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The School of Medicine News spotlights a recently published faculty research paper in each issue. The goals are to highlight the great research happening at OHSU and to share this information across departments, institutes and disciplines.


April Paper

Discovery of a therapeutic target in Fanconi anemia

blood42312Fanconi anemia is a rare inherited disease that predisposes children and adults to the development of bone marrow failure, leukemia and cancer. Genetically, the disease results from the inheritance of mutant forms of any given Fanconi gene, of which there are at least fifteen. The disease has an incidence of 1 per 350,000 births.

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March Paper

Novel Scaffold-Based Vaccine for HIV-1 Looks Promising

plosone32912According to estimates from UNICEF around 30.6 million adults and 3.4 million children under 15 years were living with HIV at the end of 2010. With no cure on the horizon, HIV vaccines are desperately needed to stem the tide of spread of HIV-1 and the devastation of AIDS worldwide.

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February Paper

Toward a better understanding of cilia and flagella function

CytoskeletonThis month's featured paper is from the Daniel Carr lab, and is titled, Loss of ASP but Not ROPN1 Reduces Mammalian Ciliary Motility.

Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a rare genetic disease characterized by abnormal ciliary motion and impaired mucociliary clearance.


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November Paper

Crippled cytomegalovirus continues to provoke the immune system

plos-path-cover121211This month's featured paper is from the Hill lab, and is titled, Sustained CD8+ T Cell Memory Inflation after Infection. It was published in PLoS Pathogens.

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a common virus in the herpesvirus family that establishes lifelong infection in at least 50 percent of Americans. Although CMV causes disease in people with impaired immunity, the vast majority of infected people have no symptoms from this harmless virus..

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October Paper

Anti-rejection drugs and hypertension

Nature MedicineThis month's featured paper is titled "The calcineurin inhibitor tacrolimus activates the renal sodium chloride cotransporter to cause hypertension."  


The calcineurin inhibiting drugs (CNIs) cyclosporine and tacrolimus revolutionized organ transplantation, and are now standard components of nearly all anti-rejection regimens. Unfortunately, these drugs have substantial complications, including kidney failure, that complicate their use.

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September Paper

Determinants of the HIV-1 core assembly pathway

Journal VirologyThis month's featured paper is titled “Determinants of the HIV-1 core assembly pathway.” It was published in the journal Virology. The research in this paper was conducted as part of an investigative collaboration in the Barklis Lab at OHSU.*

Despite great advances in AIDS diagnosis and treatment, the United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) reported that by the end of 2009, 33.3 million people were living with AIDS, 4.1 million people became newly infected, and 2.8 million had died.

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August Paper

MS-like disease in macaques

annals_journalThis month's featured paper is from Annals of Neurology and is titled “Japanese macaque encephalomyelitis: A spontaneous multiple sclerosis-like disease in a nonhuman primate.” Research in this paper was conducted as part of an investigative collaboration at OHSU.*

Japanese macaque encephalomyelitis (JME) is a spontaneous disease in a nonhuman primate that has similarities with multiple sclerosis (MS) and is associated with a novel simian herpesvirus. The disease is characterized clinically by paresis of one or more limbs, ataxia, or ocular motor paresis..

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June/July Paper

A mystery of the ear solved

Nature NeuroscienceThis month's featured paper is from Nature Neuroscience, and is titled “A differentially amplified motion in the ear for near-threshold sound detection.”

This research was conducted as part of an investigative collaboration, and includes members of the OHSU Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Dermatology, the Oregon Hearing Research Center, and other institutions in the United States, Sweden and China. The researchers include Fangyi Chen, PhD, Dingjun Zha, MD, PhD, Anders Fridberger, MD, PhD, Jiefu Zheng, MD, PhD, Niloy Choudhury, PhD, Steven Jacques, PhD, Ruikang Wang, PhD, Xiaorui Shi, MD, PhD, & Alfred Nuttall, PhD.*

The ear is a remarkably sensitive sensory system. Inside the inner ear, faint sounds cause motions that are as small as the diameter of a hydrogen atom – around 1/10th of a billionth of a meter. These invisible motions have intrigued scientists for decades.

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May Paper

The Structure of Lombricine Kinased

JBC coverThis month's featured paper is from the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and is titled "The Structure of Lombricine Kinase: Implications for phosphagen kinase conformational changes."

This research was conducted as part of an investigative collaboration, and included the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology's Olga Kirillova, PhD, Omar Davulcu, PhD, Qing Xie, PhD, Michael Chapman, PhD, and colleagues.*

Creatine kinase is the enzyme charged with maintaining steady concentrations of our cellular energy currency, adenosine triphosphate or ATP. It does this by catalyzing the transfer of a phosphate group to and from creatine, a dietary supplement that athletes hope will enhance their ability to respond to bursts of activity. Medically, creatine kinase levels are measured in the clinical diagnosis of recent heart attack and stroke, because its physiological role requires large amounts of the enzyme in the heart and brain, and its release from damaged cells can be detected in serum.

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