Category: Institute News

Dr. Ralph Tripp’s presentation “The Endgame: Eradicating Polio and other Vaccine Preventable Diseases” and Dr. Susan Mattern’s presentation “Structure and

Meaning in the Case Records of the Massachusetts General Hospital (New England Journal of Medicine)” are now available on the BHSI Youtube channel and can be found with the other #Throwback Therapies videos here. These presentations are part of the #Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science, a seminar series presented by the Biomedical & Health Sciences Institute, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Department of Classics, Department of History, and the Medical Partnership.

Joseph S. Burch, current Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences (IBS) Doctoral Program successfully defended his dissertation titled “A Metabolomics Analysis to Define the Sources of Heme Precursors During Erythropoiesis” this past Wednesday, April 27^th. As a member of the inaugural class of the University of Georgia and Augusta University Medical Partnership, Joseph will be the first MD/PhD student from the Medical Partnership to complete his PhD.

After graduating from UGA in 2008 with a Bachelor of Science from the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department, Joseph served as a lab technician before beginning medical school in 2010. Once he completed two years of medical school, he began his Ph.D. program under the mentorship of Dr. Harry A. Dailey. Through the IBS program, Joseph was able to tailor his coursework to study heme synthesis and diseases related to it, more specifically the source of heme synthesis precursors during red blood cell development. Joseph plans to return to the Medical Partnership in July, where upon completion of his remaining requirements, he will complete a residency program and hopes to conduct translational research in the future.

AU/UGA Medical Partnership
The AU/UGA Medical Partnership is a collaborative effort between Augusta University and the University of Georgia and is addressing the critical shortage of physicians in the state. The partnership combines the significant instructional and research resources of UGA, the state’s flagship land-grant research university, with the expertise of the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. For more information on the partnership, visit http://medicalpartnership.usg.edu/.

Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences (IBS) Doctoral Program
The Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences Ph.D. Program is housed in the Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute with the Office of the Vice President of Research. This program recognizes that the biomedical and health sciences have become very broad in scope and may draw as needed from traditional disciplines as unlikely as journalism and agricultural sciences. The overall mission is to provide students with a wide array of research opportunities in several more focused curricula, while assuring that all students receive core training in molecular sciences, communication skills and scientific ethics. For more information on the IBS program, visit http://ibs.uga.edu/.

Susan Mattern will speak on “Structure and Meaning in the Case Records of the Massachusetts General Hospital (New England Journal of Medicine)” at 2pm Wednesday, March 30 in Room 250 of the Zell B. Miller Learning Center. A reception will follow the talk in the Miller Learning Center second floor rotunda.

Dr. Mattern’s most recent book is The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire (Oxford University Press 2013). It is a social-historical biography of the ancient physician Galen, a cultural icon whose works were the basis of western medicine until the Renaissance. She has also written Galen and the Rhetoric of 

Healing (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), an analysis of Galen’s stories about his patients and a study of his medical practice, and Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate (University of California, 1999). Dr. Mattern has co-written a textbook, The Ancient Mediterranean World from the Stone Age to A.D. 600 (Oxford University Press, 2004). After a year of professional development studying social and psychology and transcultural psychiatry, she has begun publishing articles on mental disorders in antiquity. She is also working on a global history of menopause in addition to teaching graduate and undergraduate classes in  World History and in the history of Greece, Rome, ancient Egypt, marriage, disease, medicine, women, and law.

Mattern will speak as part of Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science, a seminar series presented by the Biomedical & Health Sciences Institute, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Department of Classics, Department of History, and the Medical Partnership.

#Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science
#Throwback Therapies is an innovative new interdisciplinary seminar series designed to entertain and enlighten any audience with interests in the origins of modern health sciences.

What if we read the New England Journal of Medicine as literature?

What were doctors up to in the time of the Roman Empire?

What does forensic pathology tell us about medical practices during the Civil War?

What prompted families to wait in long lines for polio vaccinations in the last century?

Come and find out! See what happens when historians do medicine and doctors do history in #Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science.

Ralph Tripp, PhD will speak on “The Endgame: Eradicating Polio and other Vaccine Preventable Diseases” as part of the #Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science lecture series on Wednesday, February 24th, 2016 at 2:00pm in room 250 Miller Learning Center.

Tripp is a professor in the Department of Infectious Disease at UGA and currently the Georgia Research Alliance Chair of Animal Health Vaccine Development, and is a GRA Eminent Scholar. His research interests include understanding the mechanisms of immunity and disease pathogenesis associated with respiratory virus infection, and using this information to develop therapeutic protocols and vaccines that will confer long-term protective immunity. He has led a research team in respiratory virus immunology studies at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and currently develops vaccine and therapeutic countermeasures for viral diseases at the Animal Health Research Center at UGA.

