Two adults were transported to Northwestern Memorial Hospital and two were transported to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, all in serious condition, Fire Media spokesman Joseph Roccasalva said.

Two more adults were transported to Mercy Hospital and Medical Center in “stable” condition, he said.

The crash happened near the intersection of Lake Shore Drive and McFetridge Drive about 2 p.m.

The cause of the crash was still under investigation Friday afternoon, Roccasalva said.

Read the original article from WBBM News Radio.

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Two people were injured Wednesday night during an electrical explosion at a factory in Bedford Park.

The explosion happened about 9:30 p.m. at a Archer Wire Intl. Corp., a metal work company, at 7300 Narragansett Ave., Bedford Park Assistant Chief Jeff Clohessy said.

A person at the plant notified officials about the electrical incident, Clohessy said.

One person was taken to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood and the other was taken to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Clohessy said. The victims’ conditions were not known.

The plant sustained very little damage, Clohessy said.

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A Chicago police officer was killed this morning when the squad car he was driving crashed into a tree in Chicago’s Uptown community.

A police squad car crashed into a tree at 5:06 a.m. in the 4100 block of North Lake Shore Drive, police said.

The officer was taken to Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead about 7:30 a.m., police said.

The cause of the crash was under investigation.

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A North Shore doctor who treated victims of the Haitian earthquake said the experience was both exhilarating and humbling.

Comparing his work in Haiti to battlefield surgery, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Michael Jacker has returned home with a sense of hope for those he helped, and a sense of sadness for those he couldn’t.

On staff at Advocate Condell Medical Center and Lake Forest and Northwest Community hospitals, Jacker recently returned from a seven-day volunteer stint in Port-au-Prince.

“When I heard the first radio reports, I knew immediately there would be a huge number of fracture and crush injuries,” said Jacker, 56. “I wanted to be there to help.”

He searched the Web for relief agencies, eventually finding California-based Airline Ambassadors International. Airline Ambassadors began in 1992 as a network of airline employees using their travel privileges to take trips for humanitarian projects.

Not knowing when he might return, Jacker packed plenty of clothes, a water filtration kit, mosquito net and protein bars. He flew out of O’Hare Airport at 2:30 a.m. on Jan. 29.

“It was a powerful moment for me,” Jacker said. “I knew I had to do this.”

Arriving in Port-au-Prince, he made his way to a private hospital that withstood the force of the quake. Hospital staff fled in the early days of the disaster and the place was being run by French and American medical teams.

Hundreds of injured were arriving daily.

“The most common injuries were open fractures with exposed bones. Many were infected and since the injuries were nearly three weeks old, the muscles were starting to atrophy,” Jacker explained. “I saw things I’ve only read about in textbooks.

Many of the arrivals had to be turned away. “If they had hip fractures, we couldn’t do anything for them. We just didn’t have the right hardware.”

In practice for 25 years, the Harvard University and Rush Medical Center of Chicago graduate has extensive experience in emergency trauma treatment. Fluent in French, Jacker said his language skills served him well in Haiti.

Jacker treated dozens of people, many of them children. Some of the treatment involved undoing the work done by other doctors.

“They did the best they could in the first days after the quake, but many of the casts and splints were applied in the wrong ways and needed to be changed,” Jacker said.

Lacking recovery rooms, patients were put in tents in the hospital’s courtyard.

The scene in Port-au-Prince was an assault on the senses, the Highland Park man said.

“The air was dusty, the odor from sewage, garbage and the tens of thousands of corpses still trapped in the rubble was overwhelming,” he said. “The crushed buildings and the tent camps were everywhere.”

Jacker didn’t witness any violence during his weeklong stay. The people still seemed to be in shock.

“They had a vacant look in their eyes. I saw no smiles. They looked as if they were living through a nightmare. Their tents were mostly worthless, bed sheets held up by sticks. I can’t imagine what it will be like when the rainy season comes soon.”

Jacker said being a doctor in that situation was unlike anything he’s experienced in the states.

“This was pure medicine,” he said. “No insurance forms, no malpractice worries, no paperwork. It was completely rewarding. I never felt tired, never felt exhausted.”

