Sunday, October 25, 2009

“Biomed: Challenging But Promising - New University Newspaper” plus 4 more

“Biomed: Challenging But Promising - New University Newspaper” plus 4 more

Biomed: Challenging But Promising - New University Newspaper

Posted: 25 Oct 2009 07:54 AM PDT

If you use a hearing aid, have a pacemaker or have gotten a blood test, then he has probably benefited from the expertise of a biomedical engineer.
Diana Ko, a fourth-year biomedical engineering major, admits that her major is difficult.
'The major requires the student to be familiar with a wide range of subjects including biology, quantitative physics, math, electric circuits and computer programming and design. Combining biology with engineering creates a complex field of study,' Ko said.
There are two branches of biomedical engineering that UC Irvine offers, the general biomedical engineering major and the biomedical engineering, premedical major. The BMEP major has a greater focus on biology than on engineering, thus preparing students for medical school. These are relatively new majors, which explains the relatively small number of students in the BME and BMEP majors compared to other majors. Currently, there are 180 undergrad BME majors and 305 BMEP majors.
Due to the wide range of subjects BME students need to be familiar with, students may find the course load to be very challenging.
'With both biology and engineering fields to study, it is difficult to become thoroughly familiar with all topics,' Ko said.
Brent Honda, a fourth-year biomedical engineering, premedical major, finds the course load to be difficult, affecting his ability to graduate in the typical four years. 'The heavy course load of bio and BME courses is one reason why I'm staying a fifth year,' Honda said.
Honda stressed the importance of teamwork in this major as well, though he recognizes that competition exists among students throughout UCI.
'I feel that the BME major promotes a lot of teamwork and cooperation,' Honda said. 'For example, in the intro BME courses, we did a lot of group projects and often times ,everyone in the class is so confused by the material that everyone needs to work together to complete the assignments.'
Though stressful at times, the major doesn't come without its advantages. 'One of the things I like about this major is that it's so fulfilling when you can solve a problem on your own. It requires so much thinking and hard work, but in the end, you feel really good about yourself,' said Allison Sarff, a third-year biomedical engineering ,premedical major.
According to Stephanie Wong, a peer academic advisor for the School of Engineering, there is a wide range of career options to choose from. 'You can become a doctor, go into the industry and work for a biomedical company doing research or be the head of a biomedical project. You can do consulting for a company or other, you can get a graduate degree and do research and teach for the university,' Wong said. 'One can even go into stuff that doesn't require engineering.'
Examples of specific activities of biomedical engineers include building artificial organs such as pacemakers, hearing aids and synthetic blood vessels. They may also make surgical devices such as laser systems for eye surgery.
The U.S. Department of Labor anticipates that the number of biomedical engineering jobs will increase by 31.4 percent through 2010

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UM student's research shows Missoula bears are nocturnal apple eaters - Missoulian

Posted: 25 Oct 2009 07:32 AM PDT

Missoula doesn't have an urban bear problem, so much as ursine tourists.

That's what pops out of a midpoint review of a three-year study of black bears in the Rattlesnake and Grant Creek valleys. Radio-collar mapping of 10 bears shows they spend most of their time in the mountains, but come to town for apple season.

"Another thing we noticed - the (mapping) points in town in people's yards are only at night," said Jerod Merkle, a University of Montana wildlife biology student who's running the study with the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. "Bears are usually diurnal animals. They're active in the early morning and evening, not solely nocturnal. So they may be changing lifestyle to feed on urban foods."

Merkle's research will break new ground in the urban wildlife field, according to FWP bear manager Jamie Jonkel. There's little hard data showing how bears behave on the edge of town. So finding out the times of year they come in, the times of day, the types of food or habitat they seek, and the trouble they get into all help guide urban bear management policies.

"If it all comes together, it might be a good methodology for other communities," Jonkel said. It will also contribute to Missoula's own bear buffer zone policy, which seeks to reduce the people-bear conflicts in its surrounding valleys.

Missoula's bear problem spiked in the late 1990s, when a particularly tough food year drove many bears out of the woods. The combination of spring frosts and summer droughts dried up much of the backcountry berry, fruit and grass supplies bears depend on. So they came to check out Missoula's fruit trees, fertilized lawns and garbage cans.

"We had had a bear digging through roofs into pantries, bears breaking into cars," Jonkel recalled. "There were so many bears killed by trains and cars, road-killed in the Rattlesnake, bears rushing out of alleyways and getting hit."

The bears that survived made mental maps of the new food source, and passed the knowledge on to their cubs.

Merkle had developed an interest in carnivores as an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona, and expanded on it with master's degree studies at UM. Last year, he teamed up with Boone and Crockett wildlife conservation professor Paul Krausman, who'd just landed a grant to buy radio collars and other equipment. They devised the three-year research plan for Missoula's bears.

