Boston University Medical Campus
Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

Pathology & Laboratory Medicine News Items

Happy New Year!

Announcements:

BU Bridge, the Boston University Clinical and Translational Science Institute, is delighted to announce the awardees of its 2008-2009 Pilot Project and Methods Project Grants and K12 Fellowship. These awardees were chosen after reviewing many outstanding applications. One of the PILOT PROJECT GRANTS was awarded to Nader Rahimi, PhD: Identification of Novel Anti-Angiogenesis Agent for Treatment of Angiogenesis-associated Eye Diseases. The goal of this project is to study the efficacy and pharmacokinetics of PLCã1 peptide inhibitor conjugated with two different carriers (PLCI-I and PLCI-II fusion octamer PLCã1 peptides) in inhibiting choroidal neovascularization (CNV) in an animal model. Dr. Rahimi’s group has shown that PLCI-I and PLCI-II fusion octamer PLCã1 peptides are cell membrane permeable and inhibit endothelial cell proliferation and angiogenesis in vitro.

Dr. Kazem Azadzoi has been appointed to the Surgery Scientific Merit Review board of the Department of Veterans Affairs (V A) Joint Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development and Clinical Science Research and Development for a term ending 2012

Recent updates to the Pathology Resident Curriculum includes a Molecular Pathology rotation. The molecular pathology rotation includes exposure to testing performed in anatomic pathology and microbiology. In addition a 6 lecture introductory series was created to provide background knowledge. Attendings: Nancy Miller and Karen Quillen; Faculty Member: Shi Yang; Residents: John Lee and Bethany Tierno, and technical support staff Beverly Orr, Audrey Quinn, and Charline Mack were involved in creating this new curriculum.

Basic Life Support Certification Renewed for:

• Dr. Steven Bogen

Grants

• Grant awarded from the DoD PCRP for 3 years to Steve Bogen’s group. The project is to study peripheral leukocytes in patients with elevated PSA levels. The goal is to identify an adjunct biomarker that could increase the specificity of the PSA test, thereby reducing the need for prostate biopsy

Publications:

• Hyunjin Shin, Yue Zhang, Madhumita Jagannathan, Hatice Hasturk, Alpdogan Kantarci, Honsgheng Liu, Thomas Van Dyke, Lisa Ganley-Leal, and Barbara Nikolajczyk, “B cells from periodontal disease patients express surface Toll-like Receptor 4″ in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology. Accepted on Dec 5 2008.
  
• Dr. Rosana Meyer’s manuscript entitled “Identification of ligand-induced proteolytic cleavage and ectodomain shedding of VEGFR-1/FLT-1 in leukemic cancer Cells” (Rosana D Meyer, Todd Golde and Nader Rahimi) is accepted for publication in the Cancer Research Journal. This is Dr. Meyer’s second paper accepted for publication within less than two months.
  
• Finnerty CC, Jeschke MG, Herndon DN, Gamelli R, Gibran N, Klein M, Silver G, Arnoldo B, Remick D, Tompkins RG: Temporal Cytokine Profiles In Severely Burned Patients: A Comparison Of Adults And Children, Mol Med 2008, 1076-1551
  
• Sperry JL, Friese RS, Frankel HL, West MA, Cuschieri J, Moore EE, Harbrecht BG, Peitzman AB, Billiar TR, Maier RV, Remick DG, Minei JP: Male gender is associated with excessive IL-6 expression following severe injury, J Trauma 2008, 64:572-578
  
• Natarajan S, Kim J, Remick DG: Acute pulmonary lipopolysaccharide tolerance decreases TNF-alpha without reducing neutrophil recruitment. J Immunol 2008, 181:8402-8408.
  
• Minter RM, Bi X, Ben-Josef G, Wang T, Hu B, Arbabi S, Hemmila MR, Wang SC, Remick DG, Su GL: LPS-binding protein mediates LPS-induced liver injury and mortality in the setting of biliary obstruction. Am J Physiol Gastrointest Liver Physiol 2009, 296:G45-54
  
• Merritt, W., Y. G. Lin, L. Y. Han, A. A. Kamat, W. A. Spannuth, R. Schmandt, D. Urbauer, L. A. Pennacchio, J-F Cheng, A. Zeidan, H. Wang, P. Mueller, M.. E. Lenburg, J. W. Gray, S. Mok, M. J. Birrer, G. Lopez- Berestein, R. L. Coleman, M. Bar-Eli, A. K. Sood. 2008. Decreased expression of RNA interference machinery, Dicer and Drosha, is associated with poor outcome in ovarian cancer patients. New England Journal of Medicine. 359:2641-2650.
  
