Dean John Crissman, M.D., will host a forum for faculty and staff at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 5, in Scott Hall's Blue Auditorium. The primary topic for discussion will be the status of negotiations with the Detroit Medical Center on the partnership agreement. All faculty, staff and students are welcome to attend.

Stephen Paul Ethier, Ph.D., has been appointed associate director of basic science and deputy director at WSU's Karmanos Cancer Institute. He also will serve as professor in the Department of Pathology.

Dr. Ethier, formerly a scientist in the department of chemical carcinogenesis at the Michigan Cancer Foundation (now Karmanos Cancer Institute), will be responsible for developing scientific programs, shared resources and methods to steer scientific findings toward clinical application.

"I'm happy to be returning to the Karmanos Cancer Institute," he said. "Its researchers are truly doing great things right now in the basic sciences."

Joining Ethier, who has served in several capacities during the past 16 years at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Institute, will be Kathleen Woods Ignatoski, Ph.D., an expert in cell signaling in breast cancer cells; Zeng Quan Yang, Ph.D., a molecular cytogenetics expert; and Michele Dziubinski, M.S., who will serve as Dr. Ethier’s lab manager.

 

Dr. Krawetz awarded $1 million for multi-institutional center to study pollutants’ effect on sperm

 

Just as DNA fingerprints can trace a person to the scene of a crime, RNA fingerprints can provide clues to a man’s infertility by identifying the level of sperm-affecting pollutants, including PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), in his system. This is a particularly important issue in Michigan, which has a large sport-angler population that consumes PCB-contaminated fish.

With a three-year, $1 million grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, a new multi-institution Center for Excellence hopes to turn the recent discovery of sperm in the genetic material called RNA into a variety of screening tests that will check men for PCBs, pesticides and similar pollutants that are believed to impede fertilization and/or normal fetal development, according to center director Stephen Krawetz, Ph.D.

Dr. Krawetz, Charlotte B. Failing Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Wayne State University’s School of Medicine, announced the link between sperm RNA and healthy births in the May 13, 2004, issue of the journal Nature.

“Following that work, it became quite obvious to us that the RNAs are likely to provide reasonable markers of paternal insult. In other words, if something has happened to Dad before he conceives, it’s really going to be carried by the sperm and by these RNA messages,” he said.

Researchers at the WSU School of Medicine and the center’s other two partner institutions — Michigan State University and the Van Andel Research Institute — are now beginning to compare the sperm of men who have and haven’t been exposed to these pollutants, which are collectively called oganochlorinated compounds.

“Here in Michigan, we have a huge population of sport fisherman, and some 3 million individuals in this state eat sport-caught fish. Compared to the PCB level viewed as normal, the levels in the real avid fisherman can be as high as 10-fold that amount,” Dr. Krawetz said. “This assay will give us a way to determine whether consumption of the organochlorine-contaminated fish are having an effect on births.”

Already, he noted, numerous reports have associated such pollutants with increased numbers of miscarriages, low sperm counts and reduced in vitro fertilization rates.

Once developed, the fertility-screening tests will have a number of applications, such as helping a couple plan conception, he said. “If we can identify alterations in the patterns of these RNAs that are expressed between an affected vs. a normal individual, then that clearly gives us a good diagnostic screen to tell a couple in a clinician’s office, ‘Well, this might not be a good time for you to conceive.’”

Since men turn over a completely new batch of sperm every 60 days or so, the level of PCBs van vary widely from month to month. “That means that such a test would be able to monitor the elimination of these toxic compounds or the loss of their effect until he exhibited a normal sperm profile,” Dr. Krawetz said.

Besides Dr. Krawetz, center researchers include Michael Diamond, M.D., WSU associate chair of obstetrics and gynecology and director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility; James Resau, of the Van Andel Research Institute; and Julie Wirth, of Michigan State University.

 

A recent breakthrough in tumor-imaging technology at the Wayne State University School of Medicine and its affiliated Karmanos Cancer Institute promises to greatly reduce the wait time for assessing the effects of chemotherapy on many different kinds of cancer.

Anthony Shields, MD, Ph.D., WSU professor of internal medicine, believes the newly refined technology, which uses chemically engineered "radio tracers" to track rates of growth in tumors, will soon allow clinicians to speed up their evaluation of drug therapy on cancer cells, giving them a better chance of slowing down or even completely neutralizing the disease in patients. The faster imaging system will also protect patients from the toxic effects of anti-cancer drugs by reducing the amount of time needed to evaluate various cancer-fighting agents.

Dr. Shields and his research team, who are funded by $2 million in federal grants, created the new diagnostic tool by injecting a compound in which radioactive tracers are chemically bound to a key cell nutrient. After the nutrients migrate to the tumor cells, Dr. Shields uses a positron emission tomography scanner to measure growth activity in the cancer by tracking the amount of radioactive material consumed along with the nutrient during tumor cell division and growth.

