On Friday, April 19, the third annual Oliver Smithies Nobel Symposium was held at the School of Medicine’s MBRB Auditorium before a capacity crowd of students, post-doctoral fellows, and other university community members.

The keynote speaker at this year’s symposium was Dr. Harold E. Varmus, MD, director of the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health and co-winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes.

In keeping with the goals of the symposium, Dr. Varmus shared inspiring stories about the people who influenced him and highlighted the critical experiences and driving forces that led to his successes. Dr. Varmus also discussed the development of his passion for discovery and how interpersonal relationships can influence the quality of a scientist’s work. Science, when conducted in the most exciting ways, Dr. Varmus told the audience, involves partnerships, friendly rivalries, and a wide spectrum of human relationships.

“It’s trite to say, but being familiar with literature influences how I live and how I relate to life around me,” said Varmus.

Intellectual diversity and interdisciplinary interests match the vision of the Smithies Symposium.

“This event is not particular to the School of Medicine,” said Dr. Smithies, whose genetics research earned him the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. “It is for the university as a whole. It’s meant to inspire other lecturers to come to campus and speak to our students. I believe it has the potential to have an impact across disciplines and across the university.”

Dr. Smithies believes that the symposium offers all UNC students an opportunity to learn from those who have made major contributions to their fields. He credits similar lectures he attended as a young man for inspiring his rigor as a scientist.

“The symposium is an attempt to expose students to people who have made remarkable discoveries and impacted science,” said Smithies. “I had the same experience when I was a student and Linus Pauling came to Oxford University, and that was before he won either of his Nobel Prizes. But he was an inspiring lecturer and I hope that the same sort of inspiration I received will be given to other students.”

Post-doctoral fellows from multidisciplinary backgrounds across the university participated in the selection of Dr. Varmus, who was honored to be chosen, in large part because of his respect for the UNC’s Smithies.

“I admire Oliver greatly,” said Varmus. “His dedication to rigorous science is the main reason I came for the lecture. Of course, I also came because North Carolina is a nice place to visit.”

The rooftop terrace serves as an outdoor recreational area for children with serious medical conditions, and its design allows them to go outside with all the equipment and access necessary to accommodate hospital beds, wheel chairs, IV poles and more.

The space consists of five “rooms,” themed after North Carolina’s natural areas, including the mountains, the forest, the meadow, and the beach; a sunroom was built to provide patients with the feel of a beach house, giving them a cozy environment they can enjoy on cold or rainy days.

“Being in the hospital shouldn’t be an all-negative experience,” said Amelia Drake, MD, FACS, Newton D. Fischer Distinguished Professor of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, and Executive Associate Dean of Academic Programs. “A lookout terrace like this, or a playroom, can lift a child’s spirit.”

Wesley Burks, MD, chair of the department of pediatrics and physician-in-chief of N.C. Children's Hospital, opened the event by thanking those involved with the construction of the terrace. Approximately $1 million in philanthropic support helped fund the project, including major gifts from the Eric Montross Father’s Day Basketball Camp and the Charles H. Goren Foundation.

Other speakers included Carson Rouse, a 10-year-old boy who was diagnosed with biliary atresia, a digestive disease in which the bile ducts inside or outside the liver do not function normally therefore causing bile to become trapped and later damaging the liver. Rouse has been coming to the Children’s Hospital as a patient since he was four weeks old. He shared his excitement about the terrace, saying that the space will give him a chance to “meet new friends, play basketball…and relax.”

Rouse joined Drs. Burks and Stiles in cutting the ribbon to open the area, which was inspired by a young patient of Dr. Stiles, former chair of pediatrics and chief physician of the N.C. Children’s Hospital. The child was born in the hospital and was unable to go outside for five years—the entirety of his life—because of the medical equipment he needed with him at all times to keep him alive.  Stiles said he has long wanted to make use of the space and create a special place where children with serious medical conditions could go outside to play.

“Families have asked for a space like this for years, and it will be especially set up for them,” said Stiles. “I’m really very pleased.”

Therapy dogs are trained to provide affection and comfort to those in need of emotional support. Playing with them, petting them and communicating with them can serve as therapeutic solutions to people dealing with serious stress or grief.

Kuwahara adopted Pryntzka approximately five years ago from the Durham County Animal Shelter after he’d been given up by his previous owner. According to Kuwahara, Pryntzka had been abused.