• Schembri, F., S. Sridhar, C. Perdomo, A. Gustafson, X. Zhang, A. Ergun, J. Lu, G. Liu, X. Zhang, J. Bowers, K. Sensinger, J.J. Collins, J. Brody, R. Getts, M.E. Lenburg, A. Spira. MicroRNAs as modulators of smoking-induced gene-expression changes in human airway epithelium. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In Press.
  
• Ibifiri Wilcox,1 Kevin Boettger,1 Lance Greene,1 Anita Malek,1 Lance Davis,1 Martin H. Steinberg,2,3 Hong-Yuan Luo,1,2 and David H.K. Chui Hemoglobin Kenya composed of a- and (Agb)-fusion-globin chains, associated with hereditary persistence of fetal hemoglobin. American Journal of Hematology 84: 55-58, January 2009
  
• Jozef Bartunek, MD, PHD,*,† Leen Delrue, PHD,*,† Frederik Van Durme, MD,*Olivier Muller, MD, PHD,* Filip Casselman, MD, PHD,‡ Bart De Wiest, RN,* Romaric Croes, MD,§ Sofie Verstreken, MD,* Marc Goethals, MD,* Herbert de Raedt, MD,* Jaydeep Sarma, MD, PHD, Lija Joseph, MD,_ Marc Vanderheyden, MD,*,† Ellen O. Weinberg, PHD Nonmyocardial Production of ST2 Protein in Human Hypertrophy and Failure Is Related to Diastolic Load. Journal of the American College of Cardiology Vol. xx, No. x, 2008

USCAP Accepted Abstracts for Annual Meeting Boston – 2009

• Platform Presentations
  • • Chris D. Andry, Christian Kiriakos, Diego Martinez, and Lisa O’Connor (VP for Nursing at BMC): A Pathology Department-Based Decedent Affairs Office Can Contribute to Improved Organ and Tissue Donation Services”
    • LA Emery, A. de las Morenas, A. Tripathi, P. Sebastiani and CL Rosenberg: “Gene Expression Alterations Associated with Premalignant and Preinvasive Breast Disease”
      
    • S.Yang , H Xu, H Huang, B Burke, SK Duhon, S Cerda and MJ O’Brien: “CpG Island Methylation in Serrated and Conventional CRC Precursor Neoplasms: How Individual Marker Genes and Panels Relate to Histology and Oncogene Mutation Status”