Dr. Shields, who has spent nearly two decades developing and refining innovative tumor-imaging systems, said he is quite hopeful that this method will provide faster and more powerful drug therapy for cancer patients.

"We're very excited about the therapeutic possibilities of this new technology," he said. "Achieving the much shorter waiting time is significant because with the older imaging methods, we usually needed two months or more to make the same assessment.

"Getting a faster evaluation of tumor growth will be extremely helpful to patients, since we now have 300 to 400 new cancer drugs that are about to come online as treatment therapies. Which ones will be best to help a particular patient? One of the toughest challenges we face as clinicians is finding a way to quickly determine whether a particular drug is working or not."

Voravit Ratanatharathorn, MD, has been named clinical director of the WSU Karmanos Cancer Institute's stem cell transplant program and leader of the bone-marrow transplant multidisciplinary team. He also will serve as WSU professor of internal medicine.

Dr. Voravit founded what is now the Karmanos bone-marrow transplant program in 1980; it now performs 150 transplants annually.

"The institute's BMT and stem-cell programs have grown exponentially since I was last here," Dr. Voravit said. "I look forward to enhancing the regional, national and international recognition of the institute's programs through the expansion of its outpatient BMT program, improving patient outcomes and building on its clinical and research base by incorporating innovative translational research. I am truly delighted to be back."

Dr. Voravit's interests include blood and marrow stem cell transplantation and the prevention and treatment of graft-vs.-host diseases well as graft-vs.-tumor effect. Dr. Voravit comes to the institute from the University of Michigan Medical Center, in Ann Arbor, where he served as professor of hematology and oncology.

Dr. Voravit earned both his undergraduate degree and medical degree from Mahidol University. He is board certified by the American Board of Medical Oncology, the American board of Hematology and the American Board of Internal Medicine.

Dr. Voravit is a member of several professional organizations, including the American College of Physicians, of which he is a fellow; the Southwest Oncology Group, where he is a member of its Bone-Marrow Transplant Committee; and the Transplant Society of Michigan, where he is a member of its Bone-Marrow Transplant Subcommittee.

The institute's BMT program has a state-of-the-art inpatient unit and stem-cell processing lab as well as an apheresis unit, day treatment unit, outpatient clinic and web-enabled data management unit. It has an active telemedicine program, and team members participate in weekly video conferencing with other transplant units throughout the United States.

The program is well funded and includes an immunotherapy laboratory, the minority-focused J.P. McCarthy Foundation Stem Cell Bank and Carls Foundation Stem Cell Processing Laboratory and the Center for Cellular Therapies dedicated to research in hematopoietic stem cells, dendritic cells and lymphocytes.

African-American patients with type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure benefit from aggressive use of combination high blood pressure therapy, according to a recent Wayne State University School of Medicine study presented at the annual congress of the International Society on Hypertension in Blacks.

The study, "Lotrel and Enalapril in African Americans with Diabetes," or LEAAD, demonstrates that providing patients with a combination of two highly effective medications in one capsule helps them reach the rigorous blood pressure goal of less than 130/80 mm Hg.

"All patients, especially African Americans should understand that diabetes and high blood pressure is a dangerous combination, which, if left uncontrolled, significantly increases the risk of life-threatening complications," said Dr. John Flack, WSU associate department chair of internal medicine, ISHIB president and lead investigator on the study. "I urge all African Americans with both high blood pressure and diabetes to talk to their physicians about combination therapy, which this study demonstrates helps patients achieve blood pressure goals quickly and effectively."

LEAAD evaluated the effectiveness and safety of the combination of amlodipine, a calcium channel blocker, and benazepril, an ACE inhibitor in a single-capsule vs. enalapril, a commonly prescribed ACE inhibitor. The 269 African-American patients with type 2 diabetes participating in the trial were provided with the combination of amlodipine/benazepril or enalapril at the beginning of the 24-week study.

The majority of patients taking the combination therapy, or 60 percent, reached the blood pressure goal of 130/80 mm Hg as opposed to only 44 percent of those taking enalapril alone. LEAAD was primarily designed to test the amount of time it took patients in the study to reach the blood pressure goal; those on the combination therapy reached it in about 10.1 vs. 10.5 weeks for those on the enalapril therapy alone.

In addition, those on the combination therapy experienced significantly greater blood pressure reductions than those on enalapril.

High blood pressure is extremely common in the African-American community; nearly one in three African Americans has the condition. In addition, diabetes is more prevalent in African Americans than in the general population; African Americans are 1.6 times as likely to have diabetes than non-Hispanic whites of similar age.

When high blood pressure and diabetes occur together, the risk of heart disease and kidney disease greatly increases. Because of the dangers of uncontrolled high blood pressure in those with diabetes, national guidelines released last year by ISHIB recommend these patients be treated to a blood pressure goal of less than 130/80 mm Hg.