Penn Medicine News Blog Posts by Karen Kreeger

The Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (PLM) is celebrating National Medical Laboratory Professionals Week April 22 to 28. Medical laboratory professionals are among the unsung heroes of patient care - the team behind the scenes who are “doing the best with every test.” 

While you may never meet them in person, laboratory technologists are an integral and important part of your health care. Many of your physician’s decisions for your primary or specialized care will depend on the expertise and advice from clinical labs in some way. 

Pathologists and lab technologists supervise and perform laboratory tests on blood and tissue specimens collected from patients. These test results are used to help make diagnoses and prescribe medications. Laboratory personnel prepare individualized reports and determine which tests can provide additional information. They may also consult with your physician or clinical programs on your future care and treatment.

The Philadelphia Science Festival Carnival tents have all been folded and hauled away. There have already been four nights of non-stop science cafes at local watering holes. But, there are still six more days of the festival to go, and Penn Medicine faculty will be participating at events on most of those days.

Tonight, Tuesday, April 24, come hear about the The Great Vaccine Debate, 6:30 p.m., The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway. For more than two centuries, vaccines have protected us against many of humankind’s deadliest diseases, prevented global epidemics, and saved countless lives. Yet, in recent years a debate has sprung up on the safety of vaccination, causing some parents to forgo vaccinating their children. This has led to the return of some diseases, such as whooping cough and measles, as we begin to lose our “herd” immunity. Hear the real scoop from a panel of vaccine scientists, medical ethicists, and Mark Largent, PhD, author of Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America. Jason Schwartz, associate fellow at the Penn Center for Bioethics, is a panelist.

Sometimes the world needs a superhero. On Wednesday, April 25, attend Science Super Heroes, 7:00 p.m., Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street, to meet a few Penn, Philadelphia University, and Temple scientists who are doing great things, from repairing oil spill damage to curing once-fatal diseases. Doug Smith, MD, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair, is a panelist.

On Monday, April 23, Penn Medicine faculty will be particpating in three events at the Philadelphia Science Festival.

Start off with the science café Orphan Diseases: What Are They and Why Should We Care? at Rembrandt’s, 741 North 23rd Street at 6:30 PM. Hear firsthand the plight of a patient who fought to be diagnosed with an "orphan disease," and what some Philadelphia scientists are doing to help change the fate of the 30 million Americans with rare diseases. FOP expert Fred Kaplan, MD, Orthopedics, is part of the panel discussion in this event organized by the Monell Chemical Senses Center.

Also the Franklin Institute is hosting the public lecture Cancer and our Genome: Insight and Hope at 6:00 PM. This free event features Penn cancer experts Drs. Chi Van Dang, Katherine Nathanson, and Anil Rustgi, as well as Yael Mosse from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Ashani Weeraratna from the Wistar Institute. The discussion will be emceed by WHYY’s Taunya English and is organized by the Penn Genome Frontier Institute.

It's less than a week away! The Festival, a citywide collaboration showcasing science and technology every April, will run from April 20-29. Penn students, staff, and faculty will be participating in all kinds of events throughout the entire festival. For the next two weeks, watch this news blog and Penn Medicine on Twitter and Facebook for detailed information on individual Penn events.

To start, on the first night of the Festival, Friday, April 20, Ben Stanger, a Penn cancer biologist who studies tissue regeneration, and amphibian biologist Carlos Martinez Rivera from the Philadelphia Zoo, will be part of a science café called Bringing Up Baby at 6:30pm at Rembrandts restaurant, 741 North 23rd Street. It’s free! No registration, so just show up!

The speakers will explore what all animal life on our planet – starting out as a single cell, the product of a sperm and an egg – has in common. They will guide the audience through the amazing set of events that led each one of us to be here, viewed from the worlds of molecular biology, cell biology, and zoology, with a Q&A session to follow.

Penn Medicine will play a starring role in the Philadelphia Science Festival again this year. The Festival is a citywide collaboration showcasing science and technology every April. 

This year it runs from April 20-29 -- 10 days to celebrate the region’s strengths in science and technology, bringing together more than 105 partners from academia to museums to restaurants. The Festival will include an extensive line-up of programs and exhibitions designed to inspire the next generation of scientists and spark discussion among young and old. 

Penn Medicine students, staff, and faculty will be participating in a free public outdoor carnival on the Parkway, Science Night at the Ballpark with the Phillies, and a Science