• Invited Presentations
  • • D.G. Remick, “Immunopathology of bacterial infections” Binford Dammin Infectious Disease Pathology Society
• Poster Presentations
  • Supraja Narasimhan and David Sherr: “A ROLE FOR THE AhR, AN ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTANT ACTIVATED RECEPTOR AND TRANSCRIPTION FACTOR, IN MAMMARY TUMOR PROGRESSION”
    • J.M. Cacicedo, E. Chou, N.B. Ruderman, and Y. Ido: “Activation of AMPK by AICAR Inhibits Palmitate-Induced Increases in Ceramide Mass, Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER) Stress, NF-kappaB, and Apoptosis in Cultured Bovine Retinal Pericytes (BRPC).”
    • Sudha Natarajan, Jiyoun Kim, Daniel G. Remick: “Pulmonary Endotoxin Tolerance Protects Against Lung Injury While Maintaining Capacity To Clear Bacterial Pathogens.”
    • AJ Mangini, T Nagai, A Ozonoff, MJ Fritzler, R Lafyatis and J Maguire van Seventer: “Type I Interferons: Regulators of inflammatory T helper cell responses in SLE”
    • Aditi Gurka, Cyrus Vaziri: “Regulation of Rad18 Via the Ataxia Telangiectasia and Rad3 Related (ATR) Kinase”
    • MJ Greene, K Laporte, E Klimtchuk, D Seldin and LH Connors: “Amyloidogenic nature of circulating transthyretin variants, V122I and V30A, and the effect of the NSAID, diflunisal”
    • B.G. Belikoff, S. Hatfield, F. Craciun, J.A. Buras, M. Sitkovsky, and D.G. Remick: “The Adenosinergic A2A Receptor Prevents Exacerbation of Systemic Inflammation and Lung Inflammation Secondary to Polymicrobial Sepsis”
    • D. Horton, D. Remick: “Chemokines Are Selectively Regulated during the Progression of Acute Inflammation”
    • Hongying Huang, Yirong Li, Jonathan Melamed, Peng Lee, Antonio de las Morenas: Increased Lef1 Expression in Metastatic Prostate Cancer”
    • S. Arya, D. Sundararajan, L. Haydt, B. Burke, C. Andry and A. de las Morenas: “Role Of ProEx C And MiB-1 In Evaluation Of Salivary Gland Neoplasms”
    • K. Graham, A. Tripathi, A. de las Morenas, P. Sebastiani, C. Rosenberg: “Genes are differentially expressed in normal appearing breast epithelium between different cohorts of breast cancer patients”
    • B.J. Tierno, B.D. McMillen, D.S. Xu, L. Joseph: “CD87, a Prognostic and Diagnostic Flow Cytometry Marker in Myelodysplastic Syndrome”
    • J. Kim, F. Chiem, S. Natarajan, L. Vaickus and D. Remick: “Anti-Oxidant Taurine Treatment Reduces Pulmonary Inflammation Induced by Allergen and Diesel Particulate Matter Challenge in a Mouse Model of Asthma”
    • Heather Cohen, Shinichiro Kurosawa, DJ Stearns-Kurosawa: “Adiponectin Levels During The Septic Response To B.Anthracis Sterne Strain In Baboons”
    • DJ Stearns-Kurosawa, V Collins, S Freeman, S Kurosawa: “Activated Protein C Substantially Improves Survival in a Baboon Model of Anthrax-mediated Sepsis”
    • JF. Papin, DJ Stearns-Kurosawa, V. Collins, S Freeman, G. Peer, and S. Kurosawa: “STX-1 Non-Human Primate Toxemia Model: Circulating Leukocyte MRNA Changes Coincide With Disease Onset”
    • Dana Semmel and Carl O’Hara: “Morphologic findings in PET positive, tumor negative lymph nodes in l patients with lung cancer”
    • JC Lee, PT Soo Hoo, LH Connors and CJ O’Hara: “Use of ultrastructural immunolabeling (immuno-gold electron microscopy) in the classification of systemic amyloidosis”

Announcements:

• Dr. Michael O’Brien has been named the new Chair of the New England Pathology Society
• The 2008 Cytology Proficiency Test was taken by all Cytotechnologists and Cytopathologist at the beginning of the November. We received the results last Monday and everybody passed it with 100% correct answers. Congratulations to all Cytopathology Staff! And special thanks to the proctors, Dr. Andry and Ms. Wirtanen. They also had to pass their own proctor test.
• Dr. Martin Kroll was recently elected as Program Chair for the Northeast Section of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC). The position is equivalent to the president elect for the local section. He takes office July 1, 2009 and the following year Dr. Kroll will assume the position as Chair (President in the older terminology). The AACC is one of the largest organizations in clinical Pathology in the world and its annual meeting hosts the largest and most extensive exhibits for Laboratory Medicine in the Western Hemisphere.

Posters:

• Marc Lenburg gave a poster presentation entitled “Airway epithelial gene expression in the diagnostic evaluation of smokers with suspect lung cancer” at the NCI Translational Science Conference which was held in Washington, D.C. November 7th – 9th. The poster was highlighted in the Poster Discussion Session entitled “Biomarkers for Lung Cancer Detection & Therapy”.

