McGowan Institute?
December 2004 | VOL. 12 | www.McGowan.pitt.edu
The McGowan Institute Scientific Retreat will be held on March 7-8, 2005 at the Nemacolin Woodlands Hotel. The meeting will provide unique opportunities for networking and collaboration amongst colleagues and new scientists, engineers and clinicians. The retreat program is being finalized, but several distinguished speakers are confirmed participants:
- Elliot Chaikof, MD, PhD: Emory School of Medicine
- Toshiharu Shinoka, MD: Tokyo Women's Medical University
- U.S. Army Combat Casualty Care Unit
The Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative is a cosponsor of the retreat and many of their constituents will be participating in the retreat, bringing new perspectives to the technical and scientific issues to be addressed during this two-day meeting.
On-line registration, room reservation instructions and preliminary program information will be available soon on the Institute web site.
Remember - Save the dates: March 7-8, 2005
The new journal Acta Biomaterialia was officially launched at a reception at the Materials Research Society Fall Meeting at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston on November 30th. The journal, edited by McGowan Institute Deputy Director William R. Wagner, aims to serve as the journal of choice for biomaterials scientists and engineers who are focused on structure-property-function relationships in biomaterials.
“We’re very pleased with our inaugural issue. It reflects both the breadth and the depth of the community we will be serving.” said William Wagner. “We have a quality publication that benefits from the experience and reputation of the Acta Materialia name in the materials science community and also enjoys the technological advantages, quality, and impact associated with our publisher, Elsevier.” Dr. Wagner also notes that the editorial team has assembled issue number 2 which will be going to press in the coming weeks. “With the growth in the biomaterials community, there is an increasing need to rapidly publish important work. Acta Biomaterialia is committed to a streamlined review process and the publication of accepted manuscripts in close proximity to their acceptance date.”
The journal will be published 6 times a year and the first volume will be available for free access at Elsevier’s Science Direct website. To view the first issue click here.
For those interested in receiving the first three issues in hardcopy for free, this can be accomplished at the journal’s homepage. Researchers interested in submitting their work to the journal can also find a link to the author’s guide at the above website.
Nation’s First Telerehabilitation Engineering Research Center Established
The School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS) has been awarded a five-year, $4.25 million grant from the federal government’s National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) to establish the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Telerehabilitation. The only research center of its kind, the RERC will study and develop methods, systems and technologies for the remote delivery of rehabilitation services via the information superhighway.
“By creating this center of excellence, we have been afforded the incredible opportunity to invent the state-of-the-art in telerehabilitation,” said David Brienza, Ph.D., director of the RERC and associate professor of rehabilitation science and technology. The research team, led by Dr. Brienza (picture right) and co-director Michael McCue, Ph.D., will take input from the disability community to create a consumer-driven design and usable technology to create a model telerehabilitation system that will be used world-wide.
Projects in the RERC aim to help people with disabilities by providing an interface with experts at leading rehabilitation programs like those at the University of Pittsburgh. Experts will provide services including communication therapy for children with disabilities, assessment for wheeled-mobility devices, and accessibility assessment of the home and work environment. Researchers also plan on developing an automated job coach that will prepare people with disabilities to enter the workforce. Health care providers in underserved areas will be able to consult with experts as well, helping to alleviate the shortage of rehabilitation professionals.
Additionally, through the RERC, SHRS plans to take a leadership role in establishing telerehabilitation across the United States by influencing public policy and developing a telerehabilitation curriculum.
Treating cancer is not unlike going to war inside the patient’s body. The disease is attached, but so are innocent surroundings. Dr. Leaf Huang, the director of Pitt’s School of Pharmacy Center for Pharmacogenetics, and McGowan Institute faculty member may have discovered a way to win the war against cervical cancer without taking casualties. If so, the implications for the way cancer is treated could be profound.
Huang has devoted his career to the study of nonviral vectors, specifically for use in targeted drug delivery and gene therapy. Nonviral vectors are agents, which are not made of viruses that can be used to deliver gene therapy or drugs to specific locations in the body. Many think that targeted drug delivery and gene therapy will soon be the way that many diseases are treated.
Huang and others studying gene therapy hope to outsmart the immune system. When scientists inject the therapy into the body, the immune system rightfully thinks it is being attacked, because a foreign agent has been introduced. Scientists have to find a way to trick the immune system to allow the gene therapy to get past the body’s natural defense.
Today, if a person is undergoing chemotherapy, the drugs don’t just attack the tumor-they also attack the surrounding tissue, indiscriminately killing cells. Maybe the cancer cells die, but maybe some of the tissue surrounding the tumor also dies. Delivering drugs to the body like this is ineffective and highly toxic. That’s why people who undergo chemotherapy treatment often get sick. In targeted drug delivery, the drug recognizes a tumor cell and only affects that tissue.
The most effective way to deliver targeted drugs is to use viral vector-models that employ viruses, like a simple cold virus, as a method of transporting drugs or genes directly to the site that needs treatment. Viral vectors are effective, but they can be very potent and cause other complications. As an example, in 1999, the negative side effects of viral vector gene therapy were in the spotlight when a young man died during a University of Pennsylvania clinical trial. Pioneers in gene therapy and drug delivery research, like Huang, hope that methods of transportation that don’t use viruses will prove to be safer.
Based on these findings, there was evidence that a cervical cancer vaccine may be in the making. It seemed exciting -- yet the researchers knew they had to be cautious. As with any lab breakthrough, there is no guarantee that it will ultimately prevail in clinical trials.
Dr. Huang and his students asked themselves…could this discovery actually lead to a therapeutic vaccine? Conventional vaccines are great for protecting people who don’t have a disease from being susceptible to getting it, but they offer little help to those who already suffer from a disease. A therapeutic vaccine, on the other hand, is used after a person develops a disease, like cancer. If, for instance, a woman has a tumor in her cervix, the therapeutic vaccine could be used to treat the tumor, and it would later protect her from getting cervical cancer again. Huang realized that if they could come up with a therapeutic vaccine, it would surpass all existing conventional cervical cancer treatments.
The Huang Group gave five mice cervical cancer tumors. The lab results showed that these mice did not get the cancer. The researchers discovered that the mouse vaccine doesn’t just cause complete remission in the early stages of cervical tumors; it also eradicates them in advanced stages. This discovery has profound implications, especially for the developing world. Eighty percent of cases of cervical cancer occur in the developing nations; this cancer kills about 300,000 women annually, making it the second leading cancer that kills women worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
In a few months, through the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, a new clinical trial will begin to assess the effectiveness of the laboratory findings of Dr. Huang and his students as a treatment for cervical cancer.
This text is a synopsis of the article “Beating Cancer” by Meghan Holohan published in the Fall 2004 edition of “Pitt Magazine”. Reference: www.umc.pitt.edu/pittmag/fall2004/feature2.html
Photo by: Tom Altany