and to place a moratorium on ads for a particular drug for several years after it has been approved.

This study was supported by the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health; NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Myositis research funded

Researchers from rheumatology and clinical immunology at the School of Medicine are leading a worldwide effort to study a treatment for a rare autoimmune disorder called myositis, thanks to a five-year, $8 million contract from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Chester V. Oddis of medicine is principal investigator for the effort, which involves 36 other scientists from 18 states and five countries.

Myositis is a general term for several musculoskeletal disorders characterized by muscle weakness that are thought to be autoimmune diseases.

The Pitt-led study will evaluate the effectiveness of rituximab in adults and children diagnosed with dermatomyositis and adults diagnosed with polymyositis.

In this study, rituximab is considered to be experimental because it is not FDA-approved for the treatment of dermatomyositis or polymyositis.

Rituximab is used in the treatment of B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and in adult rheumatoid arthritis patients with an inadequate response to anti-tumor necrosis factor agents. Researchers believe that the symptoms of myositis are related to the presence of B cells in the blood and rituximab is being given to reduce the number of blood B cells.

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Quality management study funded

Kim LaScola Needy of industrial engineering and Robert Ries of civil and environmental engineering have been awarded a two-year grant from the Construction Industry Institute. The $210,753 grant will fund a study of quality management in the capital facilities delivery industry.

The institute, based at the University of Texas at Austin, is a consortium of more than 100 owner, engineering-contractor and supplier firms that have joined together to enhance the business effectiveness and sustainability of the capital facility life cycle through research, related initiatives and industry alliances.

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Supply chain design grant received

Kim LaScola Needy, Bryan A. Norman and Brady Hunsaker of industrial engineering have received a two-year research grant of $100,000 from the National Science Foundation. The grant for supply chain design comes through the Industry / University Cooperative Research Centers through the TIE research program on e-design.

Researchers from Pitt’s Center for E-Design will collaborate with faculty from the Center for Engineering Logistics & Distribution at the University of Arkansas and Oklahoma State University.

This research addresses how to synchronize product design and supply chain design effectively to ensure good product design and a cost-effective supply chain that minimizes lead time and ensures quality.

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The University Times Research Notes column aims to inform readers about funding awarded to Pitt researchers and to report briefly on findings arising from University research. We welcome submissions from all areas of the University, not only health sciences areas.

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