Presentations:

• Dr. Kazem Azadzoi presented at the Society of Basic Urology Research (SBUR) Meeting held November 21-24 in Phoenix, AZ.Title of the presentation is: “Oxidative Neural Injury in the Overactive Bladder”

Publications:

• Chinnappan, D., Qu, X., Xiao, D., Ratnasari, A. and Weber, H.C.: Human Gastrin-Releasing Peptide Receptor Gene Regulation Requires Transcription Factor Binding at Two Distinct CRE Sites. Am J Physiol 2008; 295(1):G153-G162
• Boback M. Berookhim, Amanjot S. Sethi, C. Charles Wen, Jing Cui, Louis S. Liou| had a manuscript accepted by UIJ: A Cost Comparison of the Diagnostic Modalities Used in the Detection of Urothelial Carcinoma in Patients Undergoing Evaluation for Hematuria. December 2008 publication
• Rosana Meyer’s manuscript (Rosana D Meyer, David Sacks and Nader Rahimi) IQGAP1-Dependent Signaling Pathway Regulates Endothelial Cell Proliferation and Angiogenesis is accepted for publication in PLos One Journal, November 2008.

Pathology & Laboratory Medicine News – November 2008

WELCOME to NEW FACES!~

• Brian Japp in the Remick Lab
• Diana Weiner in the Kurosawa Lab
• Sreedevi Srinivasan in the Rahimi Lab
• Pritam Sengupta in the Rahimi Lab
• Dr. Rosana D Meyer, MD. will be joining Dr, Rahimi on Nov. 11th as instructor. Dr. Meyer is studying role of protein ubiquitination in angiogenesis.

Announcements:

• Steven Bogen MD PhD served on the Innovative Technologies for the Molecular Analysis of Cancer (IMAT) grant review study section for the National Cancer Institute, October 15-16, Bethesda, MD
• Steven Bogen MD PhD served on the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) sub-committee for establishing new practice standards in Immunohistochemistry. The last CLSI guidelines were almost a decade old. Last month (October), the new guidelines document was finished and sent to the CLSI area sub-committee, concluding the committee’s work
• First Year Medical students gain a glimpse of pathology organs as they dissect cadavers in the anatomy lab. The pathology department faculty, staff and senior medical students have initiated a program to demonstrate abnormal organ pathology to the first year medical students. This helps the students gain an understanding of normal and abnormal as they dissect various organ systems. The demonstrations are integrated so that they observe abnormal heart as they dissect normal heart, abnormal uterus as they dissect normal uterus and so on. The second year students are also reminded of the normal histology as they study abnormal pathology in the pathology lab sessions. Please let Drs.Joseph or O’Hara know if you are interested in participating in any of these sessions.
• Walther Pfeifer has successfully passed the Hematology exam and is now officially a diplomat of the American Board of Pathology
• Basic Life Support Certification Renewed for:
  • Dr. Sandra Cerda
  • Dr. Antonio de las Morenas

  • Dr. Jianmin Gan

  • Dr. Walther Pfeifer

  • Dr. Robert Pistey

  • Dr. Daniel Remick

  • Dr. Carmen Sarita-Reyes

n Graduate Student News:

o Sudha Natarajan’s, (J. Kim and D. G. Remick) manuscript entitled “Acute Pulmonary LPS Tolerance Decreases TNFa Without Reducing Neutrophil Recruitment” was accepted for publication in The Journal of Immunology on October 20th.

o Jillian Richmond presented a poster this past weekend at the New England Immunology Conference. The title was “Effects of Components of the M TUBERCULOSIS strain H37Rv on T cell Migration.”

n Grants

o The Clinical and Translational Science Institute hereby awards Nader Rahimi a pilot grant in the amount of $40,000.00 for the period of November 1, 2008 through April 30, 2009. The award is pursuant to your application entitled: Identification of Novel Anti-Angiogenesis Agent for Treatment of Angiogenesis-associated Eye Diseases

n Posters:

o Some photos from the CAP meeting in San Diego

§
The first one is Sara Koenig next to her poster

§ The second is Dr. Eugene Pearlman and Bethany Tierno

§ The third is Bethany Tierno next to her poster

§ Barbara Nikolajczyk’s undergraduate student, Julia Jezmir, presented a poster at the UROP symposium on the Charles River Campus entitled “The Role of the Inflammasome and TLR family hyper-activation in Type 2 Diabetes and Crohn’s Disease” held on Oct 17th.