The #Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science lecture series is presented by the UGA Biomedical & Health Sciences Institute, the departments of history and cla

ssics, the Georgia Regents University – University of Georgia Medical Partnership, and the Willson Center of Humanities and Art.

#Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science
#Throwback Therapies is an innovative new interdisciplinary seminar series designed to entertain and enlighten any audience with interests in the origins of modern health sciences.

What if we read the New England Journal of Medicine as literature?

What were doctors up to in the time of the Roman Empire?

What does forensic pathology tell us about medical practices during the Civil War?

What prompted families to wait in long lines for polio vaccinations in the last century?

Come and find out! See what happens when historians do medicine and doctors do history in #Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science.

Attention! Do you have research or projects that you are ready to show off to UGA? Then join the Graduate Students and Postdocs in Science (GSPS) for their upcoming sixth annual Research Day.

Research Day is an opportunity for students to present posters and give talks on past, current, and forthcoming research that they are working for the University of Georgia. GSPS will be awarding PRIZES to the best talks and posters according to our judge’s panel of university professors. It is a great experience for students to not only practice their presentation skills, but to also introduce the UGA community to the work that they are doing.

The highlight of Research Day will be a keynote address from Dr. Todd McDevitt, a prominent scientist in the engineering technologies of stem cell research (mcdevitt.gladstone.org).

Research Day will take place on March 28th, 2016. If you are interested in participating, please look out for another announcement which will tell you where and how to submit your abstract.  The GSPS board will then be in touch regarding specifics about the event, so be sure you are on their listserv.

GSPS will also be hosting a social event on 1/28 at Creature Comforts in downtown Athens, and as always, we are available to answer any questions you may have.

Contact GSPS for more information.

Dr. Vivian Nutton presented “Reading Outside the Canon: Some New Thoughts on Medicine in the Time of Galen” on November 2, 2015 as part of the #Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science lecture series.

Here is the video of his presentation: BHSI – YouTube

Vivian Nutton studied Classics at Cambridge University, before becoming a Fellow of Selwyn College, specialising in Ancient History. In 1977 he moved to London where he taught the history of medicine to students at University College and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine until his retirement in 2009. He has been a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and is at present Professor of the History of Medicine and  Culture at the First Moscow State Medical School. Among his many honours he is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the German Academy of Sciences.

#Throwback Therapies is an interdisciplinary seminar series designed to entertain and enlighten any audience with interests in the origins of modern health sciences. This series is sponsored by the Biomedical & Health Sciences Institute, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Department of Classics, Department of History, and the Medical Partnership.

Vivian Nutton will speak on “Reading Outside the Canon: Some New Thoughts on Medicine in the Time of Galen” at 2 p.m. Monday, November 2 in Room 250 of the Zell B. Miller Learning Center. A reception will follow the talk at 3 p.m. in the Miller Learning Center second floor rotunda.

Vivian Nutton studied Classics at Cambridge University, before becoming a Fellow of Selwyn College, specialising in Ancient History. In 1977 he moved to London where he taught the history of medicine to students at University College and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine until his retirement in 2009. He has been a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and is at present Professor of the History of Medicine and  Culture at the First Moscow State Medical School. Among his many honours he is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the German Academy of Sciences.

His publications have covered the history of medicine from the Greeks to the seventeenth century, and their later interpreters. He has edited and translated several works of Galen, and his Ancient Medicineappeared in a second edition in 2012. He has been involved recently with the publication of medical papyri from Oxyrhynchus, 2015, and with editing two sets of notes made to his own books by the renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius, 2012, 2015. He is at present engaged in an annotated translation of Vesalius’Institutiones anatomicae and in preparing a selection of essays on Renaissance medicine.

Nutton will speak as part of #Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science, a seminar series presented by the Biomedical & Health Sciences Institute, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Department of Classics, Department of History, and the Medical Partnership.

A reception will follow the talk at 3 p.m. in the Miller Learning Center second floor rotunda.

Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science

Throwback Therapies is an innovative new interdisciplinary seminar series designed to entertain and enlighten any audience with interests in the origins of modern health sciences.

What if we read the New England Journal of Medicine as literature?

What were doctors up to in the time of the Roman Empire?

What does forensic pathology tell us about medical practices during the Civil War?

