October 2008

Pathology & Laboratory Medicine News Items

WELCOME to NEW FACULTY!~

Announcements:

The Biospecimen Archive and Research Core has been mentioned in the recent issue of http://www.bmc.org/NewsLetters/medCenter/pdf/2008_10.pdf 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)