n Presentations:

o Dr. Michael O’Brien will present at the upcoming New England Pathologists Society Meeting on Nov 18^th. He will be giving the Stanley L Robbins lecture, “Serrated Polyp Pathway to Colorectal Cancer” and 3 of our residents, Dr. Bethany J. Tierno, Dr. Hongying Huang and Dr. Nalini Balgobin will be presenting a slide seminar related to the lecture topic

o John Kim, PhD went to Nuremberg, Germany on October 5, 2008 for an invited presentation titled “TNF-a Inhibitors Effectively Treat Asthma” during 2^nd World Conference on Magic Bullets: Celebrating the 100^th Anniversary of the Nobel Prize Awarded to Paul Ehrlich

o Steven Bogen MD PhD presented at the NCI’s Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies annual meeting in Cambridge, MA, Sunday October 26, 2008 in the session entitled “Technologies to capture circulating tumor cells“. Dr. Bogen’s presentation was entitled “Performance Characteristics of a New CTC Enrichment Method Using a Negative Selection Strategy”

o Dr. Kazem Azadzoi has been selected as a guest speaker to give State of the Art lecture on Oxidative Stress and Erectile Dysfunction in Gwangju International Symposium on Sexual Medicine to be held on October 31 in South Korea.

n Publications:

o Beane, J.E., A. Spira, M.E. Lenburg. “Clinical impact of high- throughput gene expression studies in lung cancer.” Journal of Thoracic Oncology. In Press. This paper reviews work that has been done using genome-wide gene- expression profiling to develop clinically relevant tools for the diagnostic and prognostic evaluation of lung cancer patients

o Seshi Sompuram PhD and Steven Bogen MD PhD had a manuscript accepted to “Applied Immunohistochemistry and Molecular Morphology”. The manuscript is entitled “Experimental validation of peptide immunohistochemistry controls“

o Ratner DM, Cui J, Steffen M, Moore LL, Robbins PW, Samuelson J. Changes in the N-glycome (glycoproteins with Asn-linked glycans) of Giardia lamblia with differentiation from trophozoites to cysts. Eukaryot Cell. 2008 Sep 26. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 18820077 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

o Sedgewick AE, Timofeev N, Sebastiani P, So JCC, Ma ESK, Chan LC, Fucharoen G, Fucharoen S, Barbosa CG, Vardarajan BN, Farrer LA, Baldwin CT, Steinberg MH, Chui DHK. BCL11A is a major HbF quantitative trait locus in three different populations with beta-hemoglobinopathies. Blood Cells, Molecules, and Diseases 41: 255-258, 2008.

o Madziar B, Shah S, Brock M, Burke R, Lopez-Coviella I, Nickel AC, Cakal EB, Blusztajn JK, Berse B. NGF regulates the expression of the cholinergic locus and the high affinity choline transporter via the Akt/PKB signaling pathway. J Neurochem. 2008 Sep 13. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 18793330 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Pathology & Laboratory Medicine News Items

WELCOME to NEW FACULTY!~

• Yuriy Alekseyev
• Rachel Factor
• Marc Lenburg
• Maria Panchenko
• Nader Rahimi
• Martin Steffen

Announcements:

• The Biospecimen Archive and Research Core has been mentioned in the recent issue of Med Center News (Page 3).
• Nancy Miller has been appointed (as an observer) to the CLSI subcommittee on User Verfication/Validation of Microbial Identification and Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing Systems
• Full house for Plate Rounds! Dr. Nancy S. Miller and the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory recently kicked-off its Fall season of “plate rounds” with Dr. Stephanie Oberhaus and 2^nd year medical students from the Disease and Therapy course (DRx). Dr. Miller is the Medical Director of Clinical Microbiology & Molecular Diagnostics. Dr. Oberhaus, Department of Microbiology, is a co-director of the BUSM-2 DRx). After last year’s successful pilot project, Drs. Miller and Oberhaus are continuing the tradition of inviting medical students to plate rounds to enhance their case-based learning from the laboratory perspective. The Microbiology Laboratory conducts weekly didactic and clinical working rounds for the Pediatric and Adult Infectious Diseases fellows and faculty, Pathology residents, and Clinical Pharmacology fellows. Welcome students!