With help from FWP biologists, Merkle trapped 10 bears in the two northern valleys and attached the collars this summer. The transmitters feed each bear's location into a computer every three hours. For most of this summer, the bears prowled the Rattlesnake Wilderness. But come mid-August, they crossed the city limits and explored all the way to the Interstate 90 freeway.

Only one bear crossed that southern boundary, and then only for a few hours. But the rest filled the Rattlesnake Valley with plot marks. The Grant Creek drainage also got explored, but to a lesser extent. Merkle said that could be because most of his collared bears were caught in the Rattlesnake fringe.

Some of the bears have already headed into dens for the winter, although most appear to be active for another few weeks. Once they're hibernating, Merkle and Krausman will analyze the data and hypothesize about the movement patterns. Next year, Merkle will continue to track the bears' motions until the collars automatically drop off in October 2010.

"Scientists don't have any idea about bears living in town," Merkle said. "We don't know their role in the ecosystem. Have they completely changed biology to live off what humans do? We need information to explain that question."

Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com.

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Journey Into the Underbelly World of Tapeworms at 'Wild Science' - Kansas City infoZine

Posted: 25 Oct 2009 06:28 AM PDT

Lawrence, KS - infoZine - Kirsten Jensen, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, will introduce the characteristics, diversity and peculiar life history of tapeworms at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 28, at KU's Natural History Museum. The event is free and open to the public.

"These flatworms are far from simple," said Jensen, who is also an assistant curator at KU's Biodiversity Institute. "Particularly fascinating are those that parasitize sharks and
rays, because they exhibit a wild array of structures to attach to their hosts."

Her talk, "From the Vertebrate Bowels of the Earth," is the first event for the academic year in the museum's Wild Science series. Held periodically throughout the academic year, the series offers a chance for the public to ask questions directly to researchers in an informal setting. Coffee, hot chocolate and cookies will be served.

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Six months later, still no sign of Brittanee Drexel - Democrat and Chronicle

Posted: 25 Oct 2009 09:34 AM PDT

Simply put, this might be one of the worst months of Chad Drexel's life.

He celebrated his missing daughter's 18th birthday on Oct. 7. A week later, he traveled to South Carolina to join a two-day search, hoping to find new clues about her whereabouts, but came back home to Rochester more dejected.

And today marks exactly six months since his daughter, Brittanee Drexel, was last seen.

"This is all very stomach-turning, draining, and I feel sick all the time," said Chad Drexel. "It's just a horrifying thought to search through the very thick woods, scared of what you might find. But I've got to keep doing whatever I can to find my little girl."

Brittanee, a Gates Chili High School student, went missing April 25 after taking a spring break trip to Myrtle Beach with several acquaintances.

Last weekend, the Myrtle Beach Police Department searched the Georgetown County area, about 35 miles south of Myrtle Beach, for the third time. That was where her cell phone last gave off a signal. Police had planned this search since May, aiming to take advantage of better conditions, including cooler temperatures and fewer insects. The search included 150 volunteers, 50 law enforcement officers, 12 cadaver dog teams and horses searching water and land. However, they found nothing.

"We at least eliminated some areas that were hard to search in May because it was so hot and that affected the volunteers and the dogs' ability to track a scent," said Vincent Dorio, a Myrtle Beach police detective. "We haven't ruled out looking anywhere again because we could have always missed something."

Dorio, who said the case is still considered active, expects another search to occur before the end of the year.

The Drexel family's anguish began in the spring when Brittanee's mother, Dawn Drexel, found out that instead of her daughter staying at a Rochester's friend home during spring break, she had gone to Myrtle Beach.

On April 25, Brittanee had texted her boyfriend, John Grieco, and then left the Bluewater Resort on Ocean Boulevard to go for a walk on the beach.

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Smilow Cancer Hospital’s chief physician? targets a cure - New Haven Register

Posted: 25 Oct 2009 03:50 AM PDT

By Mary E. O'Leary, Register Topics Editor

NEW HAVEN — Dr. Thomas J. Lynch Jr. is on a mission.

In the almost 40-year war on cancer, declared in 1971 by President Richard M. Nixon, advances certainly have been made.

But despite the $105 billion spent on research by the National Cancer Institute alone, the death rate in patients where the disease has spread has only dropped 5 percent.

In his new position as physician-in-chief of the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, Lynch will step up a collaborative model between clinical trials and basic science to come closer to a cure.

"We haven't been nimble enough in bringing genetic profiling to the clinic and Smilow is going to change that," Lynch said.

