UW School of Medicine Online News 10-12-07

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University of Washington School of Medicine

Online News

Vol. 11, No. 40
Oct. 12, 2007
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To view an archived version of Online News on the UW
Medicine Web site, visit:
http://www.uwmedicine.org/Global/NewsAndEvents/somnews/index.htm

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This week’s news:

* UW faculty and alumni elected to Institute of Medicine

* NHGRI grants $10.8 million to UW for next phase of Human Genome Project, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements

* Gregory Jurkovich, proponent of new acute care surgery model, elected president of national trauma surgery group

* Corey Casper and Jason Debley receive Young Investigator Awards from UW General Clinical Research Center


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UW FACULTY AND ALUMNI ELECTED TO INSTITUTE OF MEDICINE

Four UW faculty members and two School of Medicine alumni have been elected to the Institute of Medicine. The six are among the 65 new members and foreign associates whose election was announced by the Institute of Medicine Oct. 8, in Washington, D.C.

The new members from the UW faculty are: Wylie Burke, professor and chair of the Department of Medical History and Ethics; Eric B. Larson, clinical professor of medicine and former medical director of UW Medical Center; Christopher Murray, professor of global health and director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation; and Edward Wagner, professor of health services. UW alumni newly elected to the IOM are Leighton Chan, chief of the rehabilitation medicine department at the National Institutes of Health, and Louis Ptacek, the John C. Coleman Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the University of California San Francisco.

The Institute of Medicine is both an honorific membership organization and an advisory organization. Established in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences, the institute has become recognized as a national resource for independent, scientifically informed analysis and recommendations on human health issues.

Burke is trained as a geneticist and as a general adult medicine physician, and practices at the UW Medical Genetics Clinic. She also leads the UW Center for Genomics and Health Care Equality, a National Institutes of Health-funded Center of Excellence in the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Research. Burke is nationally recognized for her work on the ethical and health policy implications of genetic information in medicine and public health.

Larson is executive director of Group Health's Center for Health Studies. He is known for his research on aging and dementia, including a long-running project, the Adult Changes in Thought Study set in Group Health Cooperative and in the UW/Group Health Alzheimer's Disease Patient Registry.

Murray came to the UW in May as a professor of global health and to direct the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. A physician and a health economist, Murray began his career working on tuberculosis control, and with Alan Lopez, created the Global Burden of Disease methods and applications. Since then he has helped develop a range of new methods and empirical studies to measure population health.

Wagner is a general adult medicine physician and an epidemiologist. He directs the W.A. MacColl Institute for Health Care Innovation at the Center for Health Studies, Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound.

Chan completed his postgraduate training in physical medicine and rehabilitation at the UW, and earned graduate degrees in rehabilitation science and public health here. Chan served on the UW medical school faculty from 1994 to 2006, and directed the Pulmonary Rehabilitation Program at UW Medical Center. He joined the NIH this past year.

Ptacek did his residency training in general internal medicine at the UW. Now the John C. Coleman Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the University of California San Francisco, Ptacek is also an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The new Institute of Medicine members are part of a total active membership of 1,538. At least one-quarter of the members are from outside the health professions, such as law, politics, economics, the humanities and engineering. Election is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of medicine and health. For a complete list of UW Medicine faculty in the Institute of Medicine, visit:
http://tinyurl.com/y846a7


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UW RECEIVES FUNDING FOR NEXT PHASE OF HUMAN GENOME PROJECT

The National Human Genome Research Institute has awarded UW researchers $10.8 million as part of a national effort to expand the ENCyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project. The project is the next phase of the Human Genome Project, in which researchers will attempt to read instructions hidden within the genome and determine how to switch genes on and off.

The effort represents a full-scale initiative to build a list of biologically functional elements in the human genome. Previous work in the ENCODE project looked at just 1 percent of the genome, and this phase will survey the entire genetic map. Researchers hope the project will give a more complete picture of the biological roots of human health and disease.

John Stamatoyannopoulos, UW professor of medicine and genome sciences, will receive $9.7 million to map the locations of DNA sequences that encode instructions for controlling genes in cell types thought to be most important for human disease. In each cell in the body, only a fraction of the approximately 35,000 human genes are switched on. Stamatoyannopoulos’ team will map regulatory regions – DNA sequences responsible for switching genes on and off to produce the unique pattern seen in each cell type. Regulatory regions are known to play critical roles in many human diseases, including cancer, diabetes, and immune disorders. A complete map of these regions will speed research into the causes of disease.

Stamatoyannopoulos played a leading role in the ENCODE pilot project and was a senior author of the consortium’s publication in the journal Nature earlier this year.

Michael Dorschner, acting instructor in the UW Department of Medicine’s Division of Medical Oncology, will receive $1.1 million to develop a new technology for reading the regulatory sequences to determine which DNA letters actually contact regulatory proteins. This technology could have major applications in identifying specific disease-causing genetic mutations.


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JURKOVICH TO LEAD NATIONAL TRAUMA SURGERY GROUP

Gregory Jurkovich, UW professor of surgery and chief of trauma service at Harborview Medical Center, has been selected president-elect of the premier academic trauma surgery organization in the country, the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma (AAST). He was elected to serve as president in 2008-09 at the association's annual meeting last month in Las Vegas.

The AAST, founded in 1937, has approximately 1,000 members in 30 countries. The organization hosts scientific meetings to exchange knowledge about research practice and training in the surgery of trauma as well as the design of research studies to investigate new methods of preventing, correcting and treating traumatic injuries. The Journal of Trauma is published by the AAST.

Jurkovich is a leading proponent of a new medical specialty -- acute care surgery -- that combines trauma, surgical critical care, and emergency general surgery into a new training and practice paradigm. He has served on the AAST's Acute Care Surgery Committee for the past four years.

Jurkovich's research interests include injury prevention, system design and outcome studies; hypothermia in trauma; alcohol and trauma; nutritional support of the critically ill and injured; and modulation of the inflammatory response. He joined the UW faculty in 1988.

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COREY CASPER AND JASON DEBLEY RECEIVE YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AWARDS

Corey Casper, assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Jason Debley, assistant professor of pediatrics, received the Young Investigator of the Year Awards last month from the UW General Clinical Research Center. This award is presented annually to two junior faculty members who have a record of significant peer-reviewed publications and have demonstrated excellence in research supported by the GCRC at the UW and at Children's Hospital.

Casper is an assistant professor of medicine at Harborview and sees patients at the Madison Clinic. He is also an adjunct assistant professor of epidemiology, an assistant member of the Program in Infectious Diseases at Fred Hutchinson, and medical director of infection control at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. He investigates the transmission, natural history, and treatment of human herpes virus, among other kinds of infections.

Debley is an attending physician at Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle. He received his medical degree from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, and completed his pediatrics internship and residency at Children’s Memorial Hospital, also in Chicago. Debley studies recurrent wheezing of early childhood, asthma epidemiology, and non-invasive measures of airflow obstruction and airway inflammation in young children.


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Justin Reedy, editor:
206-685-0382, jreedy@u.washington.edu

Online News is copyright 2007. All rights, including electronic
redistribution, are reserved.

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