Resident News:

• Bethany Tierno and Sara Koenig are presenting at the CAP Conference
• Sara Koenig is presenting a poster at the annual AABB meeting in Montreal in October

Abstracts:

• Accepted Abstract- USCAP 2009, CD87, “a Prognostic and Diagnostic Flow Cytometry Marker in Myelodysplastic Syndrome.” Authors: BJ Tierno, BD McMillen, DS Xu, L Joseph

Grants

• Seshi Sompuram Ph.D. and Steven Bogen M.D. Ph.D. were awarded this month a new NIH grant (1R43HL093903-01) for a project in collaboration with Bill Cruikshank Ph.D. (Pulmonary Medicine Section). The grant is entitled “Identification of Therapeutic Peptides for Asthma” and seeks to identify peptides with IL-16 – like activity that can be delivered in an aerosol format for the treatment of asthma. Professor Cruikshank is co-discoverer of IL-16.

• Marc Lenburg and Avrum Spira have been awarded a grant from the NHLBI to study the pathogenesis and clinical heterogeneity of chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD) using genome-wide molecular profiling. This grant will provide approximately $1.9M in direct costs over the next four years and is part of a special Molecular Phenotypes for Lung Diseases RFA from the NHLBI. The project involves a diverse group of collaborators at BU including George O’Connor, Jerry Brody, Jim Collins, Paola Sebastiani, and Yuriy Alekseyev; as well as a number of collaborators at the University of British Columbia. The major goals of the project are to apply whole-genome exon-level and microRNA expression profiling and a variety of novel computational methodologies to identify molecular subtypes of COPD that may contribute to the extreme clinical diversity of this disease. The research will also seek to understand how these profiles change during disease progression, and uncover genetic polymorphisms that influence both molecular and clinical COPD-related traits. The hope is that this work will provide insights into the molecular pathogenesis of COPD and specific COPD-related traits, including degree of airflow obstruction, emphysema, small airways disease, and the rate of disease progression.
• Nader Rahimi just received a new RO1 grant to study the “Role of Protein Ubiquitination in Angiogenesis.” The grant is good until August 2011.

Posters:

Bethany Tierno will be presenting 2 posters at the CAP’08 meeting in San Diego next week 9/25/08:

• Ochrobactrum anthropi Bacteremia in a Patient Treated with Intravenous Treprostinil for Pulmonary Hypertension Bethany J. Tierno, MD; Paschalis Vergidis, MD (infectious Disease); Jason Konter, MD (pulmonary); Harrison W. Farber, MD (pulmonary); Nancy S. Miller, MD
• Clinical Utility of Immature Neutrophil 1 Flag Generated by the Coulter LH750 Hematology Analyzer in a University Hospital. Bethany J. Tierno, MD; Shveta Arya, MD; Melissa Gallinaro, MT(ASCP); Lija Joseph, MD

Publications:

• Zeskind J, Lenburg ME, Spira A. Translating the COPD transcriptome: insights into pathogenesis and tools for clinical management.
  • Proceedings of the American Thoracic Society. In Press. This paper reviews work that has been done using genome-wide gene- expression profiling to better understand chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lays out a series of challenges and opportunities for this work to impact diagnosis and treatment.

• Dr. Maria Panchenko’s paper entitled “Role of Jade-1 in the hat HBO1 complex” has been selected as a Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) Paper of the Week.

• 1: Herrera VL, Decano JL, Bagamasbad P, Kufahl T, Steffen M, Ruiz-Opazo N.
  Sex-specific, Hippocampal-dependent Cognitive Deficits and Increased Neuronal Autophagy in DEspR Haploinsufficiency in Mice. Physiol Genomics. 2008 Sep 9. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 18780760 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

