More than 50 U.S. university and hospital-based academic neurology departments and MS centers presented papers at the meeting. The top five centers in terms of the numbers of papers presented included: State University of New York-Buffalo with 16 papers, WSU with 12 papers, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, with 11 papers, Mayo Clinic with 10 papers and the Neuroimmunology Branch, a National Institutes of Health branch, with 9 papers.

Six of WSU’s 12 papers were investigator initiated, and six were as a result of multi-center phase II and III clinical trials. Several related publications are already in press or being peer-reviewed for publication. Omar Khan, M.D., professor of Neurology, is director of the Multiple Sclerosis Clinical Research Center & Neuroimaging Laboratory at Wayne State University School of Medicine.

Matcheri S.Keshavan MD., WSU professor of Psychiatry, recently received a four-year National Institute of Mental Health grant totalling $ 2.65 million dollars beginning this month. The grant includes a subcontract to University of Michigan. This grant, titled Bipolar and Schizophrenia Consortium to parse Intermediate Phenotypes (B-SNIP) is one of 5 sites throughout the US to receive this initiative; the other sites are the Yale University, University of Maryland, University of Illinois, and the University of Texas, Dallas. The main goals of the study are to characterize the physiological and neuroanatomical endophenotypes, i.e. biomarkers and their molecular genetic underpinnings in a large, multi-site series of patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and their relatives. An understanding of the genetic and neurobiological basis of these two disorders will eventually help clinicians make better diagnoses based on the underlying pathophysiology rather than the current reliance on purely descriptive, clinical measures. Elucidating the pathophysiology and causation of these disorders will also lead to more novel, hypothesis-driven treatments.

Pravin Goud, M.D., Ph.D., a fellow in the WSU Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology Division of Reproductive Endocrinology & Infertility, was recently awarded a $30,000 competitive grant by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine-Ortho Women's Health. The grant, "Oocyte Maturation and aging in Endometriosis,” will investigate the role of free radicals in the causation of oocyte abnormalities in endometriosis.

Dr. Goud works in close collaboration with Michael Diamond, M.D.; Bernard Gonik, M.D.; Anuradha Goud, Ph.D.; and Husam Abu-Soud, Ph.D. Their research on the role of nitric oxide in oocyte aging has previously featured in the journal Biochemistry and has received national and international awards, including the Gordon Research Conference Award in 2005.