It’s ancient knowledge that a spoonful of turmeric can soothe inflammation, but now a UA scientist is exploring how the complex structure of natural plants long used in Asia can offer medicinal benefits in other ways, many of them unnoticed in the West.
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When you are in a hospital, what you don’t know can hurt you. Case in point: That person carrying drug-resistant bacteria as he enters with you is a potential source of germs that can kill you. One UA expert, Dr. Donna Wolk, is out to improve the odds of avoiding hidden, highly contagious threats, sometimes called “hospital superbugs,” lurking in many hospitals around the world.
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Virtually everybody you know has the wily virus called CMV. Global rates of infection run from 60 to 90 percent, 100 percent in places with concentrated populations like New Delhi or Hong Kong. And at a typical daycare center, most children have it or soon will, since a bit of saliva or urine will carry it along. For most of us, our immune system keeps it in check. But it can be life threatening to those whose immunity has been compromised.
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Walt Piegorsch, PhD, is a trailblazer. At UA, he is redesigning statistics education, and on the global stage he is taking statistical knowledge across disciplines to help quantify all manner of risks, from chemical toxins to terrorism. Piegorsch, a top expert on environmental risk, is the director of a new UA program in statistics and a professor of mathematics in the College of Science. He is also a member of the UA’s BIO5 Institute.
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As a doctor, John Galgiani, MD, would like to cure his coughing, feverish, sleepy patients, all 50,000 of them. That’s the number of current infections from valley fever. It can leave patients in wheelchairs, facing hospitalization or worse. In Arizona, 30 people are likely to die each year from its complications, which can include meningitis. The disease still has no cure, but he would like to change that.
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For years, biomedical science has been turning individual genes on and off as way to treat gene-based maladies, and as a research tool. Now, a new challenge involves finding ways to bring the entire genetic blueprint of humans, animals and plants into play.
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This is a story about Charlotte, who is three days old at this writing, and a medical puzzle that might affect her susceptibility to many serious diseases. Or it might not. For infants, their first year is crucial. The kind of environment a child of that age needs to switch on certain molecules to lift their disease immunity is fairly well known. For example, living on a farm and being around a dog and lots of microbes are helpful factors, but only for some.
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Early detection is the single, most important factor in cancer survival. That’s why regular checkups and early testing are so necessary. Unfortunately, current testing methodologies have limitations that prevent very early cancer detection. Cell abnormalities have to reach about 1 mm in size before they can be seen by CT, MRI or ultrasound scans.
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Up close, a thin slice of a human cell wall might look like the Great Wall of China, with an array of towers, tubes and molecular mailboxes. Getting a message through is tricky. The molecule must hit the right receptor, a kind of smart mailbox that regulates life, screening messages, letting only a few bind to the cell.
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For most bioscientists, a slice of Nobel Prize fame would be a very big deal. For the UA’s Tom Doetschman, it is minor compared to his new goal: helping prevent colon cancer. Asked about his role in the 2007 Nobel Prize, Doetschman says drily, “I got mentioned.” Then he adds, “Those were heady days.” But these days, he has high hopes for the UA’s “knockout mouse” program, which he founded and which has already achieved global prominence in the field that was honored with that Nobel Prize in medicine. It is a UA core facility, called Genetically Engineered Mouse Models, or GEMM Core.
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Green petunia plants sprout in Rich Jorgensen’s lab in the Plant Sciences Department in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, displaying the results of genetic alternations that reflect his innovations in genetic theory. DNA has always been the superstar in the realm of genetics, with RNA playing the role of an obedient waiter, delivering just what it’s told. Thanks to the work of Jorgensen, RNA is now seen as central to things like cell differentiation, production of chemicals like insulin and even the spread of cancer.
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Imagine pulling an object 100,000 times your own weight. Put that strength into a microbe a thousand times smaller than the head of a pin and you have a picture of one of the strongest motors known in biology. This biomotor is part of an elegant system that some microbes use to communicate with our healthy cells. That system is a focus of research by Magdalene (Maggie) So, a member of the Department of Immunobiology in the College of Medicine and the BIO5 Institute at UA, and head of an interdisciplinary, university-wide Microbial Pathogenesis Program.
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Devices that spin off from the research of a UA bioengineer may one day protect airports and border checkpoints, enhance the work of pharmaceutical companies and speed the tests of water quality around the world. On a battlefield, her instant blood test for H.I.V. and hepatitis could hasten a direct transfusion and save a soldier’s life. Her device to test for signs of life in extreme environments like outer space could help NASA search for extraterrestrial life. Linda Powers, a UA bioengineer and BIO5 member, has done such projects and many more in the field of medical diagnostics.
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