• Jiang X, Nariai N, Steffen M, Kasif S, Kolaczyk ED.
  Integration of relational and hierarchical network information for protein function prediction. BMC Bioinformatics. 2008 Aug 22;9:350.PMID: 18721473 [PubMed - in process]
• Chitalia VC, Foy RL, Bachschmid MM, Zeng L, Panchenko MV, Zhou MI, Bharti A, Seldin DC, Lecker SH, Dominguez I, Cohen HT.
  Jade-1 inhibits Wnt signalling by ubiquitylating beta-catenin and mediates Wnt pathway inhibition by pVHL. Nat Cell Biol. 2008 Sep 21. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 18806787

Talks:

• Karen Quillen gave a talk 9/18/08 at the NIH Immunohematology & Blood Transfusion Symposium, entitled “Granulocyte Transfusion”
• David Chui, MD was an invited lecturer for the Hong Kong Society for the Study of Thalassemia. “Thalassemia research in Hong Kong: Moving forward together” May 8, 2008, Hong Kong
• Ann McKee was featured on WBUR NPR radio. The Concussion Crisis in Sports (Airdate 10/04/08)
  

Two pathologists successfully passed their Anatomic Pathology Boards:

• • Carmen Sarita-Reyes, M.D.
  • Rachel Factor, M.D.

Successful Ph.D. Dissertations:

• • Kristen Ross
  • Sri Sridhar

Awards:

• Alyson Mangini won First Prize for Henry Russek Day this year for Pathology with the following abstract: A.J. Mangini, J.A. Meyers, T. Nagai, A. Ozonoff, M.J. Fritzler, R. Lafyatis, G. van Seventer and J. Maguire van Seventer (2008) Type I Interferons inhibit inflammatory T helper cell responses. H.I Russek Student Achievement Day, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA.
• L Liou, M.D.’s poster won Best in Session (Basic Science Poster session 2) at the Annual Urology Meeting in Orlando this past May 2008. 262] MicroRNA EXPRESSION PROFILE IN CLEAR-CELL KIDNEY CANCER. Authors: David Juan*, Boston, MA, Gabriela Alexe, Travis Antes, Mountain View, CA, David Foran, Anant Madabhushi, Gyan Bhanot, Piscataway, NJ, Charles Delisi, Shridar Ganesan, New Brunswick, NJ, Louis Liou, Boston, MA

Presentations:

• • Antonio de las Moranes was invited to give the Grand Round presentation “Fine Needle Aspiration of Unusual Tumors. Differential Diagnosis” at New England Medical Center on August 20th 2008.
  • Louis Liou, M.D. has been invited to give Urology Grand Rounds at the Medical College of Wisconsin in September, 2008.

Publications:

• Reiner, AP, Carty CL, Jenny NS, Nievergelt C, Cushman M, Stearns-Kurosawa DJ, Kurosawa S, Kuller LH, Lange LA. PROC, PROCR, and PROS1 polymorphisms, plasma anticoagulant phenotypes, and risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality in older adults: the Cardiovascular Health Study. J Thromb Haemost, in press, 2008. (published on-line 1 August 2008) The study shows that a variant of the protein C receptor, part of a molecular network that regulates coagulation and inflammation, is associated with increased risk of stroke, all-cause mortality and decreased healthy survival in aging adults.
• Thampi P, Stewarta BW, Joseph L, Melnyck SB, Jennings LJ, Nagarajan S Dietary homocysteine promotes atherosclerosis in apoE-deficient mice by inducing scavenger receptors expression. Atherosclerosis 2008:197, (2) 620-629
• Vita JA, Holbrook M, Palmisano J, Shenouda SM, Chung WB, Hamburg NM, Eskenazi BR, Joseph L, Shapira OM. Flow-induced arterial remodeling relates to endothelial function in the human forearm. Circulation 2008; 117:3126-3133.
• Apovian CM, Bigornia S, Mott M, Meyers MR, Ulloor J, Gagua M, McDonnell M, Hess D, Joseph L, Gokce N. Adipose Macrophage Infiltration is Associated with Insulin Resistance and Vascular Endothelial Dysfunction in Obese Subjects Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol. 2008 Jun 19. [Epub ahead of print]
• Effects of Ischemia on Tachykinin-Containing Nerves and Neurokinin Receptors in the Bladder Published in UROLOGY 71: 979 –983, 2008 Authors: Kazem Azadzoi, Ziv M. Radisavljevic, and Mike B. Siroky
• Zhang, Y, Saccani, S Shin, H, and Nikolajczyk, BS. 2008. Dynamic protein associations define two phases of IL-1b transcriptional activation. J. Immunol. 181:503-512
• L Liou just published a paper in J. Urol this month on hypermethylation of kidney cancer. I have been invited to give Urology grand rounds at Medical College of Wisconsin this September.

