Minnesota Medical Foundation

A centerpiece for the Biomedical Discovery District

2013-06-18T13:38:17Z

New research building opens its doors to the public

The University of Minnesota revealed another 280,000 square feet of state-of-the-art space on June 14 at a grand opening celebration for its Cancer and Cardiovascular Research Building.

The building is the fifth facility in the University’s Biomedical Discovery District (BDD), located behind TCF Bank Stadium on the East Bank, and the first research building on campus that’s open to the public. The BDD is the single largest expansion of the University campus since the West Bank was built 50 years ago.

The new Cancer and Cardiovascular Research Building will house research on the role of chemical carcinogens in causing cancer, new cancer treatment models, and various studies on the heart and cardiovascular system.

The grand opening attracted a crowd to this highly sophisticated complex for a peek into the labs that will someday be home to significant discoveries.

University President Eric Kaler, Ph.D., asserted his confidence that this leading-edge research space will boost the institution’s level of excellence in the health sciences, and he thanked the district’s many benefactors for making it possible.

“Philanthropy is what you need to go from good to great, and great is what we have here at the Biomedical Discovery District,” Kaler said at the event.

In addition to facilitating medical advances that lead to new cures and treatments, the BDD is expected to attract up to $40 million in new annual research funding.

Researchers from the Masonic Cancer Center and Lillehei Heart Institute will begin moving into the Cancer and Cardiovascular Research Building later this summer.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Innovators at Heart

2013-06-11T15:14:32Z

Spring 2013

Clean-up duty

University team creates a novel ‘calcium sponge’ to help erase one of the country’s leading causes of heart failure

Scientist Joseph Metzger, Ph.D., and his colleagues have developed a way to give a dysfunctional heart new instructions.

A state-of-the-art place for collaboration

By midsummer, University of Minnesota scientists engaged in cancer and cardiovascular research will be settling into their new building across from TCF Bank Stadium. Conceived as the gateway to the University’s burgeoning Biomedical Discovery District (BDD), the Cancer and Cardiovascular Research Building will not only house researchers, it will also welcome passersby inside to see firsthand the impact of the research being done throughout the BDD.

Muscular dystrophy researcher gets significant new funding from a company seeking the best

The company MyDirectives.com made a multiyear gift commitment to help kick-start a University research project focused on finding a new therapy for limb-girdle muscular dystrophy type 2A.

A family’s legacy

Kaye Lillehei knew she was making a good investment in 2000 when she committed $13 million to the University of Minnesota to create the Lillehei Heart Institute. So when the longtime University advocate and volunteer died in November at age 91, her family felt it was only right to make a gift to the University in her honor.

About Innovators at Heart

Innovators at Heart is published by the University of Minnesota Foundation. Reader comments and suggestions are welcome. Contact the editor directly at 612-626-1941 or nendres@umn.edu.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

A family's legacy

2013-06-10T18:27:12Z

Katherine “Kaye” Lillehei believed in spending money wisely.

A longtime coupon clipper who hesitated to throw anything away, Lillehei knew she was making a good investment when she committed $13 million to create the Lillehei Heart Institute (LHI) and $3 million to create the Katherine R. and C. Walton Lillehei Endowed Chair in Nursing Leadership at the University of Minnesota in 2000. It was the largest gift in University history at the time.

Kaye Lillehei, a University-educated nurse, was married to University alumnus and surgeon C. Walton Lillehei, M.D., Ph.D.—known to many as “the father of open-heart surgery.”

After Walt died in 1999, Kaye wanted to do something significant to support the University and honor its strong tradition of research and innovation as well as to educate the next generation of nurses and doctors.

“She supported the University for her entire life,” says grandson Troy Loken. And by giving to medical efforts at the University, she felt that “you’re not just supporting a hospital, you’re supporting a teaching hospital,” Loken says.

Kaye Lillehei died in November at age 91. Her family felt it was only right to honor her by making a gift to the University. In addition to the Lillehei Family Foundation’s $50,000 gift, the LHI received another 32 gifts in her memory totaling more than $17,000.

To make a gift to the Lillehei Heart Institute in Kaye Lillehei’s honor, visit: www.give.umn.edu/giveto/lhi

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Muscular dystrophy researcher gets significant new funding from a company seeking the best

2013-06-10T18:19:43Z

Rita Perlingeiro, Ph.D., fields tough emails and phone calls every week—wrenching, emotional communications from the parents of children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (MD), from relatives of adults with the limb-girdle form of MD, from friends anxious to know when the cure for MD is coming.

“I feel a lot of pressure,” admits Perlingeiro, a University of Minnesota scientist who has been focused on the use of stem cells to regenerate skeletal muscle tissue for almost a decade. “You want to give people hope that there’s a breakthrough coming, but you also don’t want to give them the impression that it’s coming tomorrow.”

Earlier this year, though, she got a much different sort of email: The CEO of MyDirectives.com didn’t ask “when,” but rather “what” Perlingeiro needed to move her research forward.

“We are focused 24/7 on the success of our new business,” says Jeff Zucker, cofounder of MyDirectives.com, a free medical directives registry. “But when someone in our business family was diagnosed with a rare form of MD, we went into overdrive to find the most innovative researchers in the field. We discovered that Rita’s research was so unique [that] it just might yield extraordinary results.”

Shortly after meeting with Perlingeiro to learn more about her work, the MyDirectives.com team made a significant, multiyear gift commitment to help kick Perlingeiro’s research on limb-girdle muscular dystrophy type 2A into high gear.

Perlingeiro’s research has already shown that, using skin cells, scientists can make muscle cells that have improved function in mice with MD. But will it work in humans? That’s the next step.

Perlingeiro says she feels honored to have received support from MyDirectives.com. The gift will allow her lab to undertake an innovative project involving skin cells reprogrammed to become stem cells, genetic correction, and the regenerative potential of the resulting skeletal muscle cells.

“Rita’s passion is contagious, and her belief that there is an answer for MD in the reprogramming of stem cells makes perfect sense,” says Zucker. “We’re thrilled to know that our gift might help find that answer.”

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

A state-of-the-art place for collaboration

2013-06-10T18:11:54Z

By midsummer, University of Minnesota scientists engaged in cancer and cardiovascular research will be settling into their new building across from TCF Bank Stadium.

Conceived as the gateway to the University’s burgeoning Biomedical Discovery District (BDD), the Cancer and Cardiovascular Research Building will not only house researchers, it will also welcome passersby inside to see firsthand the impact of the research being done throughout the BDD.

“The new building allows us to expand the footprint for cardiovascular science and medicine,” says Daniel Garry, M.D., Ph.D., executive director of the Lillehei Heart Institute, which will be housed primarily in the facility. “It’s a terrific opportunity for investigators who share common goals and use similar technologies and equipment to come together under one roof.”

“This new, world-class facility will help us recruit top researchers working on heart disease, diabetes, and a range of other illnesses,” adds Joseph Metzger, Ph.D., whose lab also will move into the building.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Clean-up duty

2013-06-10T17:57:38Z

University team creates a novel ‘calcium sponge’ to help erase one of the country’s leading causes of heart failure

Imagine your heart muscle as a tiny symphony orchestra. Led by a conductor, that heart-muscle orchestra squeezes and relaxes, about one beat per second, in a never-ending tempo. For most of us, the conductor leads the orchestra so well that we never stop to appreciate the wonder of it as our hearts beat on, 100,000 times a day, 35 million times a year.

Joseph Metzger, Ph.D., head of the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology in the University of Minnesota Medical School, uses the orchestra analogy to explain not just how the heart muscle works, but to help nonscientists make sense of his recent research.

“We’re focused on understanding how the heart muscle works,” says Metzger, referring to his laboratory staff of 18 investigators engaged in molecular cardiovascular research. “It’s a journey of understanding that begins at the level of the gene.”

As he explains, the “conductor” of the heartbeat is calcium, which ebbs and flows as the heart works. Calcium levels shoot up when the heart contracts, then drop sharply as it relaxes. Specialized proteins respond to the calcium levels, prompting the heart’s squeezing-contracting rhythm.

But as hearts age or are weakened by disease, calcium levels may not drop as they should when the heart muscle relaxes. Like the orchestra hanging onto a note too long, the calcium lingers, interfering with the signal to the protein that prompts the “relax” half of the heartbeat.

“Although the squeezing action is normal,” Metzger explains, “the relaxation becomes dysfunctional. This is called diastolic heart failure, and it’s a growing medical problem in the developed world.”

In fact, the problem is huge: Heart failure is the leading cause of hospitalizations in the United States—and the leading cause of death. Diastolic heart failure, for which doctors currently have no therapies, afflicts about half of all heart patients.

“For this type of heart failure, where calcium languishes in the heart cells, we’ve been working on how modify the signal, how to ‘sop up’ that extra calcium as the heart relaxes,” says Metzger.

That’s where Metzger’s so-called “calcium sponge” enters the picture. In February, the preeminent science journal Nature Medicine published Metzger’s paper that details his team’s discovery: a way to modify the blueprints for the body’s calcium buffers, giving the heart muscle new instructions.

“Our understanding of diastolic heart failure has been limited,” says Daniel Garry, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the Cardiovascular Division in the Department of Medicine. “Joe’s work has given us quite a lot of new information [and] has, in effect, established a launching pad for developing new medications that could impact calcium levels in the heart.”

Metzger’s team has introduced its calcium sponge into mice that model diastolic heart failure, and the sponge has successfully corrected their calcium malfunction.

“The leap from lab animals to humans is not trivial,” cautions Metzger, “but if it’s possible to modify the calcium level in a mouse, whose heart beats 700 times per minute, then it seems promising that we could do it in a human heart that beats 10 times more slowly.”

To find out how you can support this work, contact Amanda Storm Schuster at 612-626-2475 or aschuste@umn.edu.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Restoring sight and movement

2013-06-04T16:15:00Z

Anonymous gift targets cures for macular degeneration and spinal cord injuries

She had $10 million to give and knew what she wanted from it: no frills, no fuss, no recognition—just a cure for macular degeneration and a way to repair spinal cord injuries.

So she’s throwing her support behind two research efforts at the University of Minnesota by creating endowments through her estate plans—$8 million for macular degeneration research in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Neurosciences and $2 million for stem cell research focused on repairing the spinal cord after injury.

The donor has supported both areas of research in the past with smaller amounts. But now, after having built trust in the researchers, she’s giving their projects a major vote of confidence.

The University has a proven track record of translating promising laboratory breakthroughs into new treatments for patients through its constellation of experts, facilities, and technologies. It’s a longtime leader in stem cell therapies, too, having performed the world’s first bone marrow transplant (a type of stem cell therapy) in 1968.

So what better place to pursue the next generation of cures?

Repairing vision — together

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of vision loss in older adults, according to the National Eye Institute. People with AMD see a dark, blurry spot at the center of their field of vision, making everyday activities like reading, driving, and recognizing faces difficult.

There’s no known cure for AMD, which gets progressively worse. But University researchers hope to change that. Under the direction of Erik van Kuijk, M.D., Ph.D., head of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Neurosciences, a multidisciplinary team of ophthalmologists, biochemists, neuroscientists, immunologists, electrophysiologists, and imaging experts is tackling this enormous task in partnership with the Stem Cell Institute.

For starters, scientist Deborah Ferrington, Ph.D., is testing several promising compounds to learn whether they can prevent AMD from worsening or possibly even prevent the disease altogether. The anonymous donor gave $150,000 earlier this year to jump-start the work.

The most successful compounds will later be tested in mice that model human AMD, and eventually the best option(s) will be refined and studied in people who have AMD.

The Minnesota Lions Eye Bank at the University has been a huge asset to Ferrington’s work, she says. While most eye banks use the corneas from deceased donors’ eyes for sight-restoring transplants and discard the rest of the tissue, in Minnesota, that excess tissue is saved for macular degeneration research.

“I know of only a handful of eye banks that are set up to do this,” Ferrington says.

Ultimately, there’s a good chance that stem cell therapies might contribute to regenerating the parts of the eye damaged by AMD, van Kuijk says.

Get moving again

While AMD typically affects older adults, most people who suffer traumatic spinal cord injuries are under 30 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were about 200,000 people in the United States living with spinal cord injuries as of 2010, and 12,000 to 20,000 more people suffer these injuries every year.

University neurosurgeon Ann Parr, M.D., Ph.D., and her lab team are steadily working toward a clinical therapy for people who have spinal cord injuries by using human skin cells to create oligodendrocytes, cells that form the myelin that insulates the nerves, brain, and spinal cord.

Myelin is lost after injury, Parr says, but the neurons can still be preserved. The theory is that oligodendrocytes could be given back to patients to restore myelin, allowing the nerves to function again.

Parr’s team is in the process of proving that theory true. With a previous gift of $1 million from the same anonymous donor, Parr used mouse skin cells to make oligodendrocytes and then transplanted those cells into rats to see if their bodies could make myelin. Indeed they could, Parr’s lab tests have shown. (The team is also doing similar experiments using oligodendrocytes from human skin cells.) Additional studies will evaluate whether the rats’ mobility improves as well.

Using it wisely

Neither Parr nor van Kuijk—nor anyone on their research teams—knows who the anonymous donor is. But as they pursue answers in their labs, they’re thinking about the best ways to use her money as she intended.

From a practical standpoint, the endowments the donor is creating provide a permanent and sustained source of funding for the research.

“What we need to do on the other end is make sure that the science we do continues to be rigorous,” van Kuijk says.

And from a personal standpoint, being in charge of a research project specifically selected by a donor comes with a special responsibility, Parr says.

“It’s an honor to be chosen like that,” she says. “We have certainly done our best to make sure that her donation has the maximum impact.”

By Nicole Endres

To learn more about supporting research in age-related macular degeneration or spinal cord repair, contact Chuck Semrow at 612-624-6313 or csemrow@umn.edu.

Vision obscured

An estimated 1.8 million Americans are affected by age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Amsler grid is used to monitor a person’s central visual field. Normally seen as a regular grid of horizontal and vertical lines, the grid might look like this to someone with AMD.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Anatomy of a gift

2013-06-04T16:14:00Z

Family’s pediatric urology fund relaunches a legacy cut short

When Leo Fung, M.D., died in 2005, his family and colleagues were stunned. As chief of urology at what’s now University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital, Fung was widely considered to be a rising star in the field of pediatric urology. But when stomach pains began plaguing him, doctors discovered that he had angiosarcoma, a rare and highly invasive cancer. Five months later, the successful doctor was dead, leaving behind a wife and three children. He was 42 years old.

“There was such an outpouring of love and support for Leo,” recalls his brother, Richard Fung, a Los Angeles-based attorney. “We wanted to do something to cherish his memory but also to honor all his colleagues and patients who’d donated to his memorial fund.”

Still reeling from their grief over Fung’s abrupt illness and death, the family decided to use the fund to establish a lectureship that would bring in top pediatric urologists to share information with the entire pediatrics department. Seven years later, that lectureship is going strong.

But the Fungs wanted to do more. Prompted by their parents, Shiu-Lam and Sydney Fung—who live in Hong Kong, where they’d raised their children—Richard and his sister, Claire Fisher, M.D., chose to make a larger gift.

With their hearts and their funds committed, the Fung family then faced a bigger decision: what, specifically, would be the best way to ensure that Leo Fung’s legacy would live on in Minnesota? Richard Fung was both surprised and gratified when his brother’s successor, Aseem Shukla, M.D. (now at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia), reached out to learn as much as he could about Leo.

“Even though he’d never met Leo,” says Fung, “he came up with several great ideas for programs that I was sure Leo would have embraced.”

One idea stood out: starting an international training program that would bring doctors from less developed countries to Minnesota, where they could see firsthand the work being done by the University’s world-class pediatric urologists. (Leo had been exploring the same idea before his death.) And thus was born the Leo C. T. Fung, M.D., Pediatric Urology Scholars Program.

The $500,000 gift from the Fung family will enable one doctor each year to come to the University to observe, listen, and learn, and then bring that information back to his or her home base.

“It’s important for us to recognize the vision of the Fung family to direct their gift in this way,” says urology department chair Badrinath Konety, M.D., M.B.A. “There is no pediatric urology specialty in many countries. Many kids just die if they are born with certain genetic abnormalities. With this program, we can help significantly elevate urology care for these kids worldwide.”

When the first doctor-scholar arrives later this year, the extended Fung family plans to be on hand for a launch celebration that honors Leo’s accomplishments.

“Of the many places Leo practiced, he seemed most at home at the University of Minnesota,” says his brother. “So we’re happy to help establish a program that dovetails so perfectly with Leo’s passion for education, for sharing knowledge with doctors in parts of the world where children don’t have access to surgeons like Leo. He would have liked that.”

By Barbara Knox

To learn more about advancing the Leo Fung, M.D., Pediatric Urology Scholars Program or other pediatric global health efforts, contact Courtney Billing at 612-626-1931 or cbilling@umn.edu.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Keeping the Phillips Neighborhood Clinic rolling

2013-06-04T16:13:00Z

It’s a unique but fitting tribute: A new medical cart at the 10-year-old Phillips Neighborhood Clinic (PNC) will bear the names of donors Mary K. and Gary Stern.

For a “pop-up” clinic that’s as nimble as it is vital—the students who run it out of a Minneapolis church basement set the whole thing up and take it down again every Monday and Wednesday—a dedication on wheels makes perfect sense.

“The cart holds the materials we need to treat the patients and to educate the students—our two main missions,” says medical director Brian Sick, M.D. Besides, the old one was in pretty bad shape: “We actually had to carry it.”

The Sterns’ gift—$25,000 to be paid in $2,500 increments over 10 years—will give the clinic an unaccustomed degree of stability, Sick says. “It’s nice to have the comfort of knowing that if a grant doesn’t come through, we won’t need to have those hard conversations about who’s not going to get care.”

A longtime board member of the former Minnesota Medical Foundation, Mary K. Stern served as president of Sit Mutual Funds before retiring in 2000. Gary Stern served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis until his retirement in 2009. They’re numbers people—and one of the key attributes that drew them to the PNC is its cost-effectiveness. The clinic, which handled 2,060 patient visits last year, operates on $45,000 annually.

“It’s such a reasonable approach to medicine. They’re not wasting anything,” Mary K. Stern says.

The Sterns live in the Kenwood area of south Minneapolis, just three miles from the Phillips neighborhood, where more than a third of residents live below the poverty line. “The clinic is in a neighborhood right next to ours, yet in terms of health care disparities, it might as well be another country. It just seemed that anything that’s working to shrink that gap would be a good thing,” Mary K. Stern says.

Her husband agrees. “It really makes a difference on the ground, which is not easy to do. And there are lots of winners—the patients, the students, the neighborhood.” Moreover, he adds, the PNC is a model for student-run clinics in underserved communities nationwide.

The Sterns say they appreciate that the PNC engages not only medical students, but also students in nursing, pharmacy, social work, and other health fields. Starting next year, students from the School of Dentistry will offer dental screenings at the clinic as well. The Sterns’ gift will likely help launch that endeavor, Sick says.

The couple admires how the clinic founders—and the students who continue expanding its reach—refuse to be thwarted by bureaucratic hurdles. “You can conjure up immediately a hundred reasons not to do this. What about malpractice insurance? What about staffing? What about the waiver?” Mary K. Stern says.

Proud grandparents (their four grandkids live nearby) and dog lovers, the Sterns enjoy bicycling and traveling. Both are also active volunteers and philanthropists who support numerous causes and organizations. But the PNC holds a special place in their hearts, and they relish telling its story.

“There isn’t anybody who doesn’t react positively to this,” Mary K. Stern says. “It doesn’t take much to get people committed to this idea.”

Thanks to the Sterns’ help, the Phillips Neighborhood Clinic will have wheels for years to come.

By Susan Maas

PNC by the numbers

The Phillips Neighborhood Clinic not only provides a place for students to get hands-on clinical experience, it also has a real impact on the people it serves.

$0

Cost to patients

10

Years serving patients

51

Percentage of non-english-speaking patients

77

Percentage of PNC patients without health insurance

103

Faculty preceptors

324

Student volunteers (99 medical students)

2,060

Patient visitors last year

$45,000

Annual cost of operation

To learn more about supporting the Phillips Neighborhood Clinic, contact Teri McIntyre at 612-625-5976 or mcintyre@umn.edu.

Or visit www.give.umn.edu/giveto/pnc-gm to make a gift online.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Advancing pioneering heart disease research

2013-06-04T16:12:00Z

Specially engineered patches may help repair damage done by disease

“Everyone has some kind of tie to a person with heart disease,” says Brian Engdahl, Ph.D., a psychologist at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, whose own father died of heart failure in 2005 at age 81.

Each year, more than 17 million people die of heart disease. A third of all deaths in the United States can be attributed to cardiovascular problems, and the No. 1 cause of hospitalization in America is heart failure.

Intent on improving those statistics, Engdahl and his family established a Stem Cell Heart Repair Research Fund at the University of Minnesota in 2008, and they have recently made a $2 million commitment to establish an endowed chair in regenerative therapy for heart disease through the Engdahl Family Foundation.

“There’s a huge need in this area,” says Daniel Garry, M.D., Ph.D., director of the U’s Lillehei Heart Institute. “And stem cell therapy and biomedical engineering are some of the two most promising avenues of research. Ultimately, one goal of the University is to cure heart disease. We hope this chair will allow us to take a big step forward in that effort.”

For decades, the University has been a global leader in heart-health research and treatment. The heart institute’s namesake, C. Walton Lillehei, M.D., Ph.D., performed many “world firsts” in open-heart surgery in the 1950s. What’s more, the study and treatment of heart disease have been revolutionized by Jay Cohn, M.D., who joined the U faculty in 1974 and initiated the first long-term clinical trials in heart failure. And more recently, U researchers have begun to explore the use of stem cell technology to develop therapies for heart disease.

Jianyi Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine and biomedical engineering and director of two cardiology labs, for example, is investigating the potential use of fibrin patches to introduce stem cells into the body. Attached to the heart, such patches could release stem cells over a period of time, stimulating growth that could counteract the damage done by heart disease. Especially intriguing is the concept of reprogramming a person’s skin cells to form heart cells, creating new organ tissue.

“It’s really a form of personalized medicine,” Garry says. “Cell therapy can take off-the-shelf cells and deliver those to a failing heart.” The patches provide a delivery system for the novel treatment. “It’s like putting a Band-Aid around the heart that delivers the necessary therapy.”

Engdahl, who is also a research professor of cognitive sciences at the University, describes the Lillehei Heart Institute as “an amazing organization.” His father, an accountant, saw the potential for wearable pacemakers a half-century ago and invested in the work of Medtronic founders Earl Bakken and Palmer Hermundslie. That investment paid off for the Engdahls.

“In a very real sense, we owe our ability to support this work to Medtronic,” Engdahl says.

Such support is critical today because government funding of scientific and medical research has reached a new low, Garry says. “This is the worst funding environment I’ve ever seen for high-risk but high-reward research.”

Endowed chairs, like the one funded by the Engdahls, help add stability to research by providing financial continuity. “[They] raise the prestige of the entire institution,” Garry says.

Brian Engdahl sees the chair as a way to ensure that the U’s work on heart disease continues in perpetuity—or until a cure is found. “I hope the gift helps retain a truly innovative researcher who builds a lab that attracts and educates other pioneering researchers. It’s multiplicative.”

By Joel Hoekstra

To learn more about advancing cardiovascular research at the University of Minnesota, contact Amanda Storm Schuster at 612-626-2475 or aschuste@umn.edu.

Or visit www.give.umn.edu/giveto/lhi-gm to make an online gift.

A Red Hot evening

The Depot was awash in red April 6 for the third annual Red Hot Soirée, benefiting the Lillehei Heart Institute. Guests who bought one of these blinking heart necklaces at the event, which raised $720,000, had a chance to win a ruby necklace.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

A smart gift to a topflight MHA program

2013-06-04T16:11:00Z

If it’s true, as philanthropist Andrew Carnegie once said, that “it’s more difficult to give money away intelligently than to earn it in the first place,” then Don and Janet Wegmiller’s recent gift to the University of Minnesota School of Public Health’s Master of Healthcare Administration (MHA) program should score high on Carnegie’s IQ test.

The couple’s decision to establish the Wegmiller Professorship in Healthcare Administration through a $1 million endowment came from a deep understanding of not only how the program educates, but how it shapes lives.

With their endowment, they want to publicly support what Don Wegmiller calls “the best health care administration program in the country.”

“The MHA program formed not just the basis of our professional lives but also of our personal lives,” says Wegmiller, who earned his MHA in 1962 and now is chairman of the health care organizations C-Suite Resources and the Scottsdale Institute. “When something like that has been so important to you over five decades, it becomes a very easy decision to say, ‘This is where we should allocate some of our resources.’”

Daniel Zismer, Ph.D., the MHA program’s director, will be the first person to hold the new professorship.

From a strictly pragmatic viewpoint, the endowment means that Zismer, and those who succeed him as director, will have access to discretionary funds to help with such things as supporting emerging research priorities and recruiting top-notch students and faculty.

“But the professorship is about much more than dollars,” Zismer says. “It adds a status to the program that shows the marketplace that we are supported by top industry professionals like Don.”

Wegmiller, who was recently inducted into the prestigious Modern Healthcare Hall of Fame, lauds Zismer’s work, crediting him with re-energizing and improving an already outstanding program since he took the reins as director in early 2010.

“Today’s MHA students will face daunting challenges as the industry changes from a volume-based to a value-based system,” Wegmiller says, “and the program will continue to need support from all of its alumni. Janet and I hope that one of the results of our gift will be to stimulate others … to say, ‘Maybe we should do something like this, too.’”

By Barbara Knox

To learn more about supporting the School of Public Health’s MHA program, contact Adam Buhr at 612-626-2391 or adambuhr@umn.edu.

Or visit www.give.umn.edu/giveto/mha-gm to make an online gift.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Healing the wounds of war

2013-06-04T16:10:00Z

Gift endows chairs to train medics, heal PTSD

William Lewis Anderson never had the chance to fulfill his dream of becoming a doctor. The combat medic died trying to save a wounded soldier on the battlefield in Italy during WWII. Now, a $4 million gift made in his honor more than seven decades later will help train today’s medics and help heal the psychological scars that haunt some veterans who return home.

The gift, which will fund two endowed chairs, comes from his younger brother, Roger Anderson, M.D., a ’52 University of Minnesota Medical School alumnus who died last year of thyroid cancer at age 86, shortly after creating the planned gift through his will.

The William L. Anderson Endowed Chair for Research and Development of Military Medical Simulation Training and Technology will support the University’s SimPORTAL, the Medical School’s interactive training center where medical students, medics, and others participate in situations brought vividly to life by virtual reality, simulation, and lifelike 3-D models.

“This gift is allowing us to create the next generation of training tools and simulations to train the next generation of providers,” says Robert Sweet, M.D., SimPORTAL’s director.

The new technologies better prepare medics for performing difficult lifesaving procedures, Sweet adds. “We want them to feel like it’s real so that they don’t freeze up the first time they have to perform those skills in combat.”

Detecting PTSD

More than 90 percent of troops wounded in action do survive, but many come home suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), intense, recurring anxiety that may include flashbacks and intrusive memories related to a traumatic combat experience.

The William L. Anderson Endowed Chair in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research will provide resources that help University scientists better understand, diagnose, treat, and prevent PTSD.

For example, the endowment will support research that uses an imaging technology called magnetoencephalography (MEG), which can diagnose PTSD with 95 percent accuracy, says Apostolos Georgopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., holder of the American Legion and American Legion Auxilliary Chair in Brain Sciences and director of the Brain Sciences Center at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Health Care System.

MEG machines read magnetic fields of the brain and can detect hyperactivity in a PTSD patient’s temporal lobe, where memories are stored, explains Georgopoulos, a Regents Professor of Neurosciences at the U.

Brian Engdahl, Ph.D., a psychologist with the Brain Sciences Center and a research professor of cognitive sciences at the U of M, says the endowment also assures that the University will lead efforts to improve the care of PTSD patients, who often suffer from severe depression, anxiety, and nightmares.

“We can use [MEG] in treatment research as a very objective marker of the severity of a particular disorder, and we can go forward with treatments and observe the results and determine what works and what doesn’t,” Engdahl says.

Quietly improving others’ lives

Roger Anderson’s $4 million gift is one of many made by a man who sought little recognition for his philanthropy, which also included a $2 million donation to the University’s ROTC program as well as gifts to the Weisman Art Museum.

Anderson spent more than 40 years as a respected radiologist, including as a staff member at Deaconess Hospital and Abbott Northwestern Hospital and as a partner with Consulting Radiologists. A stalwart resident of southeast Minneapolis, he was dedicated to the community surrounding the University.

Anderson’s cousin Mary Jo Odegaard says she wasn’t surprised by his generosity. She describes him as a humble, funny, and sweet lifelong bachelor who idolized his big brother and mourned his death for the rest of his own life.

“He gave so there was better art available, so there were better medical options available,” she says. “He wanted a better quality of life for others.”

By Tim Sturrock

To support this work, please contact Catherine McGlinch at 612-626-5456 or mcgra022@umn.edu.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Gifts of appreciated stock are smarter than ever

2013-06-04T16:09:00Z

Good news: stock prices have been rising in recent years, creating considerable “paper” wealth. The bad news for some is that the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 has raised capital gains taxes from a top rate of 15 percent to 20 percent for those with taxable incomes above $400,000 (single taxpayers) or $450,000 (joint filers). In addition, many investors at lower income levels ($200,000 for singles, $250,000 for couples) may be subject to the 3.8 percent tax on net investment income when they harvest their gains.

Charitable gifts of appreciated securities held more than one year have always been attractive because, in addition to benefiting from the income tax charitable deduction, donors avoid the capital gains tax that would have been due if they sold the shares. Higher taxes increase the benefits of using appreciated assets to make charitable gifts to the University of Minnesota Foundation.

It’s also possible to make a gift of appreciated assets and retain income for life from the full value of the property, with no loss to capital gains tax.

To learn more, contact Jay Kautt at the University of Minnesota Foundation at 612-626-0510 or jkautt@umn.edu.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

IRA charitable giving opportunity extended for 2013

2013-06-04T16:08:00Z

Thanks to recent legislation, you can benefit from a popular tax-advantaged giving option again this year.

Make a gift of up to $100,000 directly from your IRA to the University of Minnesota Foundation (UMF) to support health-related research, education, and care at the University before December 31, 2013, and avoid paying federal income tax on the amount of your gift.

These rules apply to IRA charitable rollovers in 2013:

Only IRAs are eligible (other types of retirement accounts are not).
You must be age 70 1/2 or older at the time you make your gift.
Your gift must come directly from the IRA custodian to UMF.
You can give up to $100,000 from your IRA to one or more qualified charities in 2013 (and if your spouse has a separate IRA, you can each give up to $100,000).
Your gift must be outright; it cannot be used to fund a charitable gift annuity or charitable remainder trust.

While you will not be able to claim a charitable deduction for your IRA rollover gift, you also won’t owe federal income tax on any amount up to $100,000 that you distribute to a qualified charity.

To learn more, contact Jay Kautt at the University of Minnesota Foundation at 612-626-0510 or jkautt@umn.edu.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Healing through play

2013-06-04T16:07:00Z

Minnesota Vikings center John Sullivan knows he’s fortunate to play a game for a living. And because of that good fortune, he’s giving patients at University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital and their siblings a place to play, too.

Sullivan pledged $150,000 last fall to create the Sullivan Playground, a safe and accessible space designed by Minnesota company Landscape Structures for children of all abilities. Vikings teammate Chad Greenway, through his Lead the Way Foundation, and the Minnesota Vikings football organization also have committed $25,000 each to the $200,000 project.

“It’s such a great cause,” Sullivan says. “I just wanted, as soon as I found myself in the position, to do what little I could to give back.”

Opening this month, the Sullivan Playground incorporates therapeutic, sensory, and developmental elements, as well as a mix of climbing, sliding, and spinning activities. A bonus: some evidence suggests that play can actually help kids heal faster.

“And [it can] just bring some smiles to their faces,” Sullivan adds. “That’s what it’s all about.”

By Nicole Endres

For more information about how you can support Amplatz Children’s Hospital, visit www.UofMHope.org or contact Elizabeth Patty at (612) 625-6136 or patty@umn.edu.

Playground slideshow

See a Facebook photo album of the new Sullivan Playground.

Special features of the Sullivan Playground at University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital

Because some children at Amplatz must be hooked up to IVs constantly, the playground features a custom roller slide that allows kids to climb up and slide down without getting tangled up in the equipment. This is the first commercial outdoor slide ever made to accommodate children with IVs.
Swaying benches provide a place for parents and children to relax and take in the fresh air.
Large motor skills equipment like this climbing net gives patients’ siblings a place to blow off steam.
The “talk tube” in this elephant’s trunk allows kids on the ground to communicate with playmates on the structure’s upper deck.
A large umbrella provides shade for kids whose treatments make them sensitive to the sun.
Children using walkers or wheelchairs can navigate the playground with ease on this cushioned, porous surface.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Getting involved

2013-06-04T16:06:00Z

Calendar of events: Summer-Fall 2013

Champions for Children Celebrity Golf Classic

Monday, June 17
Windsong Farm Golf Club, Independence, Minn.

Minnesota Vikings center John Sullivan will host this fifth annual event, which supports an Adopt A Room at University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital in the blood and marrow transplant unit. The event has raised more than $450,000 for University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital since its inception.

Visit www.UofMhope.org or contact Nicholas Engbloom at 612-626-8429 or engbloom@umn.edu.

Golf Classic “fore” Diabetes Research

Monday, June 17
Town and Country Club, St. Paul, Minn.

This tournament benefits the cure-focused research under way at the University of Minnesota Schulze Diabetes Institute. It includes morning and afternoon rounds, a live auction, and lunch and dinner programs. Join in the fun while supporting a tournament that has raised nearly $5 million for diabetes research in its history. Register now. Contact Katie Mae Pritchard at 612-625-5682 or katiemae@umn.edu.

Time to Fly

Saturday, June 22
Harriet Island Regional Park, St. Paul, Minn.

Children’s Cancer Research Fund’s athletic fundraising event includes chip-timed 10K and 5K runs, as well as a 5K walk and a kids’ fun run. High-energy music, activities, and contests provided by Radio Disney AM 1440 will keep kids and adults alike entertained throughout the day. Proceeds support University of Minnesota research into lifesaving therapies and cures for childhood cancer.

Visit www.childrenscancer.org/timetofly.

Rein in Sarcoma

Monday, July 22
Cafesjian’s Carousel and Como Park Visitor Center, St. Paul, Minn.

This annual event, hosted by the Karen Wyckoff Rein in Sarcoma Foundation, benefits sarcoma research at the Masonic Cancer Center, University of Minnesota. Join us as we celebrate the 13th anniversary of this event with a magical evening of music, entertainment, and family fun.

Visit www.reininsarcoma.org.

University of Minnesota Medica l School Alumni Celebration

Thursday-Saturday, September 19-21
McNamara Alumni Center
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

All Medical School alumni, scholarship donors and recipients, and those celebrating class reunions (1948, 1953, 1958, 1963, 1973, 1983, 1988, 1993, and 2003 graduates) are invited to reunite with friends, learn about the latest in medical education, and see what’s new at the Medical School. Invitations will be mailed in August.

Visit www.give.umn.edu/alumni/reunions or contact Katrina Roth at roth0103@umn.edu or 612-625-0336.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Because hope can go a long way

Learn more about how you can support children’s health at UofMHope.org

Moving toward a lifesaving EB cure

2013-05-14T15:41:20Z

Physicians know delivering bad news is part of the job. But a diagnosis of epidermolysis bullosa (EB) can be “terrifying,” says University of Minnesota pediatric oncologist Jakub Tolar, M.D., Ph.D.

EB causes the skin to slough off at the slightest touch. Wounds don’t heal, fingers fuse together, and eventually patients are unable to eat and are wheelchair bound.

Yet kids with EB, like Keric Boyd, 10, are beginning to thrive—thanks to a new treatment approach developed at the University. Six years ago, Tolar and John Wagner, M.D., director of the Division of Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplantation, began pursuing a novel idea—treating the disease from the inside out with a blood and marrow transplant, rather than from the outside in with bandages and antibiotics.

“Funds from the University and Children’s Cancer Research Fund gave us the kick-start that led to a revolutionary new therapy for this dreadful disease,” Wagner says.

Prior to Keric’s 2008 transplant, where his sister served as donor, his life was limited. “Our whole life as a family revolved around daily dressing changes,” says Keric’s mom, Krista Boyd, D.O.

Tolar, director of the U’s Stem Cell Institute, says that Keric was brave and notes that at that time he was only the fourth EB patient to undergo the procedure. Now more than 20 children have undergone this procedure.

Today, Keric is busy attending school, riding his bike, and participating in 4-H. His pain has decreased, his healing time is faster, and his bandages are changed just twice a week.

“He’s a totally different kid,” says Tolar. “However, it’s not a cure. We are at one point on a path to make EB a curable disease.”

Wagner concurs: “Our role is simple—we are out to cure the incurable.”

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Because hope can go a long way

Learn more about how you can support children’s health at UofMHope.org

Preteen songstress doesn't let CF slow her down

2013-05-14T15:39:25Z

When 12-year-old Sabrina Ness takes the stage, her soulful, bluesy voice startles listeners. Think Norah Jones or Adele. Her songwriting is just as mature.

“All of my songs are about making a difference in the world,” says Ness.

There’s a reason for that: This Stillwater, Minn., sixth-grader has been successfully defying the odds against hospitalization since she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) at 3 months old.

This genetic disease produces a thick, sticky mucus in her lungs, obstructing her pancreas, and preventing her body from absorbing food. To combat the disease, Ness takes 35 enzymes daily and wears a CF compression vest twice a day. The vest is a novel therapy developed by CF pioneer Warren Warwick, M.D., at the University of Minnesota.

Fifty years ago, few children with CF lived to age 5; today, thanks to leaders like Warwick, those who are treated at the U’s Minnesota CF Center live more than a decade longer than the national average.

“It helps further,” says Warren Regelmann, M.D., Sabrina’s U physician and the CF Center’s co-director, “to attend a center whose doctors led the development of this treatment plan and continue to research better ways to diagnose and treat people with CF.”

Sabrina’s family is thrilled with her continued good health. “If anyone would have told me this is how she is going to do, I never would have believed it,” says mom Naomi Ness. “It really is too good to be true.”

For her part, Sabrina is planning on a long and successful singing career. She recently recorded her first CD, Revolution, thanks to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Because hope can go a long way

Learn more about how you can support children’s health at UofMHope.org

'She is a star'

2013-05-14T15:37:30Z

It’s Tuesday and 4-year-old Addison Brynteson has just finished her weekly medical checkup. Next stop: “Anywhere with French fries and chicken strips,” jokes her dad, Joe.

Last fall, this lively preschooler was diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia, a rare condition that prevents normal blood-cell production, causing extreme tiredness, and puts patients at high risk for infection and uncontrolled bleeding.

Initially, Addy’s parents thought her bruises were just signs of an eager, if sometimes klutzy, toddler. But when she woke “with huge bruises like monsters along her side,” says Joe, they knew something was seriously wrong.

Because of the rarity of her disease, it took Addy’s doctors about a month to diagnose her. Then she came to University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital with a new challenge—she needed a donor for a blood and marrow transplant.

“The chance of finding a perfect match in a sibling is just 23 percent,” says Jakub Tolar, M.D., Ph.D., Addy’s oncologist at Amplatz, one of the largest and most respected pediatric transplant centers in the world. Tolar, director of the U’s Stem Cell Institute, currently leads the largest U.S. clinical research trial aimed at improving stem cell transplants.

Amazingly, Cayden, Addy’s 19-month-old brother, was a match.

While the U’s team prepared the Bryntesons for a 60-day or longer posttransplant stay at Amplatz Children’s Hospital, Addy far exceeded recovery expectations and headed home on day 41.

Joe calls the family’s experience at Amplatz “unbelievable,” noting the many things the staff did to make Addy and her family feel at ease. “If there is such a thing as a smooth bone marrow transplant, we had it,” he says.

And after seeing her in the clinic recently, Tolar is thrilled with Addy’s progress. “She was playing, running around the room, and dancing,” he says. “She is a star.”

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Because hope can go a long way

Learn more about how you can support children’s health at UofMHope.org

The gift of Grace

2013-05-14T15:35:53Z

Grace O’Masta has come a long way from the devastating day in spring 2008 when her parents were told their month-old daughter likely wouldn’t survive the night.

Born with an enlarged and weakened heart that wasn’t capable of pumping enough blood on its own, the Eagan, Minn., girl was living at University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital, hooked up to the Berlin Heart—a then-experimental ventricular assist device— and on the waiting list for a transplant.

Amplatz Children’s Hospital was one of only 13 sites nationwide to participate in Berlin Heart clinical trials. The device, which gained approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in late 2011, takes over the work of an ailing heart until the patient can get a transplant, or until the heart becomes strong enough to function again on its own.

While on the Berlin Heart, Grace had a stroke. She had lost about a third of her brain mass and was scratched from the transplant list. She was not expected to survive. But she did—to the surprise and delight of her family and medical team.

Grace recovered and went home in July 2008, but a few years later, she went into cardiac arrest and was reconnected to the Berlin Heart while awaiting a heart transplant.

In the fall of 2012, Grace got a new heart at Amplatz Children’s Hospital. The transplant was a tremendous success.

Now 4 years old, Grace has a normal life: being in preschool, enjoying the family’s new dog, romping on the swing set, and playing (and fighting) with her sister.

“She doesn’t hurt anymore,” says Grace’s mom, Jenny O’Masta. “She’s a different kid.”

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Because hope can go a long way

Learn more about how you can support children’s health at UofMHope.org

Neurosciences News

2013-05-10T18:08:47Z

Spring 2013

Connecting the dots

With donors’ support, University researcher pursues the causes of neurodegeneration behind Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s

Don’t be mistaken: Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are distinct neurodegenerative diseases. Both involve the death of neurons, but the primary cells affected are different. But as scientists are learning more about Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, they’re discovering that the diseases’ pathological pathways in the brain have much more in common than was previously believed.

Company’s gift supports integration of psychotherapy treatments for adolescents and young adults facing mental illness

It seems that psychotherapy research has taken a backseat to pharmaceutical research in recent years. After all, it’s comparatively easy to quantify the effectiveness of pharmaceuticals: count the milligrams, measure the drug in the blood, and then correlate the data to an outcome. But some, including Stephen Setterberg, M.D., are concerned by this trend.

With better diagnosis and treatment methods in mind, U takes part in study to identify biomarkers for Parkinson’s

Parkinson’s disease, a movement disorder that affects the central nervous system, is diagnosed in more than 50,000 Americans every year. Yet there is no test for diagnosing it or for predicting its progression.

Epilepsy care options expand through integration of physician groups

The epilepsy programs of MINCEP© and University of Minnesota Physicians have integrated, expanding epilepsy care options for patients throughout Minnesota.

New gene-sequencing technology gives patients answers faster and at a much lower cost

When Apple, Inc., cofounder Steve Jobs paid $100,000 to have his DNA sequenced in a bid to outrun the pancreatic cancer that ultimately claimed his life, he was just one of 20 people in the entire world to have had it done. But for the general public, the benefits of DNA sequencing, which has been both time-consuming and costly, have remained largely unattainable. Until now.

Does psychosocial distress elevate your risk of stroke?

Older Americans dealing with high levels of psychosocial distress are at higher risk for stroke, according to a University of Minnesota study.

U foundations merge to better serve donors

The boards of the University of Minnesota Foundation and the Minnesota Medical Foundation voted on Jan. 23 to merge into a single entity. The merger is designed to better serve University donors by providing one voice for private giving at the U and ensuring greater operational excellence in gift administration.

About Neurosciences News

Neurosciences News is published by the University of Minnesota Foundation. Reader comments and suggestions are welcome. Contact the editor directly at 612-626-1941 or nendres@umn.edu.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Big Ten Network shines spotlight on U Alzheimer's disease research

2013-05-09T14:42:11Z

The Big Ten Network highlighted U scientist Karen Hsiao Ashe, M.D., Ph.D., for her world-renowned work in Alzheimer’s disease research. Watch the video.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Connecting the dots

2013-05-08T16:07:51Z

With donors’ support, University researcher pursues the causes of neurodegeneration behind Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s

Don’t be mistaken: Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are distinct neurodegenerative diseases. Both involve the death of neurons, but the primary cells affected are different.

In Parkinson’s disease, most of the killed-off cells are responsible for physical movement. The disease’s most common symptoms, therefore, are motor-related: tremors, stiff muscles, poor balance, and difficulty walking, sitting, or standing.

In Alzheimer’s disease, the destroyed cells are mainly responsible for memory and cognitive skills. Thus, the disease’s key characteristic is gradual cognitive decline, including a devastating loss of memory.

But the two conditions—the most common neurodegenerative illnesses in the United States—do share some hallmark features. Dementia occurs in up to 80 percent of people who have Parkinson’s disease. And many people with Alzheimer’s lose motor function, including their ability to walk, especially toward the end of the illness.

In fact, as scientists learn more about Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, they’re discovering that the diseases’ pathological pathways in the brain have much more in common than was previously believed. One of those commonalities is the abnormal behavior of the alpha-synuclein protein.

Through his renowned research on this protein, University of Minnesota neuroscientist Michael K. Lee, Ph.D., is deepening our understanding of how neurons die in both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

This novel work is pointing to new avenues of therapies that may one day slow or even stop the progression of these two debilitating diseases, which together affect as many as 6 million Americans.

“In both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, the brain just starts dying off,” says Lee, who is codirector of the Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, part of the Institute for Translational Neuroscience at the University. “We need to stop that if we’re going to have an impact on the progression of the diseases. We have to go beyond just trying to treat the symptoms and get to the underlying processes.”

A personal interest

Susan and David Plimpton understand on a personal level the urgent need for such research, which is why the couple has made a gift to support Lee’s work. Susan, a former consumer marketing executive, and David, a semi-retired internal medicine physician (and 1966 University of Minnesota Medical School alumnus), also have set aside additional funding for the research in their estate plans.

“I have several family members on my mother’s side who died with severe dementia, and David’s father had Parkinson’s disease with severe dementia,” says Susan Plimpton, who leads a neurosciences development advisory committee for the University of Minnesota Foundation.

Lee’s research “just hit on all cylinders, so to speak, for us,” she adds. “It has the possibility of leading to some important discoveries that might help prevent or manage these diseases more effectively than we do today.”

When a protein turns toxic

Alpha-synuclein is a major constituent of Lewy bodies, the abnormal protein clumps that have long been known as a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease. The protein also becomes abnormal in Alzheimer’s disease. Its precise role in the brain and in the pathology of these diseases is unclear, however.

One of the places alpha-synuclein resides in neurons is an area outside of the nucleus known as the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). The ER functions like an assembly line, synthesizing and “packaging” proteins into folded shapes that enable them to perform specific functions in the cell. If the folding of the proteins is not done correctly, however, the proteins become useless—or, worse, toxic.

Usually, nature takes charge and fixes the problem proteins. Those that are unfolded or misfolded are “caught” and either re-folded or destroyed by proteins called chaperones before they can harm the cell. But as the brain ages, incorrectly folded alpha-synuclein molecules may gather into small toxic clumps called oligomers. Over time, the oligomers may form even bigger clumps, an outcome that can “gum up the entire assembly line of the cell,” says Lee.

The “stressed” ER tries to clean up troublemaking proteins by sending out more chaperones, but if that response is inadequate, explains Lee, “the cell activates a self-destruct mechanism that leads to its death.”

In 2012, Lee and his colleagues were the first to report an association between high levels of alpha-synuclein oligomers and the breakdown of the ER. They found this association both in mouse neurons and in neurons in postmortem human brains.

“We observed it in Parkinson’s disease,” says Lee. “But what we found may also have relevance for Alzheimer’s disease.”

That’s because research suggests that ER stress—the condition triggered by these accumulating toxic clumps—is involved in Alzheimer’s disease as well as in Parkinson’s disease.

Further evidence

To test whether the association he found between ER stress and alpha-synuclein oligomers is an important factor in the death of neurons, Lee teamed up with researchers at Johns Hopkins University to treat mice that model human Parkinson’s disease with salubrinal, an experimental drug that protects cells against chronic ER stress.

“We found that the treated mice were able to survive [without symptoms] for a much longer time,” he says.

In yet another experiment, this time conducted with researchers at the Brain Mind Institute in Lausanne, Switzerland, Lee’s colleagues gave salubrinal to rats that model human Parkinson’s and that have dopamine neurons targeted for death from alpha-synuclein. (Dopamine is a brain chemical critical for coordinating movement, and the loss of dopamine neurons is the major reason for the onset of Parkinson’s.) Once again, the salubrinal dramatically reduced the toxic effects of the alpha-synuclein protein.

Although salubrinal may one day become a good candidate for neurodegenerative therapies, it’s not currently approved for use in humans. Lee and his colleagues are testing other promising drugs, including one already used to treat high blood pressure, in animal models to see whether those compounds also will relieve ER stress.

Lee emphasizes that although the findings from his lab suggest new therapeutic targets, the research is at an early stage. Still, he’s hopeful.

“We need to have a better understanding of the underlying reason the symptoms of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases occur,” he says, “so that we can actually help people live longer and have a better quality of life. It’s a big issue—and one that affects not only the individuals who have the disease, but their families as well.”

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

A more hopeful future

2013-05-08T16:06:11Z

Company’s gift supports integration of psychotherapy treatments for adolescents and young adults facing mental illness

S. Charles Schulz, M.D., head of the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, and Stephen Setterberg, M.D., president of PrairieCare, a Twin Cities psychiatric treatment services company, say that they’re concerned by this trend.

But psychotherapy research has “progressed tremendously over the past 10 to 20 years,” Setterberg says, “and there is quite a bit of empirical support now for a variety of the psychotherapy approaches that are commonly used.” He believes psychotherapy should play a bigger role in psychiatric practice in general.

“I think that something very precious is lost without that dimension of practice,” he says.

This belief led Setterberg to commit $200,000 to the University to support research in integrative treatment methods, especially those involving psychotherapy, for adolescents and young adults. Setterberg, who received his undergraduate and medical school degrees from the University, says that he hopes the Integrative Treatment Research Fund he’s creating through his company will help to improve the lives of young people living with mental illness.

PrairieCare’s focus on children and adolescents is one reason that the gift is targeted to youth mental health. Another is Setterberg’s belief in the importance of early intervention.

“Brain development is very intensive throughout childhood and adolescence, even up to age 25 or so,” he says. “Because of this, effective psychological and behavioral interventions with younger people are both more likely to show results and to have lasting benefit.”

PrairieCare is an official training site for child psychiatry fellows and medical students at the University, a relationship that Setterberg says he feels brings the excellence of the University into his organization.

“The gift is a kind of reciprocity for that,” he says. “It’s a reflection of how we value that relationship.”

Schulz says the potential impact of the work that will be funded by PrairieCare’s gift is significant.

“It can lead us to provide better care,” he says. “We know that the need to better understand how to best treat children and adolescents, how to best structure and utilize the psychosocial treatments, is crucial. I’m just delighted with our affiliation with PrairieCare and its generosity.”

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

With better diagnosis and treatment methods in mind, U takes part in study to identify biomarkers for Parkinson's

2013-05-08T16:05:25Z

The University of Minnesota is participating in a new research study called BioFIND that’s focused on identifying Parkinson’s disease biomarkers to ultimately help find better ways of diagnosing and treating the condition.

The University is one of five sites chosen by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research for this groundbreaking two-year study.

A biomarker is a substance, process, or characteristic that is associated with the risk or presence of a disease, or one that changes over time with disease progression. Reliable and consistent biomarkers allow scientists to predict, diagnose, and monitor diseases and can be used to help determine which medications work and which do not.

There is currently no known Parkinson’s biomarker, according to Paul Tuite, M.D., principal investigator for the University’s portion of BioFIND and an associate professor in the Department of Neurology. That’s why, he says, even though there have been numerous drug trials for Parkinson’s disease in the past 10 to 20 years, the current crop of drugs being tested doesn’t appear to be stopping or reversing damage to the central nervous system; instead, today’s drugs help to manage symptoms.

Tuite says BioFIND is a particularly promising study because it involves collecting and analyzing spinal fluid, which, because it surrounds the brain and other parts of the central nervous system, could provide a host of useful information.

Tuite and his colleagues plan to focus their work on the presence of antioxidants, DNA variants, and various proteins in the blood and spinal fluid of study participants, who will include both Parkinson’s patients and healthy volunteers. And he’s optimistic about the road ahead.

“The goal is to help better diagnose patients, better predict their course,” Tuite says.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Epilepsy care options expand through integration of physician groups

2013-05-08T16:04:09Z

The epilepsy programs of MINCEP© and University of Minnesota Physicians have integrated, expanding epilepsy care options for patients throughout Minnesota.

Founded at the University in 1964, MINCEP was the first comprehensive epilepsy center in the United States and has since served as a model for epilepsy centers across the world. It is designated as a Level 4 epilepsy center by the National Association of Epilepsy Centers.

With MINCEP’s return to the University, the integrated MINCEP and UMPhysicians team is a regional leader in the field. The partners are bringing the best of two worlds together to provide comprehensive epilepsy care, including:

Exceptional patient experiences and outcomes through coordinated care and advanced capabilities, specifically in pharmacology, diagnostics, and surgery;
Specialized programs for unique patient populations, such as children and older adults; and
Expanded medical research opportunities through the University’s state-of-the-art facilities.

Learn more at www.umphysicians.org/Clinics/mincep.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

New gene-sequencing technology gives patients answers faster and at a much lower cost

2013-05-08T16:03:12Z

But for the general public, the benefits of DNA sequencing—which has been both timeconsuming and costly—have remained largely unattainable. Until now.

A new technology called next-generation sequencing (NGS), previously used in research studies but rarely for clinical diagnostic tests, is now being used in clinics affiliated with the University of Minnesota. It can test large numbers of very specific genes simultaneously and at a significantly reduced cost.

Already at the University of Minnesota Ataxia Center, NGS is helping clinicians diagnose dozens of forms of rare ataxias.

“The big technical advance is the capability of focusing the sequencing power,” says Matthew Bower, M.S., C.G.C., the Ataxia Center’s genetic counselor. “Rather than distributing it across 3 billion letters of the genome, you can focus it on a set of target genes.”

As Bower explains it, this targeting allows for a considerably shorter “diagnostic odyssey” for patients. In the past, diagnoses were ruled out one gene at a time, a process that for some patients would take decades. Using NGS, the process typically takes about two to three months.

NGS makes gene sequencing more accessible, too. The process once cost $1,000 to $2,000 per gene, and with tens of thousands genes in the human genome, the price was far out of reach for most people. But NGS typically costs between $1,500 and $4,000 total, Bower says, depending on how many genes are analyzed.

“We’re looking at hundreds of genes for the price of what it used to cost to look at a single gene,” he says.

Ataxia Center director Khalaf Bushara, M.D., says many of his patients are glad to have a definitive diagnosis, even if there’s no clear-cut treatment option. That’s particularly true if there’s a hereditary component to their disease, he says.

“They want to plan to have kids. Is it dominant or recessive?” he says. “Some patients just want to know.”

NGS is being used at other University-affiliated specialty clinics that treat patients for inherited genetic diseases and cancers, as well, says Bower, including the ophthalmology, otolaryngology, pediatrics, hematology-oncology, and blood and marrow transplant clinics.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Does psychosocial distress elevate your risk of stroke?

2013-05-08T16:02:43Z

Older Americans dealing with high levels of psychosocial distress are at higher risk for stroke, according to a University of Minnesota study.

Psychosocial distress is broadly defined as internal conflicts and external stress that prevent a person from self-actualization and connecting with others. It can include depression, stress, and a negative outlook.

For this study, University researchers followed more than 4,000 people aged 65 and older through the Chicago Health and Aging Project. They measured psychosocial distress using four indicators: perceived stress, dissatisfaction with life, neuroticism, and depressive symptoms.

Those people who had the most psychosocial distress had three times the risk of dying from stroke and a 54 percent increased risk of being hospitalized for the first time compared with those who had the least amount of distress in their lives. The risk of distress also climbed with age.

The research, published in the American Heart Association journal Stroke, noted that the impact of psychosocial distress on stroke risk did not differ by race or gender.

“People should be aware that stress and negative emotions often increase with age,” says lead researcher Susan Everson-Rose, Ph.D., M.P.H., associate director of the Medical School’s Program in Health Disparities Research. “Family members and caregivers need to recognize [that] these emotions have a profound effect on health and that it’s important to pay attention when older people complain of distress.”

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

MN Twins tickets to benefit U of M NF research

2013-05-02T15:09:34Z

Don’t miss Neurofibromatosis (NF) Awareness Night at Target Field on May 18, 6:10 p.m., where the Minnesota Twins will take on the Boston Red Sox.

Neurofibromatosis is a genetic disorder that affects 1 in every 3,000 people. The Minnesota Twins, along with University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital, are joining together for a special night to raise awareness about this disorder. By purchasing tickets to this game, you’ll experience a night out with family and friends, while supporting lifesaving discoveries at the University of Minnesota—a world leader in Neurofibromatosis research. Please join us out at the ballpark for a fun night!

Grandstand seating: $25 per person.

How to order:

Call 612-33-TWINS or 1-800-33-TWINS (hit “0” to speak to an attendant). Phone lines are open during business hours and most evenings/weekends during Twins games.
At the start of your call, be sure to reference the 2013 Neurofibromatosis Night seating. Demand for seats at Target Field is high and these tickets will likely go fast… seats are available on a first come, first serve basis only.
Please provide an email address to which instructions will be sent. Simply make copies and distribute to your group.
Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express are accepted. A $5 service/handling fee will be added to each order.
Your tickets will arrive by mail.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Because hope can go a long way

Learn more about how you can support children’s health at UofMHope.org

Retraining the brain

2013-04-29T19:55:27Z

U plasticity lab helps kids and adults recover from stroke and other disabling conditions

By Susan Perry

On a chilly Minnesota evening last December, 16-year-old Tiffany Cowan sat uncomplainingly in Room 242 of the University of Minnesota’s Masonic Memorial Building as two graduate students from the University’s Brain Plasticity Laboratory carefully attached a series of wires to her scalp and right arm.

Cowan, with the consent of her parents, had volunteered to participate in one of the lab’s studies, which was examining the safety of using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a treatment for children with congenital stroke. tDCS is a type of painless, noninvasive brain stimulation that delivers a low (battery-powered) and persistent current to specific areas of the brain through small electrodes. experimental studies have suggested that it may help adult stroke victims regain some function of their limbs. This is among the first to investigate whether it may help children, too.

Tiffany, who suffered a stroke either before or during birth, has limited use of the right side of her body. Although the lithe, blonde teenager leads an active life, including playing the violin (like nearly all violinists, she bows with her right hand and does the more demanding finger work with her left), she’s eager to participate in research that might enable her to have more muscle control of her stroke-damaged hand.

She’d particularly like to write with that hand.

Lead researcher Bernadette Gillick, P.T., Ph.D., hovered maternally around Tiffany as the graduate students prepared the young woman for the tDCS stimulation. Gillick spoke to Tiffany constantly, putting her at ease as she explained everything the graduate students were doing.

“You’re my eleventh subject in this study,” she quipped. “That’s why your nickname is C-11.”

Tiffany smiled.

Eventually, all the electrodes were secured on the correct areas of Tiffany’s capped head, and the actual experiment began. The graduate students switched on the tDCS machine, being careful to hide the device’s controls from both Tiffany and Gillick. This was a double-blinded controlled study, which meant that half the children were being randomly assigned to a “control” group that received a pretend, or sham, treatment. To ensure the integrity of the study’s results, it was important that the children and Gillick, who would be interpreting the data, didn’t know which child was in which group.

“How do you feel?” Gillick asked.

Tiffany smiled again. “Fine,” she answered. “It just feels a bit like my hair is being pulled.”

Exploring new territory

Understanding how the brain reorganizes itself after a stroke or other brain injury is the overall mission of the Brain Plasticity Laboratory. Located in the Children’s Rehabilitation Center on the University’s East Bank campus, the decade-old lab is engaged in a variety of fascinating — and often unique — research using various brain stimulation, rehabilitation, and imaging techniques. Findings from this research are not only enabling scientists to gain deeper insight into how the injured brain restructures itself, but they are also pointing to promising new therapies that may help children and adults recover lost function after such an injury.

“There are only a couple of other labs that I’m aware of around the country that are doing some of the things that we’re doing here,” says James Carey, P.T., Ph.D., who codirects the lab with Gillick and Teresa Kimberley, P.T., Ph.D. In fact, he adds, the Brain Plasticity Laboratory may be the only one using a special dual type of brain-priming technique in its studies.

There’s urgency to this area of research. Stroke affects about 795,000 American adults each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s the leading cause of serious long-term disability in the nation, and it costs the country an estimated $54 billion annually in health care services and lost productivity.

Focal dystonia, another major focus of the lab’s research, also has a devastating effect on many people’s quality of life. Tens of thousands of Americans have this neurological movement disorder, which causes specific sets of frequently used muscles, such as those in the hands, feet, or throat, to involuntarily contract and form unnatural positions. Current treatments are often short-lived and ineffective. Read more about focal dystonia.

“If we could develop a reliable, effective intervention for these conditions,” says Kimberley, “we would have a profound effect on many people’s lives.”

Retraining the brain

The term plasticity (which comes from the Greek word plaistikos, meaning “to form”) refers to the brain’s ability to change its structure and function as a result of new learning and experiences. Until the 1960s, scientists believed that after childhood the brain became a static organ, unable to create new pathways among its 100 billion cells, or neurons. But thanks in large part to advances in brain imaging technology, it’s now known that the brain is constantly reorganizing those pathways. In fact, the adult human brain is even capable of creating new neurons, a process called neurogenesis.

The knowledge that the brain can be retrained to regain lost function has led to the development of a wide range of plasticity-based behavioral therapies. Today, patients who have experienced a stroke or other brain injury are prescribed rigorous and repetitive physical exercises or tasks in order to “rewire” their damaged brain. For stroke patients, this rehabilitative therapy usually begins 24 to 48 hours after the stroke.

“Traditional therapies are effective,” says Carey. “They do help. But given the magnitude of the stroke lesions in some people, they may just not be enough.”

A newer idea, he explains, is to use tDCS or a similar technology called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to “prime” the brain so it will be more receptive to the effects of behavioral therapy.

“If we can adjust the brain to be more responsive to behavioral therapy, we might get better results,” Carey says.

Other laboratories in the United States and elsewhere are also investigating the uses of brain stimulation as an adjunct to traditional stroke therapies, but the University’s Brain Plasticity Laboratory is taking that concept one step further.

“We’re doing priming of the priming,” explains Carey.

The battle of the hemispheres

To understand how brain-stimulation priming helps stroke patients, you have to first understand how a stroke injures the brain and how, in a somewhat surprising way, the brain responds to that injury. The most common type of stroke damages the brain by interrupting blood flow to the neurons. Without oxygen in the blood, the cells in the immediate region of the stroke begin to die within a few minutes.

Strokes tend to occur on one side, or hemisphere, of the brain’s cerebrum, the largest part of the brain. Located in the top and front section of the skull, the cerebrum is responsible for movement, speech, thinking, memory, the regulation of emotions, and other functions. The hemispheres, which are connected by a thick band of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum, specialize in different functions. When it comes to movement, each hemisphere controls the muscles on the opposite side of the body.

The goal of all stroke rehabilitation therapy is to restore function to the weak side of the body. Achieving this outcome is challenging — and not only because of the damage in the stroke hemisphere. After a stroke, the cells in the nonstroke hemisphere respond in a way that compounds the problem: They become more “excitable.” This exaggerated excitability inhibits healthy cells in the stroke hemisphere from rewiring themselves to regain lost muscle function.

“It’s maladaptive,” explains Carey. “Some have called it a double disablement. As if the stroke weren’t bad enough, the patient gets a disablement from the extra inhibition coming from the other hemisphere.”

Double priming the brain

The University’s Brain Plasticity Laboratory, along with a handful of other labs around the world, has demonstrated in experimental studies that rTMs and tDCS brain stimulation can suppress the inhibitory behavior of the non-stroke side of the brain, thus “priming” the stroke side to be more receptive to behavioral therapies. The University’s lab is unique, however, in having also discovered that low-frequency (inhibitory) stimulation of the non-stroke hemisphere appears to work even better when it is preceded by high-frequency (excitatory) stimulation.

Currently, the Brain Plasticity Laboratory is the only research group in the United States to have received Food and Drug Administration approval to conduct studies involving this “priming of the priming” technique. Initial clinical trials completed by the lab have been promising, showing a distinct trend toward improved function in adult stroke patients who receive the double-priming treatment.

Children and stroke

Recently, the lab has expanded its focus to include research on pediatric stroke. Although thought of mainly as an adult illness, stroke is a leading cause of death and disability in children as well. Each year, about 11 of every 100,000 U.S. children under the age of 19 — including about one of every 4,000 newborn babies — experience a stroke, according to the American Stroke Association. The major causes of stroke in children are congenital heart problems, infections, blood disorders (such as sickle cell anemia), and diseases of blood vessels in the brain.

Children show a tendency to advance faster than adults undergoing stroke rehabilitation therapies. Scientists believe children’s brains may have greater plasticity, enhancing their ability to create new neural pathways in response to injury. But 50 to 80 percent of children with a history of stroke enter adulthood with a permanent disability. The most common is total or partial hemiplegia — paralysis on one side of the body.

Clinical studies

Last summer, the Brain Plasticity Laboratory completed a pediatric study that combined rTMS with behavioral therapy. For the study, which was conducted in conjunction with the Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare Hospital in St. Paul and funded by a $1 million challenge grant from the National Institutes of Health, the lab recruited 19 children ages 8 to 16. All had hemiplegia as a result of a stroke.

For 13 days the children received treatment, which alternated daily between rTMS stimulation of the nonstroke side of their brain and one-on-one sessions with a physical therapist. Half of the children received real rTMS stimulation; the other half received sham treatment. (Neither the researchers nor the children knew which treatment the children were receiving until the study was completed.) Throughout the study the children wore a cast on their “good” arm to force them to use only their stroke-affected arm for everyday tasks as well as for the physical therapy exercises.

Both groups of children showed some functional improvement at the end of the study, but those who received the real rTMS stimulation performed significantly better than the other group — and those added gains came with no adverse effects.

“The big question is, can we translate the results that we observed here in our research laboratory to the clinical setting,” says Gillick. “Because that’s ultimately where this is supposed to go. The goal is to improve the lives of those who live with the consequences of stroke.”

Gillick’s current pediatric study — the one Tiffany joined — is using tDCS technology for brain stimulation. Although both technologies can alter brain-cell excitability in the cerebrum, tDCS is less expensive and more portable. That’s because tDCS delivers current directly to the brain, whereas rTMS uses magnetic fields to produce its low-dose electric currents.

“We have just completed the interim analysis and have been approved to continue the study to completion of 20 subjects,” says Gillick. If promising results are found — and she believes they will be — then the next step will be an intervention study combining tdCs with behavioral rehabilitation.

Gillick’s long-term goal is to determine whether this combination of brain stimulation and physical therapy would be even more effective when used soon after a child experiences a stroke. “If we could get closer to around the time of the actual event, we might have a greater impact,” she says.

‘Sign me up’

A week after her initial participation in the tDCS safety study, Tiffany Cowan returned to the Masonic Memorial Building to be hooked up to the brainstimulation machine for a second and final time.

First, though, she asked if she could have a moment to talk with Gillick.

“She literally sat me down,” recalls Gillick, “and said, ‘Ok. you’re going to have another study, right? And you’re going to be actually treating people in that study, right? I want to participate in that study, so sign me up.’”

That conversation underlines the importance of the Brain Plasticity Laboratory’s research, says Gillick — and the great need for more effective treatments for people who have experienced a stroke or other brain injury.

“Tiffany returned for her follow-up excited about the next phase of the study,” Gillick says. “I’m excited, too.”

Web extras

Video: Brain Plasticity Lab

Learn more about brain stimulation and hand training.

Slideshow: In the lab

See a slideshow of Bernadette Gillick, P.T., Ph.D., and research study participant Tiffany Cowan in the lab.

Companion story: Easing the symptoms of focal dystonia

Guitarist Dean Harrington participates in U of M brain-stimulation studies targeting focal dystonia. Read more.

Star Tribune: New stroke therapy shows promise on kids

Using non-invasive electronic stimulation, coupled with occupational therapy, researchers say they are hoping kids can increase hand function. Read more at the Star Tribune.

Learn more

If you are interested in learning more about Dr. Gillick’s research studies, please contact study coordinator at 612-626-6415 or brown029@umn.edu.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Urban engagement

2013-04-29T19:54:57Z

MetroPAP immerses students in inner-city medicine, where relationship-building is lesson No. 1

By Susan Maas

Brian Park, a third-year medical student at the time, had seen the patient, a morbidly obese woman with COPD and recurrent pneumonia, for three months. But he didn’t have the context he needed to understand her health struggles — until he saw her home, a very small house where she lived with at least three generations of her family, as well as several friends who tended to come and go.

“There’s something really intimate about inviting someone into your home. We looked in her fridge, and it became clear why her BMI was so high,” says Park. “Why does she keep coming in? Why isn’t she taking all of her medications? That kind of learning doesn’t really come in one week or two weeks or four weeks,” he says.

Park’s participation in MetroPAP, an innovative University of Minnesota program that trains medical students to work in urban, medically underserved communities for nine months, allowed him to get to know his patient well, gain her trust, and discover the insights he needed to understand her health challenges.

MetroPAP — short for Metropolitan Physician Associate Program — is now in its third year and is the only program of its kind in the nation.

Proven approach, new setting

The program was inspired by the U’s internationally renowned Rural Physician Associate Program (RPAP). Launched in 1971, RPAP places third-year medical students in rural communities for nine-month rotations. So far, it has helped train more than 1,300 aspiring physicians to practice primary care in rural areas.

But Kathleen Brooks, M.D., M.B.A., M.P.A., director of RPAP, was concerned by the dearth of primary care doctors in urban communities, too.

“We thought, ‘wouldn’t it be interesting to take this educational model and apply it to urban underserved settings?’” says Brooks. “What would that look like?” So in 2008, then-Medical School dean Deborah Powell, M.D., challenged her to design a pilot program to find out.

Brooks — along with MetroPAP cofounders Michael Wootten, M.D., and Shailendra Prasad, M.D., M.P.H. — sought ideas from other institutions around the world.

Finding nothing like what they had in mind, they followed the RPAP model to create MetroPAP, starting small, with just two participants each year (next year it will have three, compared with 40 for RPAP). The two programs have the same core requirements for clerkships and the same basic requirements in terms of final exams, explains Brooks, who now directs both MetroPAP and RPAP.

As with RPAP, interested students apply to MetroPAP in the winter of their second year of medical school. “It tends to be students who really have a passion for underserved medicine and students who are really interested in primary care,” Brooks says.

Current MetroPAP student Vanessa Ozomaro says she’s thrilled — and undaunted — by the chance to help shape a one-of-a-kind work in progress. This winter she participated in a new six-week psychiatry rotation that joins surgery, emergency medicine, family medicine, and a two-part elective at Broadway Family Medicine Clinic in North Minneapolis and north Memorial Medical Center in nearby Robbinsdale.

A rich way to learn

MetroPAP students genuinely want to get to know their patients and mentors. “Students see it as an educational opportunity to have continuity with patients and preceptors and the health care team over nine months,” says Brooks. “I think it’s appealing, just intuitively, as a rich way to learn clinical medicine.”

While RPAP often tends to attract students from rural areas, MetroPAP has drawn students from both urban and suburban areas. Park, for example, is from the northern Twin Cities suburb of Shoreview. Ozomaro, the daughter of a nurse who is a Nigerian immigrant, grew up in St. Paul and says her urban high school had “a very diverse” environment.

“A lot of my friends had immigrant backgrounds, east African or Hmong, and we often had conversations about their experiences with the health care system,” Ozomaro says. That upbringing convinced her that it’s important for patients to be comfortable with and able to communicate with their physicians.

“I never had an African, or an African American, physician see me. I always felt like there were a lot of people who didn’t look like me, in medical [settings] and in the sciences generally.”

MetroPAP students share a deep commitment to social justice and to developing the humanistic side of medicine, says Prasad, assistant professor of family medicine. “RPAP has shown us a different way. In medical school, you get to a point where you start looking at things in a very reductionist way: You look at the heart. You look at the lungs. Here, the focus is on the context of the patient and the family and the community — the big picture.”

There’s also ample opportunity to develop procedural skills. “Objectively, in terms of clinical competency, this program is great, too,” says Park, who is taking a break from medical school to earn his master’s degree in public health. “I was able to do a lot more procedures — knee injections, circumcisions, things that come with a bit of liability. They treat you more like an intern.”

That’s by design, Prasad says. “You are treated like part of the family.

“[MetroPAP] students participate in our research meetings. We call it the percolator; they come and sit with us in the percolator and bring their ideas. And they’re part of our noncurricular activities, too — going to a baseball game, being part of our book club. We don’t force them to. It’s just natural.”

MetroPAP’s future is now

MetroPAP is built around mentorship, adds Prasad. The eager support of faculty preceptors and residents is essential. “When you look at why medical students choose disciplines, one common predictor usually is strong mentorship, strong role models. we tend to shape ourselves after folks we admire.”

Park, for one, plans to keep the trend going. “Developing strong relationships with mentors in MetroPAP gives me a framework for how I want to be a mentor to future [physicians],” he says.

“Any idea I had, they told me to run with it. I want to be involved in medical education and to help shape what it looks like.”

For now, say Brooks and Prasad, among the biggest challenges facing MetroPAP is figuring out how to expand it and make it replicable for other institutions.

“Is this an educational model we can expand, and if so, to what degree?” Brooks asks. The program’s capacity was initially limited both by design (“It’s easier to course-correct if you only have a couple of students,” she says) and by the availability of community sites. The faculty is working with the Central Avenue Neighborhood Health Source Consortium to find more participating clinics.

The time is right for MetroPAP, says Prasad: “I feel a synergy there.”

Participating faculty and students say MetroPAP reflects, as Brooks puts it, “a changing overall perspective on medical education.”

“We’re slowly doing away with the thinking that empirical knowledge is paramount to everything else,” says Park. “Scientific competency is just one tool in the toolbox. It’s about a bigger process: How do I go about building relationships in my community?”

Gradually, attentively, one patient at a time.

Susan Maas is a freelance writer who lives in Minneapolis.

To make a gift to support medical education at the University of Minnesota, visit www.give.umn.edu/giveto/meded.

Web extras

Video

Learn more about Vanessa Ozomaro’s community health project.

Community impact

A crucial component of MetroPAP is the chance to do a community health assessment, a project built around identifying and solving a problem or meeting a need in the community the student is serving. It’s not merely an academic exercise, says Shailendra Prasad, M.D., M.P.H., program cofounder and assistant professor of family medicine and community health. Students are expected to look, listen, and work with the community to make meaningful change.

Prasad points to one project that led to a lasting connection between Broadway Family Medicine Clinic in North Minneapolis and The Bridge for Youth, a resource and advocacy organization serving homeless teens.

MetroPAP student Vanessa Ozomaro lights up when she describes her idea: She’s meeting with representatives of local anti-human-trafficking organizations to connect women in prostitution, and those trying to transition out of it, with accessible health care.

“I want to identify barriers to their receiving health care, reasons why they may come to the clinic, and the type of interactions they may have had with physicians in the past,” Ozomaro says. “I want to really find out what their needs are.”

Watch a video of Vanessa and learn more about her community health project.

Building bonds

MetroPAP brings medical students and patients together in a way that traditional rotations can’t, says Ben Pederson, one of two students who blazed the MetroPAP trail in its inaugural year, 2010-11.

He tells this story to prove his point:

“I met this 60-year-old woman who would come in for stress reduction and body work; she’d been coming to Broadway [Family Medicine Clinic in North Minneapolis] for many years. I saw her at a couple different sessions, and we really got along.

“Well, she found a breast lump. I was able to go to that [diagnostic] visit and, later, to go when she was referred to the breast cancer clinic at North Memorial. She had a tumor that needed to be operated on. It’s a devastating diagnosis for anyone, but she had a very limited support network. I was able to be there with her. Every pre-op visit she had, I was there. We were able to talk about her diagnosis, talk about these complex decisions.”

When the time came for her operation, “I scrubbed in on her surgery. I was first assist, and I was able to see her in the hospital after. I think it really meant a lot to her, and it certainly meant a lot to me,” Pederson says. “I saw her for a few followup appointments after her surgery, and she’s doing well.

“People with cancer really struggle to find continuity with their providers. That’s a big part of what a good family physician can do: help patients feel comfortable and at home. It was a fantastic experience for me.”

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Big-time interest in nanomedicine

2013-04-29T19:53:19Z

U of M researchers are tapping tiny particles’ huge potential in a new realm

By Miranda Taylor

At the University of Minnesota’s new AeroCore Center, researchers are thinking big by exploring the potential of particles one-billionth of a meter in size. The center has brought together researchers from the College of Pharmacy, Masonic Cancer Center, College of Science and Engineering, and Medical School to develop a new way to eradicate lung cancer cells: inhalation of nanoparticles.

The initiative is one of many University-wide and nationwide projects advancing nanotechnology — the science of manipulating materials on an atomic or molecular scale. Broadly speaking, it’s showing up in medicine, energy, information systems, including sensors, and even in everyday products such as paints, sunscreens, and self-cleaning glass.

“The movement to put nano into medicine is a growing one,” says Stephen Campbell, Ph.D., electrical and computer engineering professor and director of the University’s Nanofabrication Center, which helps the University and companies across the country develop nanotechnology-based products.

Increasingly, he says, nanoscale drugs and devices are being used to detect and treat medical conditions. And, as the lung cancer study suggests, these tiny particles have huge potential.

Nanomedicine and cancer

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death among both men and women, accounting for 28 percent of all U.S. cancer deaths expected this year.

At the AeroCore Inhalation Testing Research Facility, University researchers are combining nanoparticles with hyperthermia, the process of raising heat levels to a point that threatens cell survival, to kill cancerous cells that have formed in the lungs. By heating iron oxide nanoparticles to temperatures higher than 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, they have been able to kill cancer cells in preliminary mouse-model trials.

To get the nanoparticles into the lungs, the researchers developed an aerosol inhalant that, with just a few deep breaths from the patient, carries iron oxide nanoparticles to diseased sites in the lungs.

Then, in a motion resembling a magician’s trick, the wave of a magnet outside the body, over the area where a tumor has formed, causes the iron oxide particles to become agitated — and hot enough to kill many of the cancerous cells around them.

From there, cells in the body called macrophages remove the dead cancer cells and iron oxide particles. Over time, any remaining particles are converted into iron salts that the body can absorb or clear.

The next step in the research is to improve the technique to the point where it can completely clear a site of cancer, says the project’s leader, Jayanth Panyam, Ph.D., codirector of the Department of Defense-funded AeroCore Center.

“We have not yet successfully eliminated 100 percent of the cancerous cells in an area,” says Panyam, who is also an associate professor in the College of Pharmacy and a member of the Masonic Cancer Center, University of Minnesota. “Without all of the cancer cells gone, the cancer will continue to come back. but what we have now does serve to help eliminate a significant portion of the cancer.”

And that’s big progress.

A growing field

Nationally, nearly 250 nanomedicine products are being used or tested in humans, according to a study published in the January 2013 issue of Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, and Medicine.

But the field is still in an early stage, says the study’s lead author, Michael Etheridge, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering in the University’s Institute for Engineering in Medicine. So far, the identified applications “are only scratching the surface of the potential available,” he told the Huffington Post in February.

“Nanomedicine products have exciting potential in so many different applications, ranging from cancer treatment or diagnosis, imaging, infectious diseases, immunologic diseases, or possibly facilitating transplantation,” says the study’s senior author, Jeffrey McCullough, M.D., a professor of laboratory medicine and pathology in the University’s Medical School and a former director of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine. “There is no question that nanomedicine products will be important in medical advances over the next decade.”

Collaboration is key

Collaboration within and beyond the University’s walls has proven essential for nanotechnology research and development. Experts from such wide-ranging fields as biomedical engineering, pharmaceuticals, head and neck surgery, and veterinary medicine are connecting over nanotechnology’s potential.

That means a person who wants to understand how to fix a problem has to find someone who has the technology to help.

“The developers behind nanotechnology don’t always understand how their discovery can be applied elsewhere,” says the Nanofabrication Center’s Campbell. “That’s not to mention the challenges of finding someone who may be interested but works for another institution or speaks another language.”

To help connect the right people, the University supports a variety of interdisciplinary workshops, conferences, and centers. A joint program of the Institute on the Environment and Medical Devices Center, for example, provides start-up funding, resources, and a network for nanotechnology projects that cross collegiate boundaries.

Increasingly, researchers are coming together with the understanding that it’s the small stuff that matters.

Miranda Taylor is a communications associate with the University’s Academic Health Center.

To learn more about nanotechnology at the University of Minnesota, visit www.nano.umn.edu.

Exploring what nano can do

University of Minnesota researchers from multiple disciplines are discovering what nanomedicine can do. Here are a few examples:

Shai Ashkenazi, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering
Developing less invasive imaging probes including a thin, flexible ultrasound device to provide a clearer picture inside the body
Allison Hubel, Ph.D., associate professor of mechanical engineering and Masonic Cancer Center member
Creating synthetic corneal tissue that mimics natural tissue
William Kennedy, M.D., professor of neurology
Quantifying cognitive function via nanotech-enabled sensors
Jayanth Panyam, Ph.D., associate professor of pharmaceutics and Masonic Cancer Center member
Investigating effectiveness of nanoparticles in destroying lung cancer cells
Amy Skubitz, Ph.D., professor of laboratory medicine and pathology and Masonic Cancer Center member
Seeking to detect ovarian cancer earlier and identify recurrences
T. Andrew Taton, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry and Masonic Cancer Center member
Creating a cancer vaccine using proteincoated nanoparticles

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Where stress, diabetes, and culture converge

2013-04-29T19:52:10Z

A UMD study explores the link between stress and high diabetes rates among Native Americans of the Midwest

By Gene Rebeck

Sociologist Melissa Walls, Ph.D., wants to make something clear: She’s not the story behind the $2.8 million National Institutes of Health research grant that she, a Medical School, Duluth colleague, and two other researchers were awarded last fall.

The story, as she sees it, is about adults her team will be working with to examine the ties between stress and type 2 diabetes among Native Americans — the population with the highest diabetes rate in the world.

“I consider them co-investigators,” says Walls, who is leading the five-year study. “They are equal partners.”

Walls, who studies the social aspects of disease among indigenous people, is Ojibwe herself, with many relatives on the Bois Forte reservation on Lake Vermilion in northern Minnesota. Bois Forte is one of the five Midwestern indigenous communities participating in the study. (Walls shares the names of participating communities only when they ask to be named publicly.)

The longitudinal study will follow a cohort of 250 people for four years, periodically monitoring their self-reported stress levels and measuring their blood sugar and cortisol levels. Chronically elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, can increase blood sugar and inhibit the effects of insulin, leading to or compounding diabetes.

Improving Native Americans’ health

Walls, a University of Minnesota, Duluth graduate, earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She returned to Duluth in 2007 as an assistant professor in the sociology department, where she earned grants for studying American Indian health. The work connected her with research partners in the Medical School, and she joined its faculty in 2011. “It was a natural fit,” Walls notes, given that improving Native American health is among the school’s priorities.

Collaborating with Walls on the current study are professor Mustafa al’Absi, Ph.D., director of the Duluth Medical Research Institute at UMD and an expert on the biological and physiological mechanisms of stress; sociologist Les Whitbeck, Ph.D., Walls’s mentor at Nebraska; and Kelley Sittner Hartshorn, Ph.D., from Oklahoma State University.

The project grew out of a diabetes study called mino giizhigad (“good day” in Ojibwe). On that study, Walls worked with Doris Isham, a diabetes nurse at Bois Forte. Isham told her that although her patients conscientiously took their medications and gave themselves shots, they were far less likely to exercise or eat healthier diets. It was almost as if they were giving up. “To me,” Walls says, “it sounded like depression or apathy.”

That insight led her to consider how stress affects type 2 diabetes in American Indian communities. Type 2 diabetes is the fourth-leading cause of death among indigenous Americans and a major contributor to cardiovascular disease, the No. 1 killer in this population. American Indians and Alaska Natives are more than twice as likely as other Americans to have diabetes.

While many studies have looked at type 2 diabetes among U.S. indigenous people, little has been written about the connection between diabetes and stress. “We know that stress and diabetes are related — [stress] impacts your ability to control diabetes, your health behaviors,” says Walls, who wants to learn more about how stress affects treatment compliance and disease progression.

Dealing with stress—past and present

Her goal is to develop treatment protocols for indigenous people that take into account their culture and history. This population copes with a disproportionate number of stressors, says Walls, naming several: economic disadvantage, unemployment, community violence, discrimination, and the long-term effects of historical traumas.

Walls is particularly interested in the last one — how catastrophic experiences in a group’s past affect its current members’ emotional and physical health. For indigenous people, she says, particularly those who live on reservations, historical trauma is bound up with cultural loss. What happened in the past, she argues, is related to contemporary stressors.

Her mentor, Whitbeck, codeveloped a “historical-loss scale” based on such questions as how often participants think about loss of land, language, tradition, and other aspects of their culture. “In some cases, 25 percent of our sample was thinking of these certain losses more than daily,” says Walls, describing a previous study she and Whitbeck conducted.

To get a true sense of the stressors indigenous people struggle with requires a deep engagement with them and their way of life, says Walls. In the current study, she and her team will be working with research councils in each community. The councils, which will include at least one member with type 2 diabetes, a tribal elder, and a service provider working with type 2 patients, will help develop questionnaires, recruit participants, and collect data. This inclusive approach, Walls says, “acknowledges the community as an equal partner in the research process.”

Bois Forte elder and community leader Stan Day has worked with Walls in the past and will serve on the community research council. “It’s a special thing for me to work for my people in any capacity that I can,” says Day. “I also have diabetes. It’s a double concern.” like Walls, he believes that the loss of land and culture is still affecting his people. “It’s something we have to heal from,” he says.

Walls hopes her team’s results aid that healing. “This is a basic research grant, but our long-term goal is always translating that basic research into something that’s actually usable and tangible. every little bit we do brings awareness.”

By Gene Rebeck, a freelance writer based in Duluth.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Easing the symptoms of focal dystonia

2013-04-29T19:51:53Z

Twenty years ago, while studying classical guitar at the University of Minnesota, Dean Harrington lost the fine motor control in the “plucking” fingers of his right hand. Soon he also found that he could no longer type efficiently on a computer and that his right forefinger would spontaneously click the mouse at inappropriate times.

He had developed focal dystonia, a neurological movement disorder that causes muscles to involuntarily contract and twist into unnatural positions. It typically affects a single group of muscles, usually those that a person repeatedly uses for a specific purpose—the muscles, for example, in a pianist’s hand, a trumpeter’s lips, a golfer’s forearm, a surgeon’s wrist, or a football placekicker’s leg. Many people in a variety of professions, including well-known musicians, athletes, writers, and illustrators, have been forced to forsake their careers after developing the condition.

Harrington found the computer problem was annoying, but easy to fix: He resorted to one-finger typing. But the effect of the focal dystonia on his guitar playing was devastating. Harrington had to give up classical guitar. Fortunately, he could still play with a flat pick, a technique that uses a different set of muscles. He switched to performing jazz.

In the ensuing years, Harrington tried all sorts of treatments for his hand dystonia, including acupuncture and various behavioral and massage therapies. Nothing worked. Harrington has enjoyed a full and busy career as a jazz musician (he performs with the popular gypsy jazz band Mill City Hot Club—see video above right), but he never completely gave up on returning to classical guitar. So when he heard about the focal dystonia research being conducted at the University of Minnesota’s Brain Plasticity Laboratory, he volunteered. So far, he has participated in three of the lab’s brain-stimulation studies, including one last year that involved a combination of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and physical therapy.

Neuroplasticity ‘gone bad’

The aim of the lab’s focal dystonia research is to alter brain-cell excitability in a way that helps the brain “rewire” itself to regain lost function. “Focal dystonia is thought to be the result of neuroplasticity gone bad,” explains Teresa Kimberley, P.T., Ph.D., codirector of the Brain Plasticity Laboratory. “People who develop focal dystonia seem to have lost the inhibitory mechanisms in their brain that come in and stop the neuroplastic response.”

Individuals with focal dystonia “literally wake up one morning to discover that their muscles are doing weird things,” she says. And the problem is usually very task-specific. An illustrator may discover, for example, that the muscles in his drawing hand no longer let him hold a pencil. But he can do just about anything else with the fingers of that hand— button a shirt, for example, or eat with chopsticks.

“There’s nothing really wrong with their muscular-skeletal system,” explains Kimberley. “Their muscle biopsies are normal. Their nerve conduction velocities are normal. Their strength is normal. Their range of motion is normal.”

For that reason, focal dystonia is often mistakenly diagnosed as a psychological disorder. “Many people have dreadful stories of being told that they were just crazy,” says Kimberley. “Others were told they had Parkinson’s disease or [multiple sclerosis] or even carpal tunnel syndrome, and then they would have surgery, which would make it worse. Often it takes years to get a correct diagnosis.”

Focal dystonia may be “all in the head,” but not in a psychological way. Brain imaging has shown that the condition arises from faulty, over-excited neural connections in the sensorimotor area of the cerebral cortex, the thin layer of neurons that cover the cerebrum. Because of those over-excited neurons, the brain tells the wrong muscles to contract.

Enhancing therapy

Current treatments for focal dystonia include botulinum toxin (Botox) injections and sensorimotor retraining therapy, a somewhat tedious process in which the brain is retrained to pick up the correct sensory cues from the affected muscles. But neither is a cure, and many people with the condition who undergo these treatments fail to see their symptoms improve.

At the Brain Plasticity Laboratory, Kimberley and her colleagues are exploring a promising new avenue of treatment. In experimental studies, they have found that priming the affected cells in the brain with rTMS can inhibit their excitability, making the brain more receptive to retraining.

“rTMS alone is not going to be a magic bullet that somehow miraculously changes people,” says Kimberley. “But it could be that the technology could be harnessed as an adjunct, enhancing the rehabilitation.”

Subtle improvement

Harrington knew the Brain Plasticity Laboratory’s studies were in their earliest stages and that there was no guarantee that they would have any impact on his focal dystonia. Still, he’s noticed some subtle changes in his symptoms, particularly since his participation in the latest study last summer.

“My typing has improved,” he says. “It’s not fast, but I’m not typing any more with one finger.”

He has even returned, if only tentatively, to playing classical guitar. “I’m approaching it like a beginner,” he stresses. “I’m going in really, really slow.” It’s too soon, he says, to know if he will be able to perform that style of guitar with any regularity. But for the first time in 20 years, he feels hopeful.

By Susan Perry

Web extra

Video:
Dean Harrington’s Mill City Hot Club

View a video of Dean Harrington playing with his band.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Students without borders

2013-04-29T19:50:50Z

The University’s Global Future Physician seminar takes premed students across the world to reflect on the state of health and health care today

At the University of Minnesota, a select group of students is swapping textbooks for English-Kannada dictionaries and boning up on Udupi cuisine for a premed course called the Global Future Physician (GFP), which plays out not in the classroom but amid the cacophony of Mysore, India, and across the tribal lands of the Indian state of Karnataka.

The goal of the course seems straightforward — expose students to the inner workings of a medical system in a vastly different land — but there’s a deeper challenge for the students selected to make the trip.

“We want each student to grow in personal awareness,” says Tricia Todd, M.P.H., assistant director of the University’s Health Careers Center and cofounder of the GFP seminar. “If you come back from India and haven’t learned anything about yourself, you’ve missed the point.”

The setting for the seminar is the Vivekananda Institute of Indian Studies, an outgrowth of the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SYVM) that was started almost 30 years ago by a group of medical students from the Mysore Medical College. Those students, committed to the idea of “building a new civil society in India,” grew SVYM from a volunteer team that handed out medicine samples to the poor and opened tribal schools for kids in old cow sheds, to a thriving organization that today includes hospitals, clinics, schools, and more.

The backstory

The three-week seminar in India is the culmination of the Future Physician Series, classes designed to help University undergraduate or postbaccalaureate students decide whether medicine might be the career for them.

Rita Chakrabarti was among the still unsure. “I thought I wanted to go to medical school,” says Chakrabarti, a postbaccalaureate student at the University, “But I wasn’t quite convinced, so I enrolled in the Future Physician classes. Fantastic experience! Those classes helped me make the decision that medical school is something I really want.”

Future Physician students hear from practicing doctors, discuss topics such as medical ethics and primary versus specialized care, and spend time volunteering in a medical setting. Only 25 students are chosen to take the global seminar each year.

Destination: Mysore

Shailendra Prasad, M.D., M.P.H., was among the medical students who helped found SVYM in the early ’80s. Today, he is an assistant professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Minnesota — and, ultimately, the link that helped pull the pieces of Global Future Physician together.

“We wanted to give future M.D.s exposure to the social determinants of health — things like gender, socioeconomic status, education — and explore how they affect medical delivery,” says Prasad. “It’s easier to get that perspective in India because things are more stark.”

Prasad’s close connections with SVYM smoothed the way for an inaugural GFP trip to India, in January 2012.

“When we got to Mysore, they took us straight to the market in the city center,” recalls David Droullard, who was a University senior when he was chosen to participate in that first GFP trip. “It was chaotic, overwhelming — and a cunning choice by the trip leaders. The market is almost a microcosm of the diversity of India, and it really set the stage for our three weeks of learning,” says Droullard, who is now a first-year medical student at Columbia University.

And learn they did. Lectures from medical doctors and educators, visits to rural clinics and schools, and daily debriefing sessions with the faculty leaders filled each day.

“We were seeing not just the ‘what,’” explains Droullard, “but the ‘why’ behind it. In some ways, I learned more in my three weeks in India than I did in my entire junior year abroad.”

Watch, listen, learn

The entire faculty team — Todd and Prasad, who developed the program and led last year’s trip, and this year’s faculty leaders, Laura Wellington, M.D., and Keri Bergeson, M.D. — share one very clear notion: Untrained students should not go abroad to work in medical clinics.

“Other mission trips often target premed students,” says Todd, “offering them the chance to get hands-on experience in a foreign clinic. But this is an ethical issue: you shouldn’t practice medicine, anywhere, without a license.”

Wellington, a faculty physician at North Memorial Medical Center, agrees that, instead of “doing” when they’re not ready, students are better off examining global medicine issues.

“What is our role, as Westerners, as health care workers in a global community?” she asks. “What can we bring to share with their communities? What can we learn and bring back to our own communities? These are questions that are so important for anyone thinking about studying medicine to ponder.”

Returning to Minnesota at the end of January after this year’s trip, Chakrabarti was reeling from her whirlwind experience.

“My big takeaway,” she says, “was becoming aware of the social determinants of health and how they affect every single patient you will ever see as a doctor.”

By Barbara Knox, a Minneapolis-based writer and editor and frequent contributor to the Medical Bulletin.

Web extra

Slideshow: Students without borders

U premed students travel to India to study social factors affecting medical care delivery. See the slideshow.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Alumni Spotlight | Christopher Wenner, M.D.

2013-04-29T19:49:25Z

A new-generation country doctor

Family physician Christopher Wenner, M.D., is also his own nurse, receptionist, accountant, and janitor. And that’s how he likes it.

Three years ago, the 1999 Medical School alumnus got fed up with the constant hurry he faced in his job with a large practice group and decided to become a solo practitioner in Cold Spring, Minn., his hometown.

“I see it as an avenue for me to practice medicine in a fashion that I feel is most fitting with family medicine — spending time with my patients, getting to know them as individuals,” Wenner says.

In his no-frills solo practice today, seeing just two patients per day covers his costs. He normally schedules 30-minute appointments, but it’s OK if they run long. He can do home visits when it’s more convenient for his patients. And, yes, he cleans his own exam rooms between appointments.

But the flexibility and autonomy that come with being his own boss are completely worth it, Wenner says.

“It’s being able to practice how I see fit, [doing] what’s best for my patients, what’s best for my practice, what’s best for myself,” he says. “When things need to get changed, it’s a committee of one.”

Making an old model new again

Wenner, who matriculated from the Medical School, Duluth campus, had always planned to go into family practice. “I really fell into that [Duluth] model and embraced it,” he says.

But as part of a group practice, he was pumping through appointments with 30 to 40 patients per day and felt like he didn’t have enough time to adequately address everyone’s concerns. So he decided to make a radical change and go out on his own.

Wenner admits that he faced a steep learning curve while he figured out how to run a medical business in the 2000s. In the 1950s, doctors could get by with a stack of 3-by-5-inch notecards as patient records, he says, but today with mandatory electronic medical records, “it’s exceedingly complex.”

The first six months were rough. He didn’t take a salary. He’d see one person one day and no one the next. At times he wondered whether his decision to go solo was a good one.

“Going from a regular paycheck to nothing — it’s quite an abrupt realization,” he says. “But I knew that I had a good model, and I knew that I was lean.”

Back on track

Three years later, Wenner feels like he’s on stable ground. In November he moved his office from a rented space in a strip mall to a renovated bank building on Main Street that he and his wife, Jennifer, own. He sees about 10 patients per day.

And now he employs an office assistant to help him with scheduling and billing, though Wenner still does technical work like blood draws himself. He says that’s often a good thing.

“Right now I find that it’s a nice way to end the visit — with some small talk,” he says. “The more time I’m able to spend with my patient, the better the visit is.”

Wenner finds that he’s spending more time with his family, too. His office is just three blocks from his home, and he gets home for dinner with his wife and three young children almost every night.

Wenner says it’s a privilege to be back in his hometown, practicing medicine the way he thinks it should be done. Sometimes that means being able to say, “There’s no charge for today’s visit,” or blocking off an afternoon to spend time with a patient in hospice, he says.

“Those are the things that keep me energized and very happy doing what I’m doing.”

By Nicole Endres, managing editor of the Medical Bulletin.

Web extras

Slideshow: A new-generation country doctor

Glimpse a day in the life of solo practitioner and Medical School alumnus Christopher Wenner, M.D.

A real family practice

At Wenner family gatherings, there’s no shortage of medical opinions.

Family physician Christopher Wenner, M.D., Medical School Class of 1999, is the oldest of four children. his sister Michelle Chestovich, M.D., Medical School Class of 2001, is a family physician in St. Paul. Another sister, Rachel Wenner Ruzanic, M.D., Medical School Class of 2007, practices dermatology in St. Cloud (and is married to emergency physician Ted Ruzanic, M.D., Medical School Class of 2005). And his youngest sister, Gretchen Butler, will be pursuing a radiology residency at the University after graduating from Creighton University School of Medicine in May.

Their father, Joseph H. Wenner, D.D.S., graduated from the University’s School of Dentistry, and their mother, Mary Legatt Wenner, has a master’s degree from the School of Public Health.

Their grandfather, Waldemar T. Wenner, M.D., Medical School Class of 1925, was an ophthalmologist, and their uncle Waldemar H. Wenner, M.D., Medical School Class of 1958, was a pediatrician.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Scholarship Winner | Andrea Stember

2013-04-29T19:48:49Z

Scholarships allow a champion pole-vaulter to set a high bar in medical school, too

Andrea Stember knows how to seize an opportunity. When an ankle injury curtailed her budding career as a teenage gymnast, the Bemidji resident decided to take up pole-vaulting. Astonishingly, she managed to break the school record on her first try.

“It was not a lofty goal,” Stember jokes. “The record wasn’t all that impressive.” Still, her initial success spurred her to put some serious effort into the sport — practicing for hours, attending training camps — and she eventually won the state pole-vault championships three years in a row.

“I worked hard to get better at it,” she says. “If you set your mind to it, you can accomplish it.”

Hard work is important, but Stember, now a 27-year-old medical student at the University of Minnesota, also acknowledges the help she’s received from other people on life’s path. Her coach played a vital role in her success as a vaulter, and generous scholarship support has made her enrollment at the U and her medical studies possible.

Confronting challenges

Stember grew up in northern Minnesota, in a family of five that grappled with medical issues almost daily. Her oldest brother was born with a host of complex health problems, including serious immune deficiencies and type 1 diabetes. When the family wasn’t hunting, canoeing, gathering wild rice, tapping trees for maple syrup, or traveling to trapping conventions (where Stember participated in tomahawk-throwing competitions), they were often attending medical appointments. Stember remembers tagging along — her toy doctor’s case in hand — as they visited innumerable clinics and hospitals.

Those visits made an impression on Stember. “My brother’s doctors were sometimes annoyed if my mother had one too many questions or my father didn’t understand something that the doctor had said,” she recalls. “So I try to keep that in mind when I interact with people: When a doctor says something, it’s like a foreign language to someone who doesn’t know medicine. I need to … remind myself that my whole reason for being there is to care for the patient — and that may include caring for his or her family, too.”

New drug treatments, multiple surgeries, organ transplants, and a positive attitude have kept Stember’s brother alive over the years. But caring for him has been both an emotional and financial drain on the family. When Stember turned 17 and decided to pursue a college education, her parents — her father is a construction worker and her mother a paraprofessional for the Bemidji school district — could offer little financial help. Her summer job cleaning cabins didn’t pay enough to cover tuition, either.

Reaching new heights

To Stember’s surprise, pole-vaulting provided the answer: “Through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, and many hours on the track, I was recruited out of high school,” Stember says. “Had it not been for the scholarships offered to me, I would have not even considered attending the U, and I would have missed out on an incredible undergraduate experience.” Ultimately, she received a full academic scholarship that supported her as a sophomore, junior, and senior.

In 2008, Stember completed her undergraduate degree, majoring in biology, society, and the environment. She planned to go on to medical school, but again required financial assistance. Now in her fourth year of medical school, Stember is grateful for the support of four different scholarships, including the 2012 Samuel J. Ravitch Scholarship.

“It definitely eases the burden and the stress,” she observes. “Financial stress doesn’t go away. The tests come and go, and you can cross those off the list, but the [expenses] continue to pile up.”

This summer, Stember will begin her emergency medicine residency at the Denver Health Medical Center.

But she’s already putting her technical knowledge and bedside manner into practice. last spring, her brother underwent a pancreas transplant, and Stember found her family turning to her for answers.

Being immersed in the situation as both a family member and a doctor-tobe reinforced the notion that practicing medicine requires empathy, as well as technical knowledge. “It reminded me that when a family is in a stressful situation, the things you say as a doctor don’t necessarily stick,” Stember says. “you have to take all that into account.”

By Joel Hoekstra, a Minneapolis-based writer and editor

Web extras

Slideshow: Scholarship recipient reaches new heights

Scholarship recipient and champion pole-vaulter Andrea Stember sets a high bar in Medical School. View a photo slideshow featuring Stember’s extracurricular activities.

Make a gift

To make a gift, visit
www.give.umn.edu/giveto/meded.

Continuing their legacy

Many Medical School alumni continue to have a lasting impact — even years and years after their deaths — by having created endowed scholarships for medical students.

Andrea Stember, for instance, has benefited from the Samuel J. Ravitch (Class of 1926) Scholarship, the B. A. Dyar (Class of 1905) and Robert Dyar (Class of 1934) Memorial Scholarship, and the Dr. Harry F. (Class of 1947) and Grace E. Burich Scholarship. (Stember also has received the David A. Dunshee Scholarship, established by the former medical student’s family in his memory.)

Gifts to endowed scholarship funds truly keep on giving. The principal gift amount is invested and continues to grow over time, while the interest it accrues is paid out annually as a scholarship to help defray the rising costs of medical school for an outstanding student.

To learn more about creating an endowed scholarship fund at the University of Minnesota Medical School, contact Teri McIntyre at 612-625-5976 or mcintyre@umn.edu.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Ahead of the curve

2013-04-29T19:47:49Z

The Medical School celebrates 125 years of innovative education

The hopeful student wishing to join the first medical school class at the University of Minnesota in 1888 needed little more than a high school diploma to apply. There were no national standards for medical education at the time, and the requirements for admission and subsequent graduation were regularly debated and varied between institutions.

Much has changed for the University of Minnesota Medical School — founded in 1888 as the College of Medicine and Surgery — in its 125-year existence, particularly in education.

The school’s first students trained for three academic years of six months each, enjoying summers off, before becoming doctors. They were young and roguish, playing tricks on their professors by introducing a cadaver to a faculty meeting, crowdsurfing a fellow student during class, or rioting after an unpopular lecture. The growing presence of women (there were just two in the first class) is thought to have helped to tone down this rowdy behavior.

The College of Medicine and Surgery went on to set much higher admissions standards and become a national leader in medical education. In fact, by 1910 when the seminal Flexner Report was released, Minnesota was credited as being “perhaps the first state in the union that may fairly be considered to have solved the most perplexing problems with medical education and practice.”

Elliot Memorial Hospital, the first of Minnesota’s university hospitals, was built on campus the following year. The Medical School later partnered with Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., to offer the first graduate-level program for physicians. In 1917 the program issued the first-ever graduate degree in a clinical specialty.

Realizing the value of mentorship and wanting to give adequate attention to each student, by 1922 the Medical School had successfully limited class sizes, ahead of many of its peers. In 1923 the school received twice as many applications as there were spaces, and that was considered selective. Interest in attending medical school has grown considerably since then: in 2012 the Medical School accepted only 5 percent of applicants to fill 230 spaces on its Twin Cities and Duluth campuses.

In its 125-year history, the Medical School has pioneered and advanced many areas of education and will continue to do so in the future. For example, it launched the nationally lauded Rural Physician Associate Program in 1971 and is now wrapping up the third year of a metro model. Also, the school will be involved in the Academic Health Center’s new Coordinating Center for Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice, a national initiative to find the best ways to prepare health professional students to work in today’s fast-changing health care environment.

Timeline

1888-1913 First 25 years

The University of Minnesota College of Medicine and Surgery, as it was originally named, is founded in 1888. The first graduating class of 23 students includes two women. The first black student, Walter B. Holmes, graduates in 1895. Medical education as a whole is just beginning to take shape in America. The College of Medicine and Surgery becomes the Medical School in 1913.

1913-1938 Second 25 years

With Mayo Clinic, the Medical School offers the first medical graduate school program in the nation. It awards the first-ever graduate degree for a clinical specialty on May 24, 1917. Class size is limited in the 1920s to better support student learning. Faculty members begin to approach learning and research with a distinct vision of interdisciplinary partnership. Owen Wangensteen, M.D., Ph.D., takes the reins of the Surgery Department in 1930 and encourages faculty to pursue bold new ideas.

1938-1963 Third 25 years

The University is home to huge leaps in surgical advancement, including the world’s first successful open-heart surgery in 1952. A successful kidney transplant is conducted at the University of Minnesota between twins in 1963. C. Walton Lillehei, M.D., Ph.D., and Earl Bakken (who later cofounded Medtronic, Inc.) make possible the world’s first portable, battery-operated cardiac pacemaker in 1957. K-rations, cortisone, the heart-lung machine, and the blood pump are invented.

1963-1988 Fourth 25 years

The world’s first successful bone marrow, pancreas, heart-lung, and simultaneous kidney-pancreas transplants are performed at the University of Minnesota. B. J. Kennedy, M.D., pioneers the field of medical oncology. The Medical School’s Duluth campus admits its first class in 1972. The University becomes the first in the world to use artificial blood in a patient. Microbiologist Russell Johnson, Ph.D., creates a vaccine for Lyme disease.

1988-2013 Fifth 25 years

With AT&T Bell labs, the University develops functional magnetic resonance imaging, which shows the brain in action. Karen Hsiao Ashe, M.D, Ph.D., develops the first genetically engineered mouse exhibiting Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. A University research team is the first to create a beating animal heart in the laboratory. Jakub Tolar, M.D., Ph.D., and John Wagner, M.D., are the first to use bone marrow transplantation to treat epidermolysis bullosa, a devastating skin disease, in children.

By Sarah Morean, the Medical School’s communication’s manager

Web extras

Medical School: Celebrating 125 years

Learn more about Medical School innovations at z.umn.edu/med125.

Medical School by the numbers

  
     
    1888
    2013
  

    Acceptance
rate
    50%(1923)
    5% 
  

    Graduating
class
    23
    225
  

    Women in
the class
    8%
    47%
  

    Months in
Medical School
    18
    40+
  

Connect

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

In the big leagues

2013-04-29T19:46:40Z

His life has been bookmarked by the Minnesota Twins.

When Jon Hallberg, M.D., was born in 1965, the Twins made their first World series appearance. He was a senior in college and a fourth-year medical student, respectively, when they won the World series in 1987 and 1991.

It’s only fitting that Hallberg, a member of the Medical school Class of 1992 and now an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, today serves as the team’s club physician and its Employee Assistance Program provider.

That means he’s on call 24/7 for the nearly 200 players in the Twins organization — from the instructional league to the pros. He’s the only family physician in this role in all of Major League baseball.

“I’m an educator, a referral source, an ear,” Hallberg says.

Hallberg counsels players dealing with depression, anxiety, addiction, and other psychological conditions — like suddenly losing the ability to throw the ball from one base to another — “any and all psychosocial issues that come up that might affect their ability to play ball,” he says.

As part of his official duties with the team, Hallberg also joins the players at training camp in Fort Myers, Fla., for a week each March to give presentations on such topics as over-the-counter supplement use and proper documentation of “therapeutic use exemptions” for legit medications that might cause a positive drug test, he says. (Stimulants for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder fit into this category.)

This spring marked Hallberg’s 17th trip to training camp with the team. He stops by the Twins clubhouse once per home stand, too, to check in with the guys.

“It seems cheesy to say it, but the Twins have kind of become a family,” he says. “They treat people like family.”

And though he’s plenty busy as medical director of the Mill City Clinic and with his weekly medical segments on MPR, Hallberg says the little things about the game itself also have kept him involved with the team.

Hallberg appreciates the finely manicured fields, the generations of people who attend games together, the smells of the ballpark, and the game’s inseparable connection to radio. But what really appeals to him is the lack of a clock.

“Since I spend so much time as a physician ‘on the clock,’ seeing patients every 20 minutes or so, always running behind,” Hallberg says, “I find that the last thing I need is to be reminded of, while watching a game, how little time is left.”

Web extras

Slideshow: In the big leagues

Medical School alumnus Jon Hallberg, M.D., helps keep Minnesota Twins in tip-top shape at spring training—and beyond. Check out the Minnesota Twins’ spring training facility in Fort Myers, Fla.

Diagnose, stitch, fix for the home team

Family physician Jon Hallberg, M.D., is just one University of Minnesota Medical School alumnus keeping Minnesota Twins players in tip-top shape:

John A. Steubs, M.D., Medical School Class of 1979, directs medical services for the team.
Tom Jetzer, M.D., Medical School Class of 1974, is one of three internal medicine physicians with the Twins.
Another internal medicine doctor with the team, Vijay Eyunni, M.D., M.P.H., earned his public health degree at the University in 1988.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

University mourns loss of cancer pioneers

2013-04-29T19:45:52Z

John H. Kersey, M.D.

The Masonic Cancer Center, University of Minnesota lost one of its most prominent and influential physician-scientists March 10 with the sudden death of John Kersey, M.D. He was 74.

A native Minnesotan and graduate of the Medical School (Class of 1964), Kersey dedicated his life to developing new treatments for childhood cancer. He founded the University’s blood and marrow transplant program and what is now called the Masonic Cancer Center, which became a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center under his watch in 1998.

Kersey also led the team that performed the world’s first successful bone marrow transplant for malignant lymphoma in 1975. That patient is alive and well today.

“John was the driving force that helped the University of Minnesota become internationally recognized for excellence in cancer treatment and research,” says Medical School Dean Aaron Friedman, M.D. “His enthusiasm for his work was contagious, and his passion for bringing people together to solve problems changed the way cancer research is conducted.”

Colleagues say that Kersey’s generosity as a friend and collaborator also set him apart.

“The world has been positively changed by John’s scientific, educational, and clinical contributions,” says Douglas Yee, M.D., who succeeded Kersey as director of the Masonic Cancer Center in 2007. “John provided mentorship and guidance to researchers around the world who will now carry on his legacy.”

Kersey is survived by his wife, Anne; 3 children; and 4 grandchildren.

To make a gift to the John H. Kersey Chair in Cancer Research in his memory, visit www.give.umn.edu/giveto/kerseychair.

John R. Ohlfest, Ph.D.

John Ohlfest, Ph.D., a University of Minnesota alumnus and pioneering researcher who dedicated his career to developing novel therapies for brain cancer, died of malignant melanoma on Jan. 21. He was 35.

Ohlfest, who earned his Ph.D. at the University in 2004, joined the faculty in 2005 and led the Neurosurgery Gene Therapy Program. The inaugural holder of the Hedberg Family/Children’s Cancer Research Fund Endowed Chair in Brain Tumor Research, he explored multiple strategies for tackling brain tumors. His focus was on creating customized vaccines that would stimulate a patient’s own immune cells to destroy the tumor stem cells responsible for tumor growth.

“Dr. Ohlfest was one of the true leaders in cancer research,” says Aaron Friedman, M.D., dean of the Medical School. “Everyone he came in contact with walked away invigorated about the possibilities of science.”

In recent years, Ohlfest’s work on brain tumors in dogs gained national prominence and helped pave the way for clinical trials in people.

“Brain tumors come back with extreme fury,” Ohlfest said in 2011. “Our work is never enough — not until this is cured.”

John Ohlfest is survived by his wife, Karen; 2 children; his parents; sister; and extended family. The Ohlfest Memorial Education Fund has been established in his honor through Wells Fargo for his children. To donate, visit any Wells Fargo branch and ask to make a contribution.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Loan forgiveness offers primary care incentives

2013-04-29T19:44:50Z

Fourth-year medical student Sarah Ristvedt is from a rural community in western Minnesota, but from a young age, she knew she wouldn’t follow the family tradition of hog farming. Instead, she wanted to become a doctor and return home to practice.

She was quick to apply to the Rural Physician Associate Program (RPAP) while attending the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth campus. With RPAP, she participated in a nine-month clinical experience last year in a community of fewer than 2,500 people. It’s 25 miles from her hometown of Beardsley, and there’s nowhere she’d rather be.

“My attending physicians were mostly specialists and would ask why I was going into primary care, saying I should think about lifestyle,” says Ristvedt. “[I am] choosing a specialty that isn’t going to make as much money as others.”

But to her, rural Minnesota is where she feels most connected, and where she knows she can make a big difference. She plans to stick with her plan, even though she will graduate this year $200,000 in debt.

Repaying that debt won’t be easy on a rural, primary-care doctor’s salary, and that can dissuade others from choosing Ristvedt’s path. That’s why the University has included a $1.5 million legislative proposal for a student loan forgiveness program that would offer debt relief to health professional students who make a three-year commitment to practice in an underserved Minnesota community.

Such debt relief, agrees Ristvedt, could serve as a powerful recruitment tool, attracting new practitioners to an area they had not previously believed they could afford to serve.

Learn more

U.S. News & World Report ranked the University of Minnesota Medical School 5th in rural medicine, 7th, in primary care, and 10th in family medicine nationally. See the rankings.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Couple creates their own loan-forgiveness fund

2013-04-29T19:43:25Z

Margaret Hustad-Perrin, M.D., is concerned about the increasingly specialized future of medicine.

“Fewer and fewer people are choosing to go into primary care,” says the recently retired pediatrician and 1976 Medical School alumna.

Some studies have indicated that medical students are being steered away from primary care fields such as family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics at least partly because they offer less earning potential than subspecialties. With the way the medical system is set up today, Hustad-Perrin says, “physicians tend to be better compensated for doing procedures than for spending more time with patients.”

So to encourage students who are passionate about primary care to stick with it, she and her husband, David Perrin, M.S.W., have set aside $1 million in their estate plan to create a loanforgiveness fund for those who plan to pursue primary-care pediatrics, primarycare internal medicine, family medicine, medicine-pediatrics, or psychiatry.

Whereas a traditional scholarship would provide the financial support regardless of changes in the recipients’ career paths, loans through this fund will be forgiven at a prorated amount — about 20 percent for each of five years — as the recipients continue their careers in primary care.

“To the small degree we can make it possible,” Perrin says, “we want to make sure that money does not sway the decision.”

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

The MNDrive to excellence

2013-04-29T19:42:25Z

Parkinson’s. Alzheimer’s. Schizophrenia. Stroke. Depression. These and a host of other debilitating neurological diseases afflict one in five Americans, at a staggering economic and social cost. But University of Minnesota neuroscientists expect to reduce that burden with advances in neuromodulation — treatments, such as deep brain stimulation, that change the activity of brain circuits.

Both the University and the state’s medical devices industry are leaders in this booming field — with Minnesota companies generating $2.2 billion in neuromodulationrelated revenue in 2011. And the state will continue to lead the way if an ambitious University initiative is approved by the legislature. The initiative, called MNDrive (Minnesota Discovery, Research, and Innovation economy), asks the state to invest $18 million in neuromodulation and three other key industries: food security, robotics, and bioremediation — the use of microorganisms to clean up hazardous wastes.

The aim: advance Minnesota’s economy, position the state as a leader in highgrowth industries, and improve Minnesotans’ quality of life.

Read more at z.umn.edu/cod.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

MERC cuts threaten medical training

2013-04-29T19:41:50Z

Minnesota hospitals and clinics may be forced to scale back their training programs because of 2011 state legislation that severely reduces funding to Medical education and research Costs (MERC). The cuts adversely affect University of Minnesota Medical School students and residents, partner hospitals, and, ultimately, access to health care in Minnesota.

The state program compensates hospitals, clinics, and other health care providers for a portion of the costs of clinical training for health professional students and residents.

Now, budget cuts threaten to dismantle MERC and the education it funds. Facing a budget deficit in 2011, the legislature cut MERCfunding for hospitals and clinics by more than 50 percent to $31.5 million, and eliminated direct payments ($5.35 million in 2010) to the University and University of Minnesota Medical Center, Fairview.

These cuts will have real consequences. Partner hospitals have told the University that they will soon have to reduce the number of students and residents they train. Meanwhile, Minnesota is facing a health professional shortage as the need for care grows with our aging population. Nationwide, we will need nearly 63,000 more physicians in 2015 and twice that in 2025—making recruiting from elsewhere difficult and costly.

Students and health care providers are not the only ones affected; families across the state depend on access to quality health care, and access to quality health care is critical to job and business growth in our communities.

The Minnesota legislature is now in session. The University, along with its partner hospitals, is urging the legislature to adopt Gov. Mark Dayton’s recommendation to restore MERC to 2011 funding levels.

In addition, the University is requesting that its direct appropriation, used to fund training at community health and dental clinics in the Twin Cities, Willmar, and Hibbing, also be restored.

You can help. Please contact your legislators and urge them to restore MERC funding. A strong Minnesota depends on healthy communities, which, in turn, depend on well-trained health care providers. About two-thirds of doctors who train in Minnesota stay and practice here.

Contact your legislators

Contact the HOUSE.

Contact the SENATE.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

After anticipation, relief!

2013-04-29T19:40:54Z

A sense of anticipation filled the McNamara Alumni Center March 15 as 225 fourth-year medical students waited to receive the envelopes containing a glimpse of their futures: the results of their residency matches.

On Match Day 2013, 46.7 percent of the Medical School’s graduating class learned that they’d be joining primary care residency programs. Family medicine (18.2 percent), internal medicine (16 percent), and pediatrics (8.9 percent) were the most popular fields, followed by general surgery (7.1 percent) and emergency medicine (5.8 percent).

Web extras

Slideshow: Meeting their match

See a slideshow of Medical School students celebrating Match Day on March 15, 2013.

Match Day 2013 - Health Talk

Find more stats and see how students reacted to Match Day 2013.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Join us for the 2013 Alumni Celebration, September 19-21

2013-04-29T19:39:10Z

Reunite and celebrate with your fellow alumni this fall. All Medical School alumni, including the reunion classes of 1948, 1953, 1958, 1963, 1973, 1983, 1988, 1993, and 2003, are invited back to campus for the 2013 Alumni Celebration, September 19-21.

Don’t miss the chance to:

pay tribute to esteemed alumni at the Alumni Awards Banquet
find out what’s new at the Medical School at the Medical Education Forum
meet medical students at the Scholarship Luncheon
catch up with old friends at the reunion class dinners
cheer on the Gophers as they take on San Jose State at TCF Bank Stadium

Invitations and registration materials will be mailed in July. In the meantime, please visit www.give.umn.edu/alumni/reunions to find a complete schedule of events and more.

Honor an outstanding alumnus

The Medical Alumni Society is seeking nominations for the 2013 alumni awards. Visit www.give.umn.edu/alumni/awards for award criteria, nomination requirements, and a list of past recipients. Nominations are due by May 24.

How you can help

Alumni are needed to contact classmates, join the reunion planning committee, or serve as reunion giving volunteers. To learn more about these opportunities, contact Katrina Roth at roth0103@umn.edu, 612-625-0336, or 800-775-2187.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

New research building takes shape for June grand opening

2013-04-29T19:38:29Z

Construction crews have been hard at work this spring as they put the finishing touches on the newest building in the university of Minnesota’s burgeoning Biomedical Discovery District.

The Cancer and Cardiovascular Research Building encompasses 280,000 square feet of state-of-the-art research space and will serve as the gateway to the Biomedical Discovery District, the result of a $292 million funding program approved by the state of Minnesota in 2008.

Together, the district’s five buildings will bring together more than 1,000 investigators and personnel in 700,000 square feet of space — larger than 12 football fields — to discover next-generation therapies for a number of medical conditions. the district is expected to attract up to $40 million in new annual research funding.

The cancer researchers housed in the new Cancer and Cardiovascular Research Building will study chemical biology with a focus on the role of chemical carcinogens in causing cancer. Others will build new models to find better cancer treatments. Heart researchers housed there will study cardiac regeneration and development, muscular dystrophy, congenital heart medicine, and genomics.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Cancer and Cardiovascular Research Building is slated for June 14. Faculty members whose labs are moving to the new building will occupy the space beginning in July.

Web extras

Slideshow: The new Cancer and Cardiovascular Research Building

See a slideshow of how the newest Biomedical Discovery District building took shape during different stages of construction.

Cancer and Cardiovascular Research Building

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

U team discovers enzyme behind breast cancer mutations

2013-04-29T19:37:56Z

A Masonic Cancer Center, University of Minnesota research team has uncovered a human enzyme responsible for causing DNA mutations found in most breast cancers. The discovery of this enzyme — called APOBEC3B — may change the way breast cancer is diagnosed and treated.

“Hopefully, [the discovery] will allow cancer researchers to develop new treatment approaches that can prevent these mutations before they become harmful,” says lead researcher Reuben Harris, Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry, molecular biology, and biophysics and a member of the Masonic Cancer Center.

Previous HIV research conducted by Harris’s lab on APOBEC3 enzymes eventually led to the discovery that APOBEC3B is overexpressed in breast cancer cell lines and tumors.

“DNA mutations are absolutely essential for cancer development,” says Harris. “Our experiments showed the APOBEC3B enzyme causes mutations in the genome of breast cancer cells. From this, we were able to reasonably conclude that the APOBEC3B is a key influencer in breast cancer.”

If further studies confirm that finding, a simple blood test could result in early detection, says Harris, who is also looking for ways to block APOBEC3B from causing mutations.

The findings were published in the Feb. 6 online edition of Nature.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

U scientists develop 'calcium sponge' to combat heart failure

2013-04-29T19:36:36Z

University of Minnesota researchers have developed a “calcium sponge” that could one day be used to combat diastolic heart failure, a common killer of men and women nationwide.

In diastolic heart failure, cardiac cells’ calcium levels rise to the peak needed for the squeezing action of the heart, but then they don’t drop quickly enough for an efficient relaxation period.

To solve that problem, scientists in the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology and the Lillehei Heart Institute used molecular genetic engineering to produce an optimized protein called Parve101Q, which soaks up excess calcium, allowing the heart to relax properly after a contraction.

The next step will be determining the best method of delivering the protein.

“Heart disease and heart failure rates are growing, especially as our population ages,” says Joseph Metzger, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology. We hope this type of discovery may one day help pave the way to a better way to treat patients.”

The study’s results were reported in the Feb. 10 online edition of Nature Medicine.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

Medical School dean to step down

2013-04-29T19:36:01Z

Aaron Friedman, M.D., announced in February that he will step down as dean of the Medical School and vice president for health sciences at the end of the calendar year, concluding his current, three-year appointment.

Past University president Robert Bruininks, Ph.D., appointed Friedman to the positions beginning in January 2011, in a move designed to secure strong, stable leadership through a review of the Academic Health Center’s organizational structure.

Previously, Friedman was head of the Department of Pediatrics and pediatrician-in-chief at University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital.

The University has launched a national search for a new vice president and dean and plans to keep the positions combined, as recommended by an external review of the AHC ordered by current president Eric Kaler, Ph.D.

The external review also recommends creating a new, inspiring vision to guide the Medical School’s future, centralizing AHC administrative functions as appropriate, and working more effectively with clinical care partners. Friedman will launch these efforts.

“Dr. Friedman has been a strong leader through a time of transition and a strong voice for the health sciences,” says Kaler. “He has been a true partner to me in moving the health sciences forward.”

View the full report from the AHC external review committee online at z.umn.edu/AHCreview.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.

	1888	2013
Acceptance rate	50% (1923)	5%
Graduating class	23	225
Women in the class	8%	47%
Months in Medical School	18	40+

Minnesota Medical Foundation

A centerpiece for the Biomedical Discovery District

New research building opens its doors to the public

Innovators at Heart

Spring 2013

University team creates a novel ‘calcium sponge’ to help erase one of the country’s leading causes of heart failure

About Innovators at Heart

Archives

A family's legacy

Muscular dystrophy researcher gets significant new funding from a company seeking the best

A state-of-the-art place for collaboration

Clean-up duty

University team creates a novel ‘calcium sponge’ to help erase one of the country’s leading causes of heart failure

Restoring sight and movement

Anonymous gift targets cures for macular degeneration and spinal cord injuries

Repairing vision — together

Get moving again

Using it wisely

Vision obscured

Anatomy of a gift

Family’s pediatric urology fund relaunches a legacy cut short

Keeping the Phillips Neighborhood Clinic rolling

PNC by the numbers

$0

10

51

77

103

324

2,060

$45,000

Advancing pioneering heart disease research

Specially engineered patches may help repair damage done by disease

A Red Hot evening

A smart gift to a topflight MHA program

Healing the wounds of war

Gift endows chairs to train medics, heal PTSD

Detecting PTSD

Quietly improving others’ lives

Gifts of appreciated stock are smarter than ever

IRA charitable giving opportunity extended for 2013

Healing through play

Playground slideshow

Special features of the Sullivan Playground at University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital

Getting involved

Calendar of events: Summer-Fall 2013

Moving toward a lifesaving EB cure

Preteen songstress doesn't let CF slow her down

'She is a star'

The gift of Grace

Neurosciences News

Spring 2013

With donors’ support, University researcher pursues the causes of neurodegeneration behind Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s

Company’s gift supports integration of psychotherapy treatments for adolescents and young adults facing mental illness

About Neurosciences News

Archives

Big Ten Network shines spotlight on U Alzheimer's disease research

Connecting the dots

With donors’ support, University researcher pursues the causes of neurodegeneration behind Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s

A personal interest

When a protein turns toxic

Further evidence

A more hopeful future

Company’s gift supports integration of psychotherapy treatments for adolescents and young adults facing mental illness

With better diagnosis and treatment methods in mind, U takes part in study to identify biomarkers for Parkinson's

Epilepsy care options expand through integration of physician groups

New gene-sequencing technology gives patients answers faster and at a much lower cost

Does psychosocial distress elevate your risk of stroke?

MN Twins tickets to benefit U of M NF research

Retraining the brain

U plasticity lab helps kids and adults recover from stroke and other disabling conditions

By Susan Perry

Exploring new territory

Retraining the brain

The battle of the hemispheres

Double priming the brain

Children and stroke

Clinical studies

‘Sign me up’

Web extras