What prompted families to wait in long lines for polio vaccinations in the last century?

Come and find out! See what happens when historians do medicine and doctors do history in #Throwback Therapies: History of Medical Science.

Paul Katz presents “The Evolution of Swimming Behaviors and their Neural Circuits in Nudibranch Sea Slugs” 

Dr. Fagan presents “Angiogenesis as a target for recovery after stroke”

Dr. Kissinger presents “Drowning in Data Yet Unable to Find What You Need?  Data Challenges for the 21st Century Health Researcher” on April 15, 2015 at 1:00pm in the Coverdell Center, Room 175 (Reception to follow).

Dr. Kissinger is the joint-Director of the Eukaryotic Pathogen Database (EuPathDB.org) and Co-PI of the Malaria Host-Pathogen Interaction Center (MaHPIC). She has been building database repositories for the sharing and mining of data related to Human and veterinary pathogens for 15 years. She combines studies of Human-computer interactions with real-world researcher needs to help design solutions that are both intuitive and useful to those working on the front line with pathogens and their hosts.

Sponsored by: University of Georgia Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute

onehealth.uga.edu | Follow OneHealth on Twitter @OneHealth_UGA

Dr. Hajduk and Tony Szempruch presents, “Extracellular Vesicle-Mediated Cellular Communication: Its role in virulence propagation and pathology of African Trypanosomes” on March 18, 2015 at 1:00pm in the Coverdell Center, Room 175 (Reception to follow).

Dr. Hajduk received his B.S. from the University of Georgia and his Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow, UK. He was a NATO and EMBO visiting scholar at the University of Amsterdam and a Rockefeller Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. He was on the faculty in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics at

the University of Alabama at Birmingham from 1983-2002 and at the Marine Biological Laboratory as a Senior Scientist and founding Director of the Global Infectious Disease Program and Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology at Brown University (2002-06). Appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at University of Georgia in 2006 he is a Fogarty International Scholar, a Burroughs Wellcome Scholar in Molecular Parasitology and a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology.

Dr. Hajduk’s laboratory studies the molecular and biochemical basis of parasitic diseases. His lab is currently investigating several basic molecular pathways in African trypanosomes. These include RNA editing, mitochondrial biogenesis, developmental control of gene expression and mechanisms of cell communication. In addition, his lab is studying human innate immunity to trypanosomes and the mechanisms used by the parasites to infect humans

Tony Szempruch completed his undergraduate degree in microbiology at North Carolina State University. He joined the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UGA in 2010 to work with Dr. Stephen Hajduk on mitochondrial RNA editing and molecular mechanisms of protein diversity in Trypanosoma brucei. His research on these processes has resulted in the identification of a novel mechanism for cellular communication and host cell remodeling used by T. brucei.

Sponsored by: University of Georgia Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute

onehealth.uga.edu | Follow OneHealth on Twitter @OneHealth_UGA

Athens, Ga. – On top of the many reasons to hit the gym, working out may also improve the ability to persevere through hard times. In a series of recent experiments, neuroscientists at the University of Georgia have begun to unravel the link between long-term stress resilience and exercise.

The study, published in the February edition of the journal Neuropharmacology, reveals that a neuropeptide called galanin is a necessary piece of the puzzle. Researchers demonstrated, in an animal model, that galanin protects neurons from degeneration caused by stress. When rats exercised, and galanin was blocked, the rats were as anxious as if they hadn’t exercised at all. Researchers also showed that galanin reverses the negative effects of stress among sedentary rats. The anatomical evidence suggests that galanin contributes to stress resilience by preserving synaptic plasticity, or the way neural connections are strengthened or weakened over time.

“We were able to show that stress, just a single exposure to stress, caused a decrease in synapse formation,” said Philip Holmes, the study’s principal investigator and a professor of psychology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Holmes also chairs the Neuroscience Program of the Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute. “The hypothesis was that maybe what galanin is doing, and what exercise is doing, is maintaining neuroplasticity in the prefrontal cortex.”

The prefrontal cortex is responsible for complex cognitive behavior such as planning, decision-making, emotion regulation and stress resilience. Interestingly, said Holmes, this region of the brain atrophies during depression. To measure synapse formation, Holmes’ lab counted dendritic spines on neurons in the prefrontal cortex. If dendrites are a neuron’s branches, then these subcellular structures are the twigs on those branches.

“Dendritic spines change dynamically with experience,” said Natale Sciolino, the paper’s first author. Counting dendritic spines enabled Sciolino to look at what she calls “an important anatomical basis of plasticity, or the brain’s ability to change.”

