ScienceLife ran 219 posts in 2010, and choosing the best of them is as hard as picking a favorite gene.  So here’s a month-by-month scan of a busy year at the University of Chicago Medical Center, full of exciting discoveries in the laboratory and the clinic. The impact of some of this research is already being felt by patients receiving improved, evidence-based medical care. For other studies, the clinical benefit may be years in the future, and may take unpredictable forms. As a closing message for 2010, we’ll re-quote the recently departed Eugene Goldwasser, whose laboratory research isolating and purifying the hormone erythropoietin has helped millions of people worldwide.

“It is a particularly impressive example of how basic research can pay a dividend that could not be anticipated at the start,” Goldwasser wrote about his life’s work, “and it is a pity that the lesson still has not been learned by those who control public funding of science.”

January: Tong Chuan-He looked at how cancer may result from cells who don’t want to grow up. Scientists studied how sleep affects the language learning skills of starlings (with painstakingly acquired video of the experiment!). Richard Jones combined two laboratory staples - Western blots and DNA micro-arrays - to develop a new method for studying protein networks. While physicians such as Tammy Utset treat patients with lupus, UChicago scientists are looking for the genetic origins of the autoimmune disorder.

February: Many Medical Center employees returned from volunteering with relief efforts in Haiti, and we filmed video interviews with Rex Haydon, Tiffany Cupp, Richard Cook, and Dima Awad on their experiences. Most of the human genome is “junk” between protein-encoding regions, but Marcelo Nobrega developed a way to find important regulatory elements in that genetic sea. Like birds, human learning can be affected by sleep, and Leila Kheirandish-Gozal reported on the impact of obstructive sleep apnea upon learning in children. Can a single protein in the brain create behaviors associated with drug addiction in rats?

March: Everyone knows air travel is stressful, but did you know that eastbound flights cause stronger cortisol changes than westbound trips? The laboratory of Milan Mrksich found a way to direct stem cells to form fat or bone by shaping them into stars or flowers, a brilliant example of bioengineering. Computational neuroscientists discovered how touch is like vision in the brain, knowledge that could be used to someday re-engineer Luke Skywalker’s robot hand. Dartmouth president and Partners in Health co-founder Jim Yong Kim visited to talk about a new, needed area of research: health care delivery.

April: Researchers at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago teamed up for the Emerging Pathogens Project, an effort to find new viruses in animals before they jump to humans. Cardiologist Martin Burke tested out a new type of internal defibrillator device that can go under the skin, instead of into the heart (the clinical trial, reported in May, was a success). In a lecture to the MacLean Center of Clinical Medical Ethics, transplant surgeon J. Michael Millis described his efforts to bring American organ transplant practices to China.

May: A trial testing the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra for a rare, untreatable lung disease failed, but pulmonologist Imre Noth found a silver lining. Lauren Sallan and Michael Coates uncovered evidence of a previously unappreciated mass extinction event 360 million years ago that changed the path of life on Earth. Researchers from the University of Chicago and around the world presented science at the frontier of biotechnology at the annual BIO conference.

June: In a study that is literally the size of an entire country, epidemiologist Habibul Ahsan measured the toll of a tragic, accidental exposure of millions to arsenic in Bangladesh. Putting a gene from fireflies into the pancreas of mice isn’t mad science, it’s an imaging tool that will help study cures for diabetes. Epigenetics, the modifications that turn genes on and off, took off in 2010, and cardiologists Stephen Archer and Jalees Rehman linked one epigenetic factor to pulmonary artery hypertension.

July: Scientists don’t often get to see the fruits of their research in the flesh, but the Celebrating the Miracles gathering of diabetic children weaned off injected insulin thanks to genetic research was a moving exception (video of the event can also be viewed). Another hot topic in science and medicine this year was the use of computational analysis to sift through rapidly accumulating data, topics explored by Gary An and Andrey Rzhetsky. Or you can build a computer model of a brain network to study the dynamics of epilepsy, like neurologist Wim van Drongelen.

