Three join National Academy of Sciences

Three School of Medicine faculty members were elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in May, bringing the total for the school to 28. The new members are Peter Cresswell, Ph.D., professor of immunobiology and dermatology; Pietro De Camilli, M.D., professor of cell biology; and Richard P. Lifton, M.D., Ph.D., professor of genetics, medicine, and molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and chair of the Department of Genetics. All three are Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators. Election to the NAS, which was established in 1863 by congressional charter, is one of the nation’s highest scientific honors. The academy has 1,874 active members and 325 foreign associates.

Yale 300 hits the home stretch

Yale’s observance of its 300th year began last October with a weekend focused on the University’s ever-stronger ties with New Haven [“Med School Invites Neighbors to Join in Tercentennial Celebration,” Fall 2000|Winter 2001] and continued this spring with a two-day program exploring “300 Years of Creativity and Discovery.” The April convocation featured a dozen medical school faculty members, who led seminars on topics from biotechnology to global health to child development to cancer research. They were in good company; other sessions spotlighted the experiences and contributions of returning alumni, including former President George H.W. Bush, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Carnegie Institution President Maxine F. Singer, Palm Computing and Handspring co-founder Donna Dubinsky, novelist Tom Wolfe and cartoonist Garry Trudeau. The Tercentennial year will culminate Oct. 5 and 6 with an academic convocation on Old Campus and a public celebration in the Yale Bowl. For updates, visit www.yale.edu/yale300.

A call to arms on AIDS

Yale students who previously campaigned for price and patent relief for an AIDS drug developed here turned their attention this spring to the United Nations General Assembly’s Special Session on HIV/AIDS. The students called on the United States to contribute up to a quarter of the $7 to $10 billion sought by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for a Global Fund for HIV/AIDS. The United States has offered $200 million. “If that’s how much we give, the fund will fail,” said medical student Kyeen Mesesan, one of the authors of a petition circulated by students of medicine, public health, divinity and law. Signed by more than 150 faculty members and students, the petition asked President Bush to take the lead not only in funding, but in seeking a strengthened declaration of principles that links treatment and prevention and affirms respect for human rights as “a necessary part of the response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.”

Hope springs from UN conference

One of the participants at the UN’s special session in June was an AIDS-conference veteran who believes that too few of the previous international gatherings have led to action. Michael H. Merson, M.D., dean of public health at Yale and a former director of the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on AIDS, said, “I watched leader after leader sign a declaration in Paris [in 1994] and go home, and nothing changed.” This time, however, he saw reason for hope. “What is different now is that you have a conference being held at the UN and you have a secretary-general providing leadership, putting himself in charge of mobilizing an international effort. You have many more years of experience and excellent examples of success with prevention. And you have an opportunity to offer treatment to millions of persons infected with the virus. We need to see this as a new beginning, no doubt the best chance we have ever had to control this devastating pandemic.”

Drug-coated stent appears promising

Physicians at Yale and other medical centers have begun testing a new stent coated with a drug to help prevent scar tissue from forming in blocked blood vessels that have been reopened through angioplasty. Reclogging of the vessel by scar tissue occurs following about 20 percent of the 500,000 procedures performed in this country each year. “The initial data is just amazing,” Michael W. Cleman, M.D., professor of medicine (cardiology), told The Hartford Courant in April. “If this tends to work out, I would anticipate that we’d be looking at a whole new era of stenting.” The clinical trial looks at the effectiveness of stents that have been coated with Sirolimus, a drug already being used to help prevent kidney transplant rejection. So far, the medication appears to keep scar tissue from forming around the implanted stent and to reduce the frequency with which vessels become blocked again.

Raising blood pressure to save lives

Severe low blood pressure affects as many as half
of kidney disease sufferers undergoing dialysis. Their intradialytic hypotension (IDH), or very low blood pressure, can become so serious that it causes life-threatening symptoms, such as abnormal heart function and low blood supply to the brain, and it leads some patients to prematurely end their life-prolonging treatments. In studies presented at the National Kidney Foundation Meeting in Orlando in April and published in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, Mark A.
Perazella, M.D., associate professor of medicine and director of the Acute Dialysis Services, found that midodrine hydrochloride could significantly and safely reduce IDH among dialysis patients, even among those who did not respond to other treatments.

Also in Et cetera:

Three join NAS  |  Yale 300 hits the home stretch  |  A call to arms on AIDS  |  Hope springs from UN conference  |  Drug-coated stent appears promising  |  Raising blood pressure to save lives 

Chronicle  |  Rounds  |  Findings

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Originally published in Yale Medicine, Summer 2001.
Copyright © 2001 Yale University School of Medicine. All rights reserved.