Read the original article on DailyHerald.com.

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That process is already gaining traction at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology (IGSB), where researchers are one year into a three-year project to collect and analyze the genetic sequence and variations of every gene expressed by 1,000 tumors.

Over the past year, working closely with physicians, the IGSB team collected complete sequence data for genes expressed by 100 tumors — primarily breast cancer, head and neck cancer, and leukemia.

Correlating genetic data with patient outcomes, they have begun to identify genetic patterns within tumors that may help them predict how a cancer will behave.

Many experts believe such information will increasingly guide treatment.

“The long-term goal,” said IGSB Director Kevin White, James and Karen Frank Family Professor in human genetics and ecology and evolution,” is to translate genomic discoveries into useful diagnostic tools and therapeutic strategies. This should improve patient care.”

Not to be confused with the “1,000 Genomes Project” — an international effort to sequence all of the DNA from 1,000 individuals selected from hundreds of distinct populations worldwide — the Chicago 1,000-cancer-genomes project is based entirely at the University of Chicago and tightly focused on the genetics of this common disease.

“The Chicago Cancer Genome Project is aimed at teaching us how to use the genetic state of the cells as a guidepost for which treatments should be offered to specific patients,” White said.

Cancer is a genetic disease. Each tumor’s genes provide clues about the severity of the disease.

They can sometimes predict whether a cancer will respond to specific treatments, develop resistance to radiation or chemotherapy, relapse after therapy, or spread to a distant site.

Many established cancer treatments grew out of genetic information, beginning at the University of Chicago with Elwood Jensen’s discovery of the estrogen receptor in 1958, which led to the development of estrogen blockers such as tamoxifen, and Janet Rowley’s descriptions of the first chromosomal translocations in 1972, work that led to the targeted therapy known as Glevec.

But the Chicago Cancer Genome Project is among the first efforts to combine a focus on the genes expressed by multiple cancers with broad scale, systematic implementation.

During the pilot phase — sequencing expressed genes from the first 100 tumors — the team established and refined a project framework utilizing the latest in gene-sequencing technology and computational analysis.

“We now know how to do this,” said White.

“We have the basic structure in place. In the process, we have identified novel genes associated with clinical outcome in selected cancers.”

The next steps are to determine how these altered genes act and expand the project to include more tumor types, including cancers of the bladder, lung, pancreas, prostate, as well as several childhood cancers such as rhabdosarcomas and neuroblastomas.

Analyzing a wide variety of tumors may reveal previously unknown genetic similarities in cancers typically classified as different according to tissue of origin, White said.

The genetics of cancer can be extraordinarily complex, said Michelle LeBeau, PhD, director of the University of Chicago Cancer Research Center.

“Kevin’s team at the IGSB brings all the right tools,” she said.

“They have the ability to collect and manipulate large amounts of genetic data, the capacity to study not just single genes but entire genetic pathways and their interactions, and a close working relationship with multiple teams of cancer specialists.”

The Chicago approach differs from several large-scale cancer-genome efforts in progress. A year ago a team from Washington University published the first cancer genome, from a patient with leukemia.

Since then, genomes for breast cancer, melanoma and lung cancer have appeared, and the National Cancer Institute is compiling its Cancer Genome Atlas.

Unlike those projects, the Chicago researchers will study only the genes that are expressed by these tumors — one to two percent of an individual’s genome — but will collect genetic data from many more tumors.

“If we eliminate 98 percent of the genome, that makes it 50 times cheaper and easier,” said White.

“That’s still quite a lot of DNA,” he emphasized, the equivalent of 20 entire genomes, or about 60 billion base pairs. Collecting genetic information from 1,000 tumors will take about three years, he said, but it will provide information that “can more rapidly be applied to answer clinical questions.”

The project also will gather genetic data on how the genes expressed by tumors evolve over time.

Whenever possible, the researchers will compare tumor samples taken from a patient before and after treatments, to learn how cancers accumulate additional genetic changes that enable them to resist radiation or chemotherapy or to spread to distant sites.