August: Air pollution is a problem indoors as well as outdoors in developing countries where dung and firewood are used to cook food - a problem being tackled in a project led by Sola Olopade. A study of the hormonal changes induced by a stressful test revealed a surprising protective effect of marriage and long relationships. Microbiologist Olaf Schneewind’s laboratory developed two new strategies against MRSA, the most-wanted cause of hospital-acquired infections.

September: To study multiple sclerosis, neurologist Brian Popko’ s laboratory developed a new mouse model that can replicate the disease, then spontaneously recover. Meanwhile, a new drug to treat MS, originally isolated from fungus found in wasps, was approved by the FDA and is being studied for broader uses at the Medical Center. The micro-organisms that live in humans were analyzed as part of a “microbiome” study looking at the protective effects of breast-feeding against a intestinal disease.

October: Common wisdom on quitting smoking says to stay away from cigarette-associated cues, but research from psychiatrist Harriet de Wit’s laboratory revealed that abstinence could make craving even worse. A study of how getting a good night’s rest affects dieting results suggested that “sleeping off the pounds” isn’t merely a fantasy. Graduate student Daniel Matute solved a 100-year-old riddle about how quickly new species become reproductively incompatible with each other.

November: In perhaps our favorite study of the year, geneticist George Perry found a way to acquire the genomic information of endangered species from…poop. The evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen passed away, but his Lewis Caroll-inspired Red Queen Hypothesis lives on. Sometimes statistics don’t tell the whole truth, as in the curious case of the aspirin paradox - why the cardio-protective drug may actually predict worse outcomes after heart attack.

December: Evolution textbooks may need a rewrite after geneticist Manyuan Long’s laboratory discovered that new genes can be just as essential as old genes. A study by neurobiologist Nicholas Hatsopoulos proved that the only thing better than a thought-controlled device is a thought-controlled device equipped with a robot arm. Ripped from the headlines: microbiologist Jack Miller weighed in on the hype over arsenic-based bacteria, and ethicist/physician/friar Daniel Sulmasy discussed the Presidential Bioethics Commission’s report on synthetic biology.

All told, it was a great year of science and medicine. Let’s do it again in 2011! Regular posting will resume Jan. 3rd. Happy Holidays.

Almost all cases of Type I diabetes are currently treated with the same method: insulin. Because of an immune response that attacks the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas, diabetics must replace the endogenous hormone from external sources to process sugar and maintain safe blood glucose levels. Except for a tiny minority of cases where a genetic mutation is found to explain their disease, insulin injections become an unpleasant daily ritual for Type I diabetics that they will need for their entire lives.

But scientists and clinicians hope to someday offer diabetics more permanent ways of managing, or even erasing their disease. Transplantation of pancreatic islets - which contain beta cells, the insulin factories of the pancreas - have achieved very limited success, offering the recipient temporary glucose control. But finding compatible donors is difficult, the patient must continuously take immunosuppressive drugs, and even with therapy, 90 percent of those transplants fail within five years.

In 2003, an even better solution was proposed: what if a diabetic could simply regenerate their own damaged pancreatic beta cells? A team from Massachusetts General Hospital announced that mice were capable of pancreatic cell regeneration when the overactive immune response was controlled alongside an injection of spleen cells. Several groups, including one from the University of Chicago, recreated the study, and while they failed to replicate the effectiveness of spleen cells, a promising degree of beta-cell regeneration was observed.

“I think it was a little bit controversial for a long time. Most people felt that when you lost the beta cells, they were pretty much gone. But recently it became clear that, at least in mice, there is a pretty substantial regeneration by some groups,” said Anita Chong, professor of surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center.  “If the observation in mouse could be translated into humans, this would be very significant.”

So Chong’s group continued to study regeneration, looking for specific treatments or protocols that would maximize the recovery of beta cells. Yet the studies were laborious, with time-intensive data collection requiring 20-30 hours of microscope work for each mouse in a given study.