Nationally, only 3 percent of patients go to clinical trial. Lynch would like to see that increase to 20 percent and the basic tool that will enable it is molecular profiling of all cancer patients.

"We are going to be doing sequencing and genotyping of cancers as a routine test," Lynch said. "I feel it is critical to make personalized medicine a reality."

The new 14-story, $467 million Smilow Cancer Hospital on Park Street will eventually house all 12 cancer clincs now scattered throughout Y-NH's medical campus, while consolidating state-of-the art equipment.

Officially dedicated last week, Smilow will treat its first patient Monday at its radiation oncology center as the facility opens in phases over the next six months.

Lynch was lured here from Massachusetts General Hospital in Cambridge, Mass., where he helped set up a molecular profiling center.

Smilow hopes to join five other institutions where this approach is routine, from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York to Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Tennessee.

Molecular profiling will be used to match the right drug to the right patient, as well as use the information to find new targets for those drugs and determine who is at greater risk for cancer.

"One of the things that we haven't done well is we don't have good tools for picking up cancer early or for finding who among us is at greatest risk," Lynch said.

He likes to call it his "Uncle Eddie and Uncle John problem." Both smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, but one dies of old age and the other succumbs to lung cancer at age 55. The question is "Why?"

"Unless we start genetically profiling patients we are never going to know the answers to that," Lynch said.

All this is a spinoff of the human genome sequencing announced in 2001 by Francis Collins, a Yale University graduate who now heads the National Institutes of Health.

"I am more confident now that we will cure cancer than I ever have been," Lynch said, which he hopes comes within his children's lifetime, but maybe earlier.

TRIAL AND ERROR

Among the hundreds of researchers and clinicians associated with Yale, Dr. Mario Sznol, a medical oncologist, came here five years ago to focus on melanoma treatments, an investigation advanced with an $11.5 million, five-year SPORE grant and a recent $10 million, 5-year grant from Roslyn Milstein Meyer and Jerry Meyer.

"The way clinical research is moving in the future is to identify patients based on the biology of their tumor and to select treatments based on that biology," said Sznol.

He said there is already a focus on clinical trials at Y-NH, but his sense is that the investment in Smilow will produce more of the ancillary resources needed to advance these trials, from data coordinators to project manageers and lab technicians.

Sznol uses immunotherapy and molecular targeted agents.

Working with one of those immunotherapies, interleukin 2, a drug that activates a cell in the body which then attacks the tumor, Sznol has seen great results against melanoma, but generally it only helps five percent of patients.

He is now participating in trials where a combination of immunotherapies will hopefully show better results for more patients.

Sznol, who previously headed the Biologics Evaluation Section of the NIH Investigational Drugs Branch, said the best thing about Yale is being able to tap into all the basic science research going on here.

"This is a very collaborative place" where colleagues share what seem like disparate and unrelated findings that end up helping patients, Sznol said.

An excited Sznol said investigators now know that about half of melanoma patients have a specific mutation called B-raf mutation, which a new drug targets, with phase one trials showing dramatic results for 80 percent of participants.

"Because this drug is so specific for this mutation we may be able to combine this drug with immune therapy and get better results," Sznol said.

Another advance that may be able to separate out those patients who will respond best to a therapy will have implications for drug approvals by the Federal Drug Administration.

In a trial of 100 patients, if only five respond, the FDA will demand much more testing, Sznol said. But, if the individuals in a trial already have the right biology, the success rate is higher and the drug is approved more quickly.

"Not only do you help patients more, but you help get drugs to the patients faster. That's the vision that Tom (Lynch) and others have for how we are going to develop cancer treatments," Sznol said.

He predicted that it won't be long before scientists will be able to identify a large number of critical mutations inexpensively.

Sznol said another exciting path is the discovery of how tumors defend themselves and the testing of therapies that block those defenses. Patients with lung, colon, kidney and liver cancer have responded to drugs which essentially allow their own immune systems to fight the tumors.

"I think we are going to see a lot of advances in the next few years," Sznol said as research advances immunotherapy and direct molecular targeting of the cancer cell on parallel paths.

Professor Maria Rose Menocal, Sterling professor of the humanities at Yale, will be the first patient in the door at Smilow on Monday, where she will begin six weeks of radiation to fight mucosal melanoma.

She knows about Sznol's work and said the oncologist has her tumor for study purposes.

Menocal, 56, has had surgery, and while mucosal melanoma is a rare cancer, she said her doctors are optimistic about her recovery.

Still, Sznol's research gives her some comfort.

"If something comes back, he will know more about the biology of my body and my tumor and so he will be able to treat it that way. It's wonderful."

Mary E. O'Leary can be reached at 789-5731 or moleary@nhregister.com.

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