All patients must provide prior consent for their tissues to be catalogued and studied. Because the researchers are focused on how genetic clues can predict cancer behavior, the team follows each patient’s progress through his or her clinical course.

Most patients have been eager to donate, said cancer specialist Kevin Roggin, MD, assistant professor of surgery, who offers each patient with a pancreatic cancer the opportunity to contribute to a project that could, over time, make a difference in treatment and outcome.

“It is already starting to help,” he added. “We are accumulating data that we hope to develop into a molecular fingerprint, a DNA profile that may help us predict which pancreatic cystic tumors are likely to remain benign and which ones will develop into cancers.”

Donating tumor tissue requires no extra effort or expense for the patient, said Roggin.

“First we make sure we don’t compromise the pathologists’ ability to make a diagnosis.

Second, if there is extra tissue, we flash freeze it to 80 below zero and log it into a database. Then we can store the tissue indefinitely and take what we need to generate DNA and RNA.”

The project meshes well with the Medical Center’s established program in cancer pharmacogenomics, which studies how certain gene variations influence patient responses to various anti-cancer drugs and develops genetic tests to predict side effects.

“By studying both the tumor and the patient we will, increasingly, be able to design optimal treatment strategies that offer the best hope for control of the cancer with the least toxicity for the patient,” said Richard Schilsky, MD, professor of medicine and chief of hematology/oncology at the Medical Center and past president of the American Society for Clinical Oncology.

“It’s a long road from having a piece of genome sequence to improving patient care,” White cautioned. “But the path of discovery is clear. In many cases we know enough now to connect the dots.”

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Securing full approval meant passing rigorous inspections and fulfilling requirements mandated by the Department of Energy as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Select Agent Program.

“The express purpose and specific design of the laboratory is to generate the very best science and technology in a safe, state-of-the-art facility,” said lab director Olaf Schneewind, MD, PhD, professor and chair of microbiology at the University of Chicago and director of the Great Lakes Regional Center of Excellence (GLRCE) for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Research.

“Teams in the laboratory will develop and test drugs, vaccines and diagnostic devices to counter bioterrorism and study emerging infectious diseases,” Schneewind said.

“The lab will also provide the ideal setting for teaching the next generation of young scientists and technicians how to do productive and safe research on infectious disease.”

In 2003, the NIAID, one of the National Institutes of Health, named the University of Chicago as the lead institution for the GLRCE and awarded the Center more than $35 million in research funding.

The Institute also awarded funds to the University to build a regional biocontainment facility at Argonne National Laboratory to support research conducted by the GLRCE.

Additional support from the State of Illinois and other sources contributed to the project.

The Ricketts laboratory will house research on microbial agents that are considered either Risk Group 2 (agents that cause mild to moderate symptoms in humans, but are not life threatening) or Risk Group 3 (agents that have the potential to cause lethal human infections, but have at least one effective treatment).

It will not study microbes from Risk Group 4.

Besides performing research, the GLRCE and the Ricketts Laboratory will act as a regional resource for public health officials, providing expertise, rapid diagnosis, support and advice about containment and treatment in the event of a bioterror event or the emergence of new disease-causing agents.

Small level-3 laboratories already existed at the University and Argonne, but at 54,100 gross square feet, the new laboratory will create a comprehensive, flexible environment enabling researchers to study several different pathogens at the same time.

A primary focus in designing and building the laboratory was safety. A design firm with extensive biosafety experience–Flad & Associates of Madison, Wisc.–created the original plans, in collaboration with the scientific team and in consultation with the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and others, including local public safety sources.

All aspects of the design and construction had to meet stringent guidelines that will protect those who work in the laboratory as well as those who live nearby. Safety features include redundant mechanical systems (ventilation, electrical, and other utilities), controlled air flow, HEPA-filtered exhaust, tightly controlled access to the building, multiple ways to isolate and disinfect specific areas, and many more.

Whenever possible, researchers will use experimental models of the microbes they study.

These have been genetically modified to reduce the likelihood for human transmission and their ability to cause disease.

All laboratory personnel will undergo specific and intensive training and will be closely supervised by scientists who have experience working with these agents.

Operation of the laboratory will be routinely inspected by federal, state and local agencies.

The GLRCE pulls together research teams from 26 institutions in the six states in federally-designated Region V. The research teams will involve more than 300 scientists, said Schneewind, including a core of more than 60 key researchers who specialize in microbiology, infectious diseases, public health, medicine, vaccine research and pharmacology, as well as related disciplines such as biochemistry, computer science, engineering, mathematics and nanotechnology.

The Ricketts Laboratory is named for the University of Chicago’s Howard Taylor Ricketts (1871-1910), who discovered the organisms that cause Rocky Mountain spotted fever and typhus.

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The UHC report focuses on observed-versus-expected mortality. The data show that during this period significantly fewer patients died after undergoing neurosurgical procedures at the Medical Center than the UHC statistical models predict based on the severity of the patients.

During this time, UCMC neurosurgeons performed 429 procedures that were placed into UHC’s product line of Neurosurgery. The UHC models are based on a number of patient factors, including age, race and payer status as well as the nature and severity of their disease, number and type of co-morbid conditions and their admission status.

The models predicted that 18 of those 429 patients would not survive to hospital discharge. Instead, only seven of the 429 succumbed to their illness while in the hospital. This gave the Medical Center an observed-versus-expected mortality rate of 0.37 for the past year, about one-third the predicted rate of 1.0.

The University of Chicago’s neurosurgery’s observed-versus-expected mortality rates have been consistently better than average, according to UHC data, since the final quarter of 2007.

“Our feeling has always been that the neurosurgical care at the Medical Center is amongst the best in the country and it’s gratifying to see that the data confirm that,” said David Frim, MD, PhD, Ralph Cannon Professor and chief of neurosurgery at the University of Chicago.

“This excellence in patient care reflects on the singular training and commitment of the entire neurosurgery section as well as the operating room and neuro-critical care faculty and nurses.”

The neurosurgery program has a long legacy of excellence in the treatment of brain tumors, brain aneurysms and arteriovenous malformations, pediatric and congenital nervous system disease, and functional nervous system problems such as epilepsy and movement disorders.

The University HealthSystem Consortium, based in Oak Brook, Illinois, is an alliance of 104 academic medical centers and 220 of their affiliated hospitals representing approximately 90 percent of the nation’s non-profit academic medical centers.

It collects and shares comparative data on clinical outcomes as well as operational, financial and patient safety best practices. UHC’s benchmarking studies are used to detect trends, draw attention to quality outliers, and identify top performers.

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Shohei Koide, PhD, Associate Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, won an NIH Transformative R01 (T-R01) Award, which comes with a 5-year, $2.8 million grant, to develop an innovative protein-capture technology with high levels of fidelity and predictability.

“Our work represents a paradigm shift in protein-capture reagents, which are essential for delineating the molecular mechanisms of diseases, detecting and characterizing cellular abnormalities, and characterizing the biological effects of drugs,” Koide said.

Protein-capture reagents are molecules (most often antibodies) that allow researchers to detect and/or isolate proteins in a sample.

Because human cells contain tens of thousands of different kinds of proteins, and bacteria and viruses have their own sets of proteins, there are millions of proteins in nature.

To be useful, protein-capture reagents must be able to catch miniscule amounts of the protein of interest–but not others. In addition to high selectivity and sensitivity to the target molecule, a protein-capture reagent should be easy to generate and handle.

“The current shortage of high-quality protein-capture reagents presents a major bottleneck in many areas of biomedical sciences,” Koide said. “This project will establish a new approach to generating protein-capture reagents that are high performance and easy to produce. It will fill a major void in available molecular tools and impact virtually all areas of molecular biomedical science, medical diagnosis and drug development.”

Each protein molecule is comprised of hundreds of 20 different amino-acid building blocks that are connected one after another in the order programmed by the genome.

Koide’s new technology, called C-clamping, aims to develop reagents that find the right protein by reading only the last eight letters of the protein sequence.

“The term, C-clamp, comes from the protein tail, which is called a C-terminus,” Koide said. “Each protein has a tail, and virtually every protein has a unique combination of amino acids within this short tail that can be distinguished with high efficiency by C-clamping.