“When we got him, he had a really good temperament, so I thought he’d be great for therapy,” she said.

Because she knew she would be studying medicine in the future and understood how helpful therapeutic dogs can be for patients, she decided to train Pryntzka as a therapy dog.

Pryntzka’s training to become a therapy dog took a total 18 to 24 months. The process began with initial obedience training, and later Pryntzka took a Canine Good Citizen Test, in which his behavior and comfort were tested in a variety of situations.

“A lot of the training that went into it was to get him used to being in different health care settings and get him used to being around different people,” said Kuwahara.

The exposure included meeting with kids, having sirens approach him from behind, and getting him comfortable with putting his head in the laps of patients in wheel chairs and hospital beds.

At the end of training, Pryntzka was officially certified as a therapy dog after passing Therapy Dogs International’s series of high-level obedience and temperament tests.

“Because he had such a rough past, the petting gives him as much therapy as it gives the patients,” she said.

Pryntzka’s presence on campus served as a Wellness Event sanctioned by the School of Medicine Advisory College, a program developed to foster relationships between MD students and faculty and to mentor students to be successful in their future endeavors in the medical field.

Workers load the mice onto the van that carried them to the space shuttle.

I have experienced some exciting things in life, but never something of this magnitude. While working with Dr. Ted Bateman, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, he suggested that I fly to Florida to join his team for the final space shuttle launch. As manager of the broadcast program, it made sense to help document this historic moment.

So I flew into Florida two days before launch to observe and film the preparation of the 30 mice that would fly in STS-135. NASA had some pretty strict rules about who could and could not be in or around the lab.  However, I was permitted to observe the ceremonial passing off of the research mice to NASA officials the day before launch.  A group of mostly scientists, and me, packed into a small hallway.  Cameras flashed constantly as three carefully boxed carts were wheeled to a van.  It was as if there were a celebrity sighting.  Now I am not a part of the research team, but I could only imagine what it must have felt like to witness years of hard work drive away to make history.  In the background, I am certain that I heard a few heavy sighs of relief.

Then it was time for the main event. Threat of a tropical depression loomed on the morning of launch but it didn't dampen any spirits.  I joined Dr. Bateman and his lab team members and thousands of others for a walk to the perfect spot for viewing a shuttle launch.  We were two to three miles away.  This was the day we were glad the weather forecasters were wrong.  One of Dr. Bateman's postdoctoral students, Anthony Lau, and I worked out a scheme for filming and taking pictures of what would be seconds of history in the making.  You'll see a number of his photos in the video.  But I hope you will also see the culmination of hard work by scientists at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Colorado, and Harvard University.  Even more, within that massive plume of smoke left behind by the shuttle is a bellow of hope.  Hope for millions of people with osteoporosis. Dr. Bateman's research on bone formation and bone loss may one day make a tremendous difference in their lives. In the meantime, we hope for the safe return of the crew that took history and a piece of research into orbit with them.

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“This is the first major funding initiative ever to focus on HIV eradication, and we at UNC are excited to lead this collaboration of an incredible group of 19 investigators from across the country,” said David Margolis, MD, professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology in the UNC School of Medicine and principal investigator of this effort.

While previous HIV funding initiatives have focused on prevention and vaccine development, “with this funding, the NIH and the scientific community are saying that finding a cure for AIDS is a realistic goal and should be part of our plan of attack against the epidemic,” said Margolis, who is also professor of epidemiology in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Although individuals infected with HIV may effectively control virus levels with antiretroviral drugs and maintain relatively good health, the virus is never fully eliminated from the cells and tissues it has infected. Researchers need to better understand where these reservoirs of HIV are located, how they are established and maintained, and how to eliminate them.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grant will be administered by the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute at UNC and will be shared among researchers at nine U.S. universities, all of them pioneering researchers in HIV latency. Co-funding is also being provided by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

The UNC-led consortium will be one of three groups funded by NIAID under its Martin Delaney Collaboratory initiative. The UNC-led effort will undertake more than a dozen research projects to discover how the virus can remain dormant and virtually invisible, identify drugs and treatments capable of ridding the body of persistent infection and evaluate these new strategies in relevant animal models so that they can be translated into people.

“This award will fundamentally change the way in which we look for a cure for AIDS,” said Victor Garcia-Martinez, a UNC professor of medicine who is involved in the collaboratory.