Sciolino was finishing her Ph.D. at the time of the experiment and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. When Sciolino found fewer dendritic spines on the neurons of sedentary rats than in the ones that exercised or were given shots of galanin, she knew the lab had discovered something significant.

The team used mild foot shocks and a plus-shaped maze to measure anxiety-like behavior in the rats. Stressed rats that exercised or received galanin were more willing

to explore the maze, a sign of resilience. Stressed sedentary rats, however, did not want to explore. In one experiment, researchers gave rats that exercised a drug to prevent the action of galanin, and these rats stayed put as often as the sedentary group.

“We found this protective effect of exercise, but we could block it with the galanin antagonist, so that was really exciting because that told us that galanin was necessary for the beneficial effects of exercise,” said Holmes. “That’s really the key experiment.”

Holmes and Sciolino established a positive relationship between exercise and stress resilience in previous research at UGA. Their 2012 paper showed that exercise increases galanin levels in a key region of the brain that handles stress. The current study aimed to combine these findings into one well-defined and comprehensive model.

“We know increasingly the evidence is pointing to some sort of deficit in neuroplasticity as being the most important process in stress-related disorders like depression and anxiety,” Holmes said.

Sciolino began investigating the connection between exercise and galanin after Holmes and David Weinshenker, a professor of human genetics at Emory University, received a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse for addiction research in 2010.

“We know that stress is the most common cause of relapse in people with drug dependence, and we were able to show that either exercise or galanin decreased relapse-like behavior in rats given cocaine, so the ability of exercise-induced galanin to reduce stress makes sense,” Weinshenker said.

Sciolino said the big picture implication of this research is that we can harness the benefit of exercise because we understand the mechanism. The field of neuroscience has only begun to appreciate the magnitude of galanin’s effect on the brain.

“We’re the only lab that’s looking at that connection between galanin and exercise,” said Holmes. “It’s good and bad-it’s good that we’ve got our own little niche, but it’s bad in that it doesn’t receive enough attention.”

Research reported in this news release was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health awarded to Weinshenker and Holmes under project number DA027535, and a Diversity Supplement awarded to the parent grant for Sciolino. For a full version of the paper in Neuropharmacology, see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25301278.

Athens, Ga. – Researchers at the University of Georgia have identified a previously unknown process that many bacteria, including those that cause disease in humans, use to survive. Their discovery could lead to new therapies for bacterial infections like MRSA and tuberculosis that are resistant to current antibiotic treatments.

Their discovery centers on the ways in which bacteria use an iron compound known as heme. Most commonly recognized as a fundamental component of hemoglobin—the red pigment in blood responsible for the transportation of oxygen—heme also provides some of the essential nutrition that bacteria require to grow within a host.

“We found an enzyme that only gram-positive bacteria have, and they use this enzyme in a unique way to make heme,” said Harry Dailey, professor of microbiology and lead author of the paper describing their discovery in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Heme is essential for these organisms; they have to make heme, so if we can find a way to disrupt this process, the bacteria would die.”

More than 2 million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics each year in the U.S., and at least 23,000 people die as a direct result of these infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The enzyme discovered in Dailey’s lab could serve as an attractive target for the next generation of antibacterial drugs, and his laboratory is partnered with other institutions

to explore the development of new therapeutics.

“One of the great things about this enzyme in terms of treatment is that it is only found in gram positive bacteria-it’s not found anywhere else,” said Dailey, who is also director of UGA’s Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute. “So if you target the enzyme with a therapeutic, you won’t damage any of the other essential mechanisms that we need to remain healthy.”

Their discovery also challenges some of the established scientific literature related to the production of heme, which has remained largely unchanged for decades.

“We are obviously very excited about the potential medical applications related to this enzyme, but our experiments also tell us a lot about the evolutionary history driving the behavior of organisms we study every day,” Dailey said. “We have assumed for more than 50 years that we understood these pathways well, but it may not be as clear cut as we once thought.”

For a version of the paper as it appeared in PNAS, see http://www.pnas.org/content/112/7/2210.abstract.

The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health under grant numbers DK096051, DK020503 and DK083909.

UGA Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute
The University of Georgia Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute facilitates and promotes interdisciplinary research and instructional efforts throughout UGA. With divisions focusing on neuroscience, basic and translational biomedical science and the One Health initiative, researchers in the institute support graduate degree programs and cooperative research projects designed to solve the most fundamental problems in the fields of biomedical and health sciences. For more information about the institute, see biomed.uga.edu.