In contrast, currently available protein-capture reagents try to read the entire protein sequence so they are overwhelmed by the long sequences.

“Our proof-of-concept experiments have been successful, and C-clamping has enormous potential,” he added.

The T-R01 Award is a new part of the NIH Common Fund’s Roadmap for Medical Research program enacted by Congress in 2006. The other Roadmap for Medical Research Awards are the Pioneer Award and the New Innovator Award.

The T-R01 Award provides a new opportunity for scientists that is unmatched by any other NIH program. Since the funding limit is so high (up to $25 million for five years) and preliminary results are not required, scientists are free to propose bold ideas that may require significant resources to pursue.

This year, NIH awarded 42 T-R01 Awards totaling $30 million.

“Competition for the awards was fierce, and standards were very high,” Collins said. “These projects tend to be inherently risky, but if successful can profoundly impact a broad area of biomedical research.”

MEDIA CONTACT:

Greg Borzo, 773-795-0892
greg.borzo@uchospitals.edu

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The work shows–for the first time–that social isolation is associated with altered gene expression in mouse mammary glands, and that these changes are accompanied by larger tumors.

“This interdisciplinary research illustrates that the social environment, and a social animal’s response to that environment, can indeed alter the level of gene expression in a wide variety of tissues, not only the brain,” said Suzanne D. Conzen, MD, associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and senior author of the study, to be published on Sept. 30, 2009, in Cancer Prevention Research. “This is a novel finding and may begin to explain how the environment affects human susceptibility to other chronic diseases such as central obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, etc.”

The research began six years ago when cancer specialist Conzen joined forces with biobehavioral psychologist Martha McClintock, PhD, professor of psychology and founder of the Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago, who has long been interested in the result of social isolation in aging, to study behavior and cancer in a mouse model.

The University of Chicago scientists took mice that were genetically predisposed to develop mammary gland (breast) cancer and raised them in two environments: in groups of mice and isolated.

After the same amount of time, the isolated mice grew larger mammary gland tumors. They were also found to have developed a disrupted stress hormone response.

“I doubted there would be a difference in the growth of the tumors in such a strong model of genetically inherited cancer simply based on chronic stress in their environments, so I was surprised to see a clear, measurable difference both in mammary gland tumor growth and interestingly in accompanying behavior and stress hormone levels,” Conzen said.

The researchers then turned their attention to how the chronic social environment affected the biology of cancer growth. In other words, they sought to discover the precise molecular consequences of the stressful environment.

To do this, they studied gene expression in the mouse mammary tissue over time. Conzen and her colleagues found altered expression levels of metabolic pathway genes (which are expected to favor increased tumor growth) in the isolated mice. This was the case even before tumor size differences were measurable.

These altered gene expression patterns suggest potential molecular biomarkers and/or targets for preventive intervention in human breast cancer.

“Given the increased knowledge of the human genome, we can begin to identify and analyze the specific alterations that take place in caner-prone tissues of individuals living in at-risk environments,” Conzen said. “That will help us to better understand and implement cancer prevention strategies.”

These findings do suggest novel targets for chemoprevention, according to Caryn Lerman, PhD, Scientific Director of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and Deputy Editor of Cancer Prevention Research. “Future studies should evaluate whether these molecular processes can be reversed by chemopreventive agents.”

The findings also support previous epidemiologic studies suggesting that social isolation increases the mortality of chronic diseases, as well as clinical studies revealing that social support improves the outcomes of cancer patients.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health Centers for Population Health and Human Disparities; the University of Chicago Cancer Center’s Women’s Auxiliary Board; and the University of Chicago Cancer Center.

The paper is titled “A Model of Gene-Environment Interaction Reveals Altered Mammary Gland Gene Expression and Increased Tumor Growth following Social Isolation,” and Cancer Prevention Research is published by the American Association for Cancer Research.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Greg Borzo, 773-795-0892
greg.borzo@uchospitals.edu

University of Chicago Medical Center Researchers Determine Negative Social Isolation Worsens Cancer | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.