Delaney was an internationally recognized AIDS activist who died in 2009. Delaney championed the concept of accelerating progress toward a cure for HIV infection through a public-private partnership involving government, academia and industry.

The UNC-led collaboratory also includes an important industrial partner, Merck Research Laboratories, Whitehouse Station, N.J.  Merck has an outstanding track record in the development of small molecule drugs and other therapies that target viral reservoirs. Merck Research Laboratories will be receiving no federal funds for their contribution to this research.

“This award takes a multidisciplinary approach to solve a very complex problem.  It will allow for unique synergies and innovation that couldn’t be accomplished otherwise,” said collaboratory investigator Angela Kashuba, PharmD, associate professor in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and director of the UNC Center for AIDS Research Clinical Pharmacology and Analytic Chemistry Core.

“All of the collaboratory members are inspired by the chance to change the natural course of HIV infection to achieve a cure or drug-free remission of this terrible disease,” Margolis said.

The other universities involved in the UNC-led collaboratory are Case Western Reserve University; Johns Hopkins University; University of California, Davis; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, San Diego; The Gladstone Institute; University of California, San Francisco; University of Minnesota, and the University of Utah.

The NC TraCS Institute at UNC is one of 60 medical research institutions across the country working together as a national consortium to improve the way biomedical research is conducted. The consortium is funded through the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), led by the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Media contacts: Lisa Chensvold (919) 843-5719, lisa_chensvold@med.unc.edu, Les Lang, (919) 966-9366, llang@med.unc.edu

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This is the focus of five projects funded under the second round of Health-e- NC (Health for Everyone in North Carolina) grants program.  The program provides pilot funding in support of the University Cancer Research Fund’s strategic goal of optimizing cancer outcomes in North Carolina.

Projects were selected through a competitive review process that included review by national experts from outside UNC.  Projects emphasize the use of interactive technologies to deliver breakthrough innovation and excellence in behavioral research; collaborative, cross-disciplinary approaches; potential for generating additional external funding from peer-reviewed sources; and real and tangible impact on the health of North Carolinians.  The projects focus on areas of the state where cancers, and in particular breast, lung and colorectal cancers, are common and place a burden on the health of North Carolinians.

“UNC Lineberger researchers from across campus were challenged to design ways to increase programs’ reach and impact with interactive technologies focused on Health-e- NC’s strategic goals.  We are dealing with a state 500 miles across, with 10 million citizens, making it crucial to design more cost-effective ways of preventing disease and allowing access to quality care. We will be evaluating outcomes to see if technology can help deliver better education, care and interventions with improved reach, and potentially at a lower cost of delivery.  The result will be healthier North Carolina communities,” said Shelley Earp, MD, UNC Lineberger’s director.

Funded projects include:

• A Home Based Motivational Exercise Program for African American Breast Cancer Survivors:  A Pilot Study
• Reducing HPV-Attributable Cancers Through HPV Vaccination – an Interactive Technology Based Approach for Adolescents in School Based Health Centers
• Telemedicine Delivery of a Cancer Support Training Intervention:  Partnership with Community-Based Survivorship Centers
• Improving Care Quality with Virtual Tumor Boards Using Videoconferencing Technology
• Lose-Now-NC:  Feasibility of a large group format community weight loss program coupled with Internet support

For more information about these projects, see the full abstracts at http://ucrf.unc.edu/awards/.

Media contact: Ellen de Graffenreid, (919) 962-3405, edegraff@med.unc.edu

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About Health-e-NC

Health-e-NC is a statewide effort to improve cancer outcomes for the diseases that hit North Carolina’s citizens the hardest. Sponsored by UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and the University Cancer Research fund, Health-e-NC is aimed at finding out what really works in the areas of cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment and survivorship and helping to spread the latest and best evidence-based cancer information to health care providers and advocacy groups as well as cancer patients, their families and survivors.

About the University Cancer Research Fund

The University Cancer Research Fund was created by the N.C. General Assembly with the mission to ensure that future generations of North Carolinians will develop cancer less often and live longer and better when they do.  Research creates new knowledge, turns that knowledge into innovative treatment, screening, and prevention, and then assures delivery of innovations across the state – that research is the key unlocking the doors to a new and better future.  The UCRF is helping make that research possible.  For more information, visit ucrf.unc.edu.

Ted Bateman and his team are sending mice up with the last space shuttle mission to help find new treatments for osteoporosis. Nearly 40 million people have or at risk for this sometimes crippling disease.

CHAPEL HILL, NC — Researchers in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill/North Carolina State University Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering will be at the Kennedy Space Center for the last space shuttle launch of the NASA program as Atlantis departs for its final mission into Earth’s orbit.

With July 8, 2011 as the target launch date, the UNC/NCSU team led by Ted Bateman, PhD, associate professor in the department, have painstakingly prepared an experiment aboard Atlantis aimed at revealing strategies to protect future astronauts from bone loss during extended exposure to micro-gravity.

Not only is this a milestone in the history of space exploration, but also for Bateman who, along with his collaborators at the BioServe Space Technologies Center with the University of Colorado, has been involved as an investigator in numerous spaceflight studies. Once again he and his team have another research project on this, the final mission of STS-135.

In addition to the human crew of this historic 12-day flight, Atlantis will be host to thirty of its smallest passengers – mice that might help humans one day travel far beyond the moon. These mice are integral to Bateman’s research on bone and muscle health in microgravity.

Rapid bone loss, an accelerated osteoporosis, results from removing gravitational loading. Such exposure will be unavoidable for interplanetary missions such as a round-trip to Mars, explains Bateman. “We’ve known for quite a while, since the 1970s and the Skylab missions, that astronauts are going to lose bone on these extended missions,” Bateman says. “Comprehensive work has been done to identify the amount of loss – about one to two percent per month, which is approximately five times the rate that postmenopausal women lose bone here on Earth.

“And we know that this will cause a decline in bone strength of approximately three percent per month. When astronauts return, the recovery is incomplete. On extended missions, beyond six months up to three years, such as on a Mars mission, this loss is going to be substantial.”

Along with his UNC/NCSU team, Bateman’s project includes colleagues at the University of Colorado and Harvard University. The study will explore how weightlessness in space affects mouse bone tissue at the molecular level, studying the changes in protein expression by load-sensing bone cells called osteocytes.

Osteocytes are the bone cells primarily responsible for communicating changes in forces and loads to other cells that affect bone mass and strength. Normally, these cells send a signal in the form of a protein called sclerostin to control bone formation.

“Though it has never been tested, we expect that during spaceflight, with the removal of gravitational loading, sclerostin levels will increase significantly,” Bateman said. “We believe this increase in sclerostin signal may be a primary reason why bone formation is reduced in astronauts and mice when they are in microgravity.”

In this experiment, half of the space-flown mice will be treated with a novel agent that blocks the activity of sclerostin. This experimental agent, a sclerostin antibody, has been shown to increase bone formation and bone mineral density in ground-based mouse studies. A different sclerostin antibody than the one being used for this space shuttle mouse study is currently in clinical trials as a collaboration between the biopharma companies Amgen Inc. and UCB.

The UNC scientist says that the sclerostin clinical candidate antibody “may offer a potential treatment for Earth-based osteoporosis as a novel way to increase bone formation and prevent fractures.”

After the flight, the researchers will analyze the skeletons of the mice for changes in bone strength and bone mineral density, in addition to looking for alterations in bone cell activity and in the biochemical communications used by these cells.

Funding for the research comes from Amgen, Inc; the National Space Biomedical Research Institute; and NASA’s Human Research Program, Johnson Space Center.

Media contact: Les Lang, (919) 966-9366, llang@med.unc.edu

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The UNC team, which includes Charles Perou, PhD, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and genetics, Neil Hayes, MD, associate professor of hematology/oncology, and Katie Hoadley, PhD, Research Associate, completed the microRNA and mRNA microarray analysis that contributed to the findings.

Ovarian serous adenocarcinoma tumors from 500 patients were examined and the analyses are reported in the June 30, 2011 issue of the journal Nature. Serous adenocarcinoma accounts for about 85 percent of all ovarian cancer deaths.

The researchers confirmed that mutations in the tumor suppressor gene TP53, are present in more than 96 percent of these cancers.  Tumor suppressor genes produce proteins that normally prevent cancer formation.  When the genes mutate and those protein functions are disrupted, tumors can form.

The team also found sets of genes associated with different patient survival patterns, indentifying a set of 108 genes associated with poor survival and 85 genes associated with better survival.  Overall, the five-year survival rate for ovarian cancer is 31 percent, meaning that there is an urgent need for a better understanding of and therapeutic targets for the disease.

“These are exactly the types of cancers for which The Cancer Genome Atlas project can make a difference, providing the resources and collaborative scientific power to establish new investigative avenues aimed at treatments targeted to the specific biology of ovarian cancer,” said Hayes.

Investigators on the project also searched for existing drugs that might inhibit genes that seem to play a role in ovarian cancer.  They identified 68 genes that could be targeted by existing FDA-approved or experimental therapeutic compounds.  For example, PARP inhibitors, which have been tested in clinical trials at UNC and elsewhere, may be able to counteract a DNA repair gene observed in half of the ovarian tumors studied.

TCGA is jointly funded and managed by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), both part of the National Institutes of Health.  As participants in TCGA, UNC Lineberger scientists have also been involved in findings related to subtypes of the brain tumor glioblastoma and of lung cancers.

Media contact: Ellen de Graffenreid, 919-962-3405, edegraff@med.unc.edu

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The UNC study, published online on June 29, 2011, by the journal Nature, uses a cutting-edge technique called “optogenetics” to tweak the microcircuitry of the brain and then assess how those changes impact behavior. The findings suggest that therapeutics targeting the path between two critical brain regions, namely the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens, represent potential treatments for addiction and other neuropsychiatric diseases.

“For most clinical disorders we knew that one region or another in the brain was important, however until now we didn’t have the tools to directly study the connections between those regions,” said senior study author Garret D. Stuber, PhD, assistant professor in the departments of cell and molecular physiology, psychiatry and the Neuroscience Center in UNC School of Medicine. “Our ability to perform this level of sophistication in neural circuit manipulation will likely to lead to the discovery of molecular players perturbed during neuropsychiatric illnesses.”

Because the brain is comprised of diverse regions, cell types and connections in a compact space, pinpointing which entity is responsible for what function can be quite tricky. In the past, researchers have tried to get a glimpse into the inner workings of the brain using electrical stimulation or drugs, but those techniques couldn’t quickly and specifically change only one type of cell or one type of connection. But optogenetics, a technique that emerged six years ago, can.

In the technique, scientists transfer light-sensitive proteins called “opsins” – derived from algae or bacteria that need light to grow – into the mammalian brain cells they wish to study. Then they shine laser beams onto the genetically manipulated brain cells, either exciting or blocking their activity with millisecond precision.

In Stuber’s initial experiments, the target was the nerve cells connecting two separate brain regions associated with reward, the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens. The researchers used light to activate the connections between these regions, essentially “rewarding” the mice with laser stimulations for performing the mundane task of poking their nose into a hole in their cage. They found that the opsin treated mice quickly learned to “nosepoke” in order to receive stimulation of the neural pathway. In comparison, the genetically untouched control mice never caught on to the task.

Then Stuber and his colleagues wanted to see whether this brain wiring had a role in more natural behavioral processes. So they trained mice to associate a cue – a light bulb in the cage turning on – to a reward of sugar water. This time the opsin that the researchers transferred into the brains of their rodent subjects was one that would shut down the activity of neural connections in response to light. As they delivered the simple cue to the control mice, they also blocked the neuronal activity in the genetically altered mice. The control mice quickly began responding to the cue by licking the sugar-producing vessel in anticipation, whereas the treated mice did not give the same response. 
The researchers are now exploring how changes to this segment of brain wiring can either make an animal sensitized to or oblivious to rewards. Stuber says their approach presents an incredibly useful tool for studying basic brain function, and could one day provide a powerful alternative to electrical stimulation or pharmacotherapy for neuropsychiatric illnesses like Parkinson’s disease.

“For late-stage Parkinson’s disease it has become more routine to use deep brain stimulation, where electrodes are chronically implanted into brain tissue, constantly stimulating the tissue to alleviate some of the disease symptoms,” said Stuber. “From the technical perspective, implanting our optical fibers is not going to be more difficult than that. But there is quite a bit of work to be done before we get to that point.”

The research was funded by NARSAD: The Brain & Behavior Research Fund; ABMRF/ The Foundation for Alcohol Research; The Foundation of Hope; and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a component of NIH.

Study co-authors from Stuber’s laboratory at UNC include Dennis R. Sparta, PhD, postdoctoral fellow, and Alice M. Stamatakis, graduate student.

Media contact: Les Lang, (919) 966-9366, llang@med.unc.edu

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CHAPEL HILL, NC — The lopsided smile is testimony to Jean Rogers’ gratitude.

Rogers, 58, of Fairmont, N.C., in Robeson County, underwent surgery at UNC Hospitals on March 8 to remove a cancerous right parotid gland and 20 lymph nodes, followed by chemotherapy and daily radiation that kept her in Chapel Hill weekdays until late May.

“We have good doctors back home, but I was sent to where I needed to be,” said Rogers, a career Social Security Administration employee, eyes twinkling.

“And I had three good-looking doctors here,” she added, grinning crookedly ear to ear.

The parotid glands are the body’s largest salivary glands.  They are located in front of the ears and extend to the area beneath the ear lobes along the lower border of the jawbones.  The nerve that controls facial movement runs through the parotid glands.

For Rogers, the lower portion of that nerve had died because of direct involvement of the tumor, leaving her with paralysis in her lower face and fueling suspicion that the tumor was malignant.

“In an ENT practice parotid tumors are not terribly rare, and about 80 percent of them are benign,” said Mark C. Weissler, MD, distinguished professor of otolaryngology/head and neck surgery at the UNC School of Medicine, who diagnosed Rogers’ tumor as malignant, removed the tumor and dead nerve, and conducted a nerve graft. Dr. Weissler is also a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“Hers is an unusual cancer of the parotid gland and arose from a previously benign and much more common tumor,” Dr. Weissler said.  “She is the case in point of how a benign tumor can degenerate into a cancer and why we usually recommend removing even benign parotid tumors.”

The nerve grafting should bring back much of Rogers facial function, Dr. Weissler said.  “The proximal [nearest] end of the nerve will actually grow back out through the nerve graft to reinnervate her face,” he said. “It’s a very slow process, with about six months being the soonest that any return of function would be expected.”

Because of the aggressive nature of Rogers’ cancer, treatment with radiation and chemotherapy were required.  She breezed through both with no debilitating side effects.

“I’ know I’m lucky,” Rogers said.  “I’ve had a little pressure, but no pain.  I’ve not lost my hearing or had mouth sores.  I lost a little bit of hair to the radiation, and my skin is a little red along my neck and jaw.”

Dr. Weissler thinks of Rogers as the unsinkable Molly Brown, the Titantic survivor who exhorted fellow lifeboat passengers to search for more survivors after the great ship sank.

“She’s a resilient human being, and her persistence and perseverance are to be admired,” Dr. Weissler said. “She’s not yet at six months-post surgery, and her face is a bit lopsided, but she’s still able to enjoy life.  We are very hopeful for her long-term prognosis.”

While in Chapel Hill, Rogers stayed at SECU Family House, a 40-bedroom hospital hospitality house minutes from UNC Hospitals.  Family House provides comfortable, convenient and affordable housing for seriously ill adult patients and their family member caregivers.  While there, Rogers met two other patients who also had had their parotid glands removed.

“A lot of friendship and fellowship goes on at Family House,” Rogers said.  “It’s like being in a family home, but also having space to yourself. If I wasn’t having treatment, I would have thought I was on a vacation.  It’s that nice.”

Rogers finished treatment and returned home on May 20 in time to attend her manager’s retirement dinner that evening.

“I have to brag on my co-workers who ‘adopted a day’ for me to help defray the cost of staying at Family House,” Rogers said, adding that they all had a good cry together the day she was diagnosed.  “And when my medical leave ran out on May 13 they pitched in extra days to help me that last week of treatment.”

And tears flowed spontaneously when Rogers talked about the support she had received from her family especially husband Keith, daughter Crystal, son Benton, grandson Bradley, and brothers and sisters and mother and mother-in-law.

Rogers is eager to return to work, but must allow her skin, irritated by the radiation, to calm down and heal.

“I’m very happy to be done with the treatment and be back home,” Rogers said.  “Everything about this has been good.  I’ve always been blessed and still am."

Media contact: Tom Hughes, (919) 966-6047, tahughes@unch.unc.edu

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In addition, 5 percent of North Carolina mothers of three-month-old babies say they have spanked their very young children. More than 70 percent of mothers of 23-month-old children say they have done so, too.

“We were pretty surprised by the staggeringly high rate of spanking,” said Adam Zolotor, MD, MPH, lead author of the study, an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and a core faculty member of the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center. “We need to do a better job as a society teaching parents how to teach their kids what they need to learn without fear, pain, or coercion.”

The study was published June 24, 2011 by Frontiers in Child and Neurodevelopmental Psychiatry, an open-access online journal.

In the study, a total of 2,946 mothers of children born in North Carolina between Oct. 1, 2005 and July 31, 2007 completed the anonymous telephone survey. The survey was conducted from Oct. 1, 2007 to April 7, 2008, at UNC’s Survey Research Unit.

“The very young children that are the focus of this study are not developmentally sophisticated enough for willful misbehavior,” Zolotor said. “Family physicians, pediatricians, and parent educators must start much earlier at helping parents understand child behavior and develop disciple strategies.

“The cost to society is huge,” Zolotor said. “We know that spanking has been associated with child abuse victimization, poor self-esteem, impaired parent-child relationships, and child and adult mental health, substance abuse, and behavioral consequences.”

Co-authors of the study are Desmond K. Runyan, MD, MPH of UNC; Ronald G. Barr of the Child & Family Research Institute at the University of British Columbia; and T. Walker Robinson, MD, MPH and Robert A. Murphy, PhD, both of Duke University Medical Center.

Media contact: Tom Hughes, (919) 966-6047, tahughes@unch.unc.edu

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A new finding by UNC scientists provides a window into how the immune system initially reacts to a virus invader, as well as how a subgroup of proteins plays a role in returning the immune system to a normal surveillance function. Their pre-clinical findings were published in the June 24, 2011 online edition of Immunity.

Coy Allen, PhD, first author of the paper and a postdoctoral fellow at UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, explains, “We knew that proteins called NLRs control the immune system’s initial response to an invading pathogen, such as influenza. However, we did not realize that a sub-group of these proteins actually functions to bring an overactive immune response back under control after the pathogen threat has been resolved. Our study showed that a newly identified NLR protein called NLRX1 is capable of shutting down an overreaction by the immune system during an influenza infection.”

Allen says, “We worked with influenza because the flu virus is an ongoing global health concern that results in a significant number of deaths each year.  In 2009-2010, a new influenza virus emerged and rapidly spread throughout the world, ultimately resulting in the first global influenza pandemic in over 40 years.  As part of our studies, we partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and found that NLRX1 also functions in controlling the immune response following 2009 H1N1 influenza virus infection.

In most cases, individuals who die from influenza virus infection suffer from a hyperactive immune response to influenza.  Thus, NLRX1 is one of the mechanisms that dampen this hyperactive immune response.

Allen is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Jenny Ting, PhD. Ting, UNC Alumni Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and director of the Inflammation center at UNC, is a pioneer in the understanding of the NLR family of proteins. She is co-leader of UNC Lineberger’s immunology program and senior author of the Immunity paper.

Allen explains, “These findings are also relevant to cancer.  Several viruses are implicated in cancer, including adenovirus, Hepatitis C Virus, Epstein-Barr virus and Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus.  It is likely that NLRX1 may also mediate elements of the host immune response following onco-virus exposure.

Allen says that the next steps are to examine other NLR proteins to determine if they too can act as an anti-inflammatory and to further describe how the NLRX1 protein shuts down the immune response at the appropriate time.

Other UNC authors are: Monika Schneider, UNC graduate student;Yu Lei, PhD; Beckley Davis, PhD; Margaret Scull, PhD; Denis Gris, PhD; Kelly Roney, PhD; Albert Zimmerman,PhD;  and Raymond Pickles, PhD. Additional authors are Chris Moore, PhD,   from Glaxosmithkline, Research Triangle Park, NC; John Bowzard, PhD; Priya Rahjan, PhD;and Suryaprakas Sambhara, PhD,  from the influenza division, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA; and Kathryn Monroe, University of California at Berkley graduate student.

Research funding was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health and a National Research Service Award.

Media contact: Dianne G. Shaw, (919) 966-7834, dgs@med.unc.edu

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Polycythemia is a disease characterized by excessive production of red blood cells. Symptoms include an enlarged spleen, blood clots, an increased risk of stroke, and in some cases the disease is a precursor to acute leukemia. While 95 percent of polycythemia cases are associated with a mutation in the JAK2 gene, a small number of patients have a mutation in the von Hippel-Lindau gene that produces a protein called pVHL.

“It was thought that these two types of polycythemia would need treatments targeting different biochemical pathways,” says William Kim, MD, one of the study authors and a member of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Kim is an assistant professor of Medicine and Genetics at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“We found that – despite their different origins – both types of disease display activation of JAK2.  This is exciting because there are JAK2 inhibitors in late stage clinical trials that look promising for patients with JAK2 mutant polycythemia.  Our work in laboratory models shows that inhibition of JAK2 is an effective strategy for both types of the disease.  Under normal circumstances, the small number of people with a Chuvash VHL mutation would make this type of polycythemia an orphan disease.  There are simply not enough patients to make the development of a targeted treatment worthwhile for pharmaceutical companies,” he added.

The study results were published earlier this week in the journal Nature Medicine.

Kim cautions that, while the JAK2 inhibitors look very promising in laboratory models of Chuvash polycythemia, they have not yet been tested in humans.

Other UNC Lineberger collaborators include Bing Zhou, PhD, and Samuel Heathcote, BS.  Scientists from the University of Toronto, University of Pennsylvania, University of California, San Diego, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario also participated in the research.

The research was funded by the Canadian Cancer Society, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Defense.  Dr. Kim is a Damon Runyon Merck clinical investigator.

Media contact: Ellen de Graffenreid, (919) 962-3405, edegraff@med.unc.edu

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Dr. Roper is one of three physician leaders in North Carolina who were included on the list, which represents “some of the brightest leadership in the health care industry,” according to a news release from Becker’s Hospital Review.

“Physician leaders make up an exceptional niche in health care. This unique role has only been emphasized with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which incites hospitals to reduce costs while improving the quality of care and patient experience. It takes talented, skilled and principled leadership to strike this balance. With clinical and financial backgrounds, the 65 executives included in this list continue to lead reputable institutions to the forefront of the industry,” the Becker’s news release said.

Physician leaders were selected for inclusion on this list based on nominations, inclusion in previous Becker's Hospital Review lists and research conducted by the Becker's editorial team.

The full-length edition of the list can be found at: http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/lists/physician-leaders-of-hospitals-and-health-systems.html

Media contact: Jennifer James, (919) 966-7622, jjames@unch.unc.edu

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Hepatitis C is a continuing public health problem, which is difficult to measure because symptoms occur months to years after infection. The World Health Organization estimates as many as 2 to 4 million people in the United States may have chronic Hepatitis C, and most do not know they are infected. More than a third of those who are long-term carriers may develop chronic liver disease or liver cancer.

“Hepatitis viruses have co-evolved with humans over a very long period of time and they are good at evading the immune system, but nobody understands how Hepatitis C becomes a chronic infection,” says Stanley M. Lemon, MD, professor of microbiology and immunology and a member of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Center for Translational Immunology.

Lemon and his colleagues thought that Hepatitis C might become chronic by disrupting the host’s interferon response – part of the innate immune system that protects the body against any kind of ‘foreign’ invader.

However, their study, published on-line in the Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, came up with some surprising findings.

In comparing data from experiments with Hepatitis A and Hepatitis C, the team found that Hepatitis A virus, which causes only acute, self-limited disease, is more efficient at inhibiting the host’s interferon response, and that the virus can actually linger in the body for almost a year.

“These results undermine the theory that evasion of the interferon response is a key mechanism in the development of chronic Hepatitis C – the outcome of infection with these viruses is very different, highlighting how little we understand the unique environment within the liver for virus-host interactions,” Lemon notes.

“It is actually the acute infection, Hepatitis A, that is stealthier at evading the interferon response.”

In addition to Lemon, the research team included Zongdi Feng, PhD, and Daisuke Yamane, DVM, PhD from UNC-Chapel Hill; Robert Lanford, PhD, of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute and the Southwest National Primate Research Center; Deborah Chavez, MS, and Bernadette Guerra, BS, from the Texas Biomedical Research Institute; Kathleen Brasky, DVM, of the Southwest National Primate Center; Yan Zhou, PhD, and Christopher Walker, PhD, of the Center for Vaccines and Immunity at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, OH;  and Alan Perelson, PhD, from Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Media contact: Ellen de Graffenreid, (919) 962-3405, edegraff@med.unc.edu

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