Student Publication:

• Alyson J. Mangini, Robert Lafyatis, and Jean Maguire van Seventer. (2007) Type I Interferons Inhibition of Inflammatory T helper Cell Responses in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1108: 11-23.
• Karen Quillen’s and Kate Murphy’s article, “Quality improvement to decrease specimen mislabeling in transfusion medicine (Arch Pathol Lab Med 2006;130:1196-1198) was recently cited in the Joint Commission DRAFT of Blood Management Candidate Measure Profile (BM-17).

Abstracts:

• Oxidative Stress-Responsive genes Regulate Ultrastructural Changes of the Overactive Bladder Authors: Kazem Azadzoi, Ziv Radisavljevic, Bingguan Chen, and Mike Siroky To be presented at the International Continence Society (ICS) annual meeting in Cairo, Egypt on October 22-25, 2008
• Abstract accepted for poster presentation at CAP meeting, September 2008: Ochrobactrum anthropi Bacteremia in a Patient Treated with Intravenous Treprostinil for Pulmonary Hypertension Bethany J. Tierno, MD; Paschalis Vergidis, MD; Jason Konter, MD; Harrison W. Farber, MD; Nancy S. Miller, MD
• Abstract accepted for poster presentation at AABB meeting, October 2008: Validation of the VersaTREK® automated blood culture system for detection of microbial contamination in hematopoietic progenitor cells SC KOENIG, BL ORR, A SCHWARZMANN, K QUILLEN, NS MILLER Boston Medical Center, Department of Laboratory Medicine, Boston, MA
• Accepted Abstract for 2008 CAP meeting in September. Use of multiple patient analyte samples to enhance detection of changing clinical status. SC Koenig, MH Kroll
• Accepted Abstract for 2008 CAP meeting in September Incorporation of a periodic function: an alternate approach to insulin monitoring. SC Koenig, MH Kroll

Student Abstracts:

• • T. Nagai, A. Mangini, M. York, A. Ozonoff , R. Lafyatis and J.M. van Seventer (2008) Serum from a subset of SLE patients inhibits inflammatory cytokine IFN-γ and IL-17 secretion in a type I IFN-dependent manner. Conference of Japan Immunology Society, Kyoto, Japan.

Grants:

• • Kazem Azadzoi, M.D., M.A. just got funding notification by VA Merit Review for “Oxidative Stress and Neurodegeneration in the Overactive Bladder” for 4 years starting October 08

Resident News:

• • Sara Koenig was accepted at UNC for their transfusion medicine fellowship
  • John Lee is presenting at the CAP Conference. John Lee’s Title “Myocardial Mast Cell Distribution in Cardiovascular Disease”

Announcements:

• • The integrated disease and therapy course for the second year medical students in underway as of August 18th, 2008. The course is the result of over two years of planning and discussions initiated by Dr.Adrianne Rogers. The course “horizontally” integrates microbiology, pharmacology, pathology and biology of disease into one course. It has a thread of health law and policy weaved throughout. The course also “vertically” integrates anatomy, histology, biochemistry and physiology content from the first year. The Integrated problems and introduction to clinical medicine courses are now aligned to this course content so that organ based concept is emphasized to the students. Many of the pathology faculty have been integral and extremely helpful in the process and we are always looking for faculty who would like to develop their educational portfolio on campus. If you are interested in being part of this effort, please contact Dr. Joseph at lija.joseph@bmc.org or Dr. O’Hara at Carl.Ohara@bmc.org

Meet Our New Residents who began July 1st

Coming on September 1st – - Our New PhD and MA Graduate students:

Grad Students Passing Qualifying Exams:

Core Committee has voted to approve the Experimental Pathology Core:

Publications:

Abstracts:

Grant News:

Awards:

Invited Presentations: