Even if I didn’t know anything about what went into creating Three Fold, Stanford Medicine’s new sculpture by Alyson Shotz, I’d love it. As I wrote in today’s Inside Stanford Medicine, the 56-foot-long sculpture, which hangs from a ceiling in the Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge, shimmers in an ever-changing array of iridescent colors. Pretty colors get me every time.

There’s a lot more to the sculpture than pretty, though. Shotz is a widely respected artist. Her works, exhibited in prestigious museums like New York City’s Guggenheim and DC’s Hirshhorn, are engineering feats inspired by scientific concepts - this one, by a CAT scan. As Shotz tells it:

I was very interested to learn that CAT scans image by sections, using a penetrating wave. This seems quite relevant, as my work represents an imaging of space, and the wave illuminating the shape, in this case, is color: the varying wavelengths of light that the viewer will see reflecting off the sculpture.

Shotz has other interesting things to say in a Stanford video, above, where she describes how her creative process reminds her of protein folding:

Proteins achieve functionality when they go from a non-dimensional shape to a folded three-dimensional shape, which is fascinating to me because when I started these drawings the lines are actually non-dimensional and then I expand them out into three-dimensional surfaces which then become functional as sculpture.

While reporting the article I learned that the artwork was born on a computer. I found out that despite its gossamer appearance, it weighs more than 3,000 pounds. (It’s made of about 10,000 pieces of custom-cut plastic, 600 pieces of aluminum and more than 20,000 screws.) And I learned the secret behind the pretty colors: dichroic-acrylic-coated plastic, which not only reflects light but refracts it.

Three Fold is being dedicated this week to the medical school’s former dean Philip Pizzo, MD. If you’re in the neighborhood, it’s worth a look.

Photo in featured entry box, of Shotz overseeing assembly of Three Fold, by Norbert von der Groeben

Patients want doctors to treat them as partners. Patients expect their doctors to listen to them not only about their symptoms, but also about their own perspectives on their condition. To be clear, patients don’t want to play doctor, but many patients—especially those with rare diseases—become highly educated about their condition and have done research which they believe bears consideration. The asymmetry of medical information available to patients versus doctors is almost gone, and today any one of us can go online to learn a great deal about a medical condition.

Patients are less cynical about pharma companies than you’d think. Patients want the medical system to work for them. They want pharma companies to make the drugs that help them and their loved ones. When we started Inspire, we were warned that patients would be overwhelmingly negative about pharma companies. This is simply not what we see. What we do see is a lot of discussion about how to optimize treatment, and a genuine interest among patients to best to benefit from their treatments.

Patients are not online just to vent. In our experience, patients seek three kinds of support: emotional, scientific, and practical. Many patients get scientific support from their physicians and online encyclopedic sources. But they are also hungry for practical information to improve their health, and they gather a lot of this information from their peers online. In two recent Inspire surveys—one of psoriasis patients, and another patients with the rare disease neurofibromatosis—each group said the primary reason they participated in online groups was to research the best available treatments. Emotional support and empathy are important, no doubt. But many patients share crucial practical information that only fellow patients know.

Previously: Experts by experience: A year’s worth of patient stories, Doctors: Please have “ears that hear” and Zebras with different stripes: One patient’s story

But some of these tiny survivors of high-risk birth still suffer permanent developmental problems. It’s only recently that physicians have begun to understand how to protect fragile infants’ developing brains.

As I describe in today’s issue of Inside Stanford Medicine, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital recently became one of the first hospitals in the country to devote a section of its neonatal intensive care unit to specialized neurologic care for newborns. The new “Neuro NICU” will treat babies at risk for neurologic injury, including preemies, full-term infants deprived of oxygen during birth, and babies with congenital heart defects, who may receive too little oxygen in utero.

But knowing how to treat newborns’ brains is tricky because they change so fast, the story explains:

“The challenge and exciting thing about treating these tiny babies is that the brain is developing on a literally day-by-day basis,” said Courtney Wusthoff, MD, Packard Children’s neonatal neurologist.

Fortunately, new research findings and brain-monitoring technologies are helping doctors better understand infants’ immature nervous systems. For instance, they now have the tools to detect seizures that would once have gone undetected:

“In the past, it’s been assumed that you could just tell by looking if a newborn was having a seizure,” Wusthoff said. But it turns out that 80 to 90 percent of seizures in this age group cause no outward changes. “Newborns’ brains are not developed enough to show on the outside what’s happening on the inside.”

Wusthoff and her colleagues anticipate that the next several years will give doctors even better ways to understand and care for babies’ brains.

Previously: Increasing breast milk feeding rates for preemies at California hospitals , A look at the world’s smallest preterm babies and Advancing heart surgery for the most fragile babies
Photo of Jackson Thomas and Packard Children’s NICU nurse Diana Powell courtesy of the Thomas family

The Big Data in Biomedicine conference kicks off at Stanford this week. The event, which will be held at the School of Medicine’s Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge, is bringing together leading figures from academia, industry, government and philanthropic foundations to discuss the burgeoning opportunities for mining the vast amounts of biomedical data housed in public databases. Here’s a look at the schedule.

For those unable to attend the conference in person, the event will be webcasted via the Big Data in Biomedicine website. Throughout the three-day event, we’ll also be live tweeting the keynote talks from Anne Wojcicki, CEO and co-founder of personal-genetics company 23andMe, and David Ewing Duncan, author of Experimental Man, as well as other proceedings from the conference. You can follow the tweets on the @SUMedicine feed or by using the hashtag #bigdatamed.

Previously: Obama’s new open-data policy aims to boost access to federal data for entrepreneurs, researchers, Stanford computer scientist shows stem cell researchers the power of big data, Atul Butte discusses why big data is a big deal in biomedicine and Stanford and Oxford team up for conference on “big data’s” role in biomedicine
Photo by Wellcome Images

This spectacular image was taken by Indiana University research associate Jane Stout and depicts a scene from mitosis where chromosomes (highlighted in blue) are pulled apart by hook-like kinetochores (shown in green) and spindle fibers (marked in red). The photo took first place in the microscopy category of the most recent GE Healthcare Life Sciences Cell Imaging Competition and was featured on an electronic billboard in Times Square last month.

Stout explained in an Indiana University news story the significance of the photo:

This particular high-resolution image allowed us to see individual strands within bundles of specialized structures that form the spindle, whereas before we could only infer the bundled structure from other types of imaging and assays… In future images, we hope to see where the different members of the protein family act on the spindle to learn how their movements are coordinated to regulate the entire process of DNA segregation.

Photo by Indiana University

A full workout in just seven minutes? Science says so!: Don’t have time to hit the gym? Try this high-intensity, seven-minute workout. As a past Well blog piece explains, findings published in the latest issue of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal show that it’s a quick and effective way to keep in shape.

The mystery surrounding lung-transplant survival rates: An October article in the San Francisco Chronicle offered a look at the challenges facing lung transplant patients and explored why a significant number don’t live beyond the five-year mark, despite improvements in survival rates.

Ask Stanford Med: Director of Stanford Autism Center taking questions on research and treatment: For this month’s Ask Stanford Med installment, Carl Feinstein, MD, director of the Stanford Autism Center at Packard Children’s Hospital, took questions related to autism spectrum disorder. Feinstein will respond to a selection of the questions in a future Scope Q&A.

Emmy nod for film about Stanford brain tumor research – and the little boy who made it possible: “Dylan’s Gift,” a documentary detailing how one family’s generosity is advancing research on a little-understood childhood cancer, has been nominated for an Emmy. The film, which was inspired by a 2009 Stanford Medicine story, explores the work of Stanford physician-scientist Michelle Monje, MD, PhD, who cares for pediatric brain cancer patients and conducts research on a rare, vicious brain tumor that arises in school-aged children.

Distinction with a difference: Transgender neurobiologist picked for National Academy of Science membership: The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently conferred membership to three Stanford scientists, including Ben Barres, MD, PhD. Chair of Stanford’s neurobiology department, Barres is believed to be the first transgender scientist admitted to NAS.

Previously: Waste not, want not, say global sanitation innovators

In this short animation, John Hengeveld, marketing director for high performance computing at Intel, shares his story of undergoing an appendectomy and learning that, as a result of a burst appendix, a rare and cancer-causing material was now circulating in his body. Currently, there are few good treatment options for his condition, but Hengeveld hopes that by harnessing computers to perform scientific research this could change. Watch the video to learn how computers can help researchers accelerate the scientific process by simulating biomedical experiments to develop new methods of fighting disease.

Previously: Obama’s new open-data policy aims to boost access to federal data for entrepreneurs, researchers and Stanford computer scientist shows stem cell researchers the power of big data

We don’t understand the normal breast… If we’re really going to prevent breast cancer, we have to understand it

The forum was an event focused broadly on women’s health issues, but breast cancer and cancer survivorship were major topics – with many of the 400 attendees also hearing from Mark Pegram, MD, director of Stanford’s breast cancer program, and Allison Kurian, MD, an assistant professor of oncology at Stanford whose research is focused on hereditary breast cancer. (Kurian, in fact, had spent much of her day Tuesday answering questions from the press about Jolie.)

Love, who told the New York Times yesterday that she wants people to understand that “we really don’t have good prevention for breast cancer,” described to the audience how the state of knowledge about the breast and breast cancer is far from adequate. She said:

We don’t understand the normal breast… You’d think we’d know, but we really don’t. That’s a whole area that’s been ignored and it’s another thing we have to push people to do – to not just look at the disease. If we’re really going to prevent it, we have to understand how it works, to figure out what the early changes are. Isn’t it a shame that the only thing Angelina has to do, knowing she has the (mutant) gene, is to have a normal body part cut off – because we don’t know how to prevent breast cancer?

…

We’ve got awareness. We don’t have to work on that; we have to go beyond that to be part of finding the solution, to demand better research and to be part of it. I think we can be the generation that ends breast cancer.

Videos of this and other talks will be posted soon on the Stanford Center for Health Research on Women and Sex Differences in Medicine (WSDM) website.

Previously: Breast cancer advocate Susan Love to deliver keynote at Stanford Women’s Health Forum, Stanford’s Mark Pegram discusses breast cancer in the genomic age, Helping inform tough cancer-related decisions, BRCA patients use Stanford-developed online tool to better understand treatment options and A closer look at preventive breast cancer surgery

A similar simplification existed at one time in genetics, when it was believed that the DNA sequence of our genes determined our biological destiny. But over time scientists have learned that many variables affect how, when and even to what degree these genes are expressed, or transformed, into proteins. For instance, I may have the same DNA sequence for gene A as my friend, but I may make more, or fewer, molecules of protein A than she does, and therefore have a significantly different biological outcome. Unfortunately, it’s been difficult to accurately quantify and compare protein levels among individuals and groups.

Now research led by Stanford geneticists Hua Tang, PhD, and Michael Snyder, PhD, published yesterday in Nature (subscription required), has shown that these variations in gene expression levels are inherited over generations. In other words, your levels of expression of individual genes is likely to be similar to that of your parents. What’s more, genes involved in common processes tend to vary in similar ways – indicating a high degree of coordination of expression. As Tang explained in an e-mail to me:

We’ve found that the abundance of many proteins varies considerably among individuals, and we have identified numerous DNA variants that may influence the protein expression of a neighboring gene. We also showed that proteins that co-vary tend to have related biological functions or physical interactions.

The researchers used a sophisticated variation of a technique called quantitative mass spectrometry to determine the relative level of nearly 6,000 proteins in cells from 95 people from around the world. Until recently, most researchers relied on an indirect, and inexact, method that estimated protein levels within a cell based on the prevalence of RNA messages encoding that protein. Co-first author and research associate Sophie Candille, PhD, (who co-authored the research with postdoctoral scholar Linfeng Wu, PhD) explained:

RNA is in fact an intermediary molecule in the expression of the protein-coding genome. Proteins are the end product and active agents of the cell but their quantification has been challenging and therefore has lagged behind that of RNA.

By analyzing which proteins co-vary, the researchers were able to identify new functional groups that hint at previously unknown protein networks and interactions. Postdoctoral scholar and co-first author Linfeng Wu, PhD, concluded:

This research is important because many proteins are involved in the human immune response and diseases such as cancer. Therefore, the DNA variants that influence gene expression at the protein level are likely to be associated with disease phenotypes.

As Wu explained, the researchers are particularly interested in understanding how variation in protein expression levels affects disease risk or physical attributes. In my case, I can’t help wondering whether I have a genetic predisposition to nausea when I hear talk of eating bananas with Baconnaise or Spam with chocolate sauce (gag). But maybe, my reaction isn’t all that unusual?

Previously: Stanford geneticist talks tracking biological data points and personalized medicine