“We realized that the standard way of looking at beta cell regeneration was extremely tedious and subjective,” Chong said.

A workaround for that laboratory annoyance was inspired by an unlikely source: the firefly. The laboratory of Graeme Bell, professor of medicine and human genetics, developed a transgenic mouse with the enzyme luciferase (responsible for the firefly’s distinctive glow) attached to the insulin promoter. So cells that produce insulin will also produce luciferase, and when an activating luciferin salt is injected, they glow. While imperceptible to the naked eye, the mouse can be placed in a photon-counting detector that allows researchers to quickly assess the amount of pancreatic beta cells present.

Those mice were then used for a regeneration study published earlier this year in the journal PLoS One. The hypothesis, according to first author and surgical resident Eric Grossman, was to test whether merely controlling glucose levels in a mouse model of diabetes would help pancreatic beta cells to regenerate. Half the mice received an islet cell transplant, while the other half were simply treated with insulin via an implantable pellet.

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This is the third day of our coverage of the 2010 BIO International Convention, a massive biotechnology conference being held this week at McCormick Place in Chicago. Come back all day for reports from panels, lectures, and the exhibit floor on how scientists, government leaders, and industry hope to use the combined forces of science and technology to tackle some of the world biggest problems. For the first two days of our coverage, click here and here.

6:00 PM - Biotechnological Patriotism and the Petabye Age

Walking through the elaborate castles erected by countries from Europe, Asia, and South America on the exhibit floor (pictured below), an American might develop some anxiety about their country’s status as undisputed champion of biotechnology. That’s partially an illusion - if all of the kiosks for individual American states and U.S.-based biotech companies were pooled into one giant USA! USA! booth, it would take up the majority of the exhibition. But paranoia that the rest of the world is hot on America’s trail was palpable through the conference, with rumblings of new biotech epicenters in China and India rippling through McCormick Place.

A panel organized by Scientific American this afternoon sought to set some of those fears at bay, and the message was delivered through a persuasive moderator: CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. With his keynote address, Zakaria talked about the economic landscape as the world recovers from a global financial crisis, but said that the real economic story of the last 50 years was not bubbles and recessions, but the broader participation in the world economy. No longer is all the exciting innovation and economic development happening in a few North Atlantic nations, Zakaria said; now even small countries have robust, independent economies and an impact on the global system.

The downside of that phenomenon, for Americans at least, is that we are no longer the one place where the world’s biggest achievements are located. The biggest mall in the world, Zakaria pointed out, is no longer Minneapolis’ Mall of America - it’s the South China Mall in Beijing. The richest man in the world lives in Mexico City. The world’s largest refinery is in India. But the United States can still lay claim to the most highly-respected universities in the world, and the “extraordinary quantity of high quality research” that goes along with that system.

Joined by a panel of biotechnology industry leaders, the reassurance continued. China and India - while several orders of magnitude larger in population than the United States - are too concerned with building infrastructure to pose a near-term threat to American biotech expertise. The American investment system, which rewards creativity and understands that many big ideas fail, remains a model for the world. And as long as United States universities are perceived as the world’s best, they will attract the best students from around the globe to our shores - even if, increasingly, those students return to their home countries to apply their education.

With all those warm feelings, it was a little disheartening to find what I thought would be one of the day’s most engaging research sessions - on applications of computational science to drug discovery - to be also the day’s most sparsely attended. Fascinating, exciting research was presented by scientists from the University of Illinois and Argonne National Laboratory on how the rapid growth of computing power capabilities has made new types of experiments possible.

Emad Tajkhorshid showed animations representing the dynamic wobble of protein interactions, drugs and targets undulating like ocean waves - suggesting that scientists will no longer be constrained by the necessary simplifications of benchtop science. Rick Stevens, from Argonne, talked about grabbing a small soil sample and sequencing every organism within, grabbing potentially thousands of complete genomes - many of them never before seen - at once. As one questioner said, we’ve brought everyone into the genomic age, but the next step will be the petabyte age, an age of previously unfathomable computation enabling the creation of new science. Unfortunately, this afternoon there were few there to witness the new age’s early steps.

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Studies of human disease often work from the patient backwards - doctors and scientists take the common symptoms of a particular disorder and use them as clues to figure out what first went awry to spur the disease. For neurological diseases like Parkinson’s or amytrophic lateral sclerosis (aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease), symptoms and brain images have pointed the research at particular parts of the brain, which are then studied in animal models and on the genetic or cellular level. But disease research can also work from the other direction, where a particular cellular process is identified as a potential culprit in the disorder before a patient with that defect is even found.

That’s the case with a paper published this month by a team of University of Chicago researchers studying the cellular mechanisms that underlie diabetes. There are many types of diabetes mellitus, but all can be traced back to the hormone insulin - the body’s signal that cells should soak up sugar from the blood. Most cases of juvenile, or Type 1, diabetes result from the immune system erroneously attacking and killing the Beta-cells of the pancreas, which release insulin. Type 2 diabetes, which often develops in adulthood, results from a reduced sensitivity to insulin and/or a decreased release of the hormone.

But diabetes can also have a genetic origin, in some rare cases, when one of the genes involved in the secretion of insulin is disrupted. Previously on the blog, we’ve talked about the story of Lilly Jaffe, whose diabetes was found to be caused by a rare genetic mutation in a protein called a potassium channel, critical for the release of insulin. The mutated potassium channel seen in Lilly’s case interferes with the trigger of insulin release, causing lower amounts of the hormone to circulate through her blood. Thus, Lilly was treated by daily injections of insulin, until doctors at the University of Chicago detected the mutation and prescribed her a drug that directly targeted the potassium channel.

Now researchers at the University of Chicago have found another ion channel that must function properly for the right amount of insulin to be released. Only problem: there’s no patient.

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As you’ve no doubt heard by now, actor Patrick Swayze died yesterday at age 57 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. In March, blog founder Jeremy Manier interviewed University of Chicago Medical Center physician Dr. Irving Waxman about pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest and hardest to treat cancers. The challenge, as Waxman explains, is twofold - the symptoms of pancreatic cancer typically do not present until the disease is in advanced stages, and the organ’s location deep behind the abdomen makes makes surgical treatment more difficult. The statistics are sobering: even with treatment, only about 5% of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer survive 5 years.

But doctors are hopeful that the momentum could be shifting in the battle against pancreatic cancer. “Smart chemotherapy” with less severe side effects, new imaging techniques to detect pancreatic cancer in its early stages, and new drug treatments - a study released just yesterday found that an already-existing diabetes medication may be effective in combination with chemotherapy for selectively killing tumor cells.

Here again is the interview with Dr. Waxman where he discusses the clinical challenges of pancreatic cancer and some of the promising frontiers of research to reduce those challenges.

There’s a fine pancreatic cancer piece in the Chicago Tribune today by Robert Mitchum, a friend of the blog who recently got his Ph.D. in neurobiology at the University of Chicago. Rob uses a new study on a potential method of detecting pancreatic cancer to talk about the urgent need for such early screening methods. Pancreatic cancer typically causes few symptoms until a relatively late stage, when the tumor has spread and treatment options are limited. The statistics are stark - each year, more than 37,000 people get pancreatic cancer and 34,000 die from it.

Despite the grim numbers, some people do survive, and new efforts at early detection could boost their chances further. What I find amazing is how patients - and doctors - find the hope to continue their fight in the face of such daunting odds. How do you muster the energy for a struggle you know you’re unlikely to win, though future progress may depend on lessons learned from your failure? Many diseases that are now treatable once seemed hopeless. Most of those successes are built on knowledge gained from countless tragedies.

We hope to write a lot about pancreatic cancer in this blog. I’ll return later this week to the subject of finding hope in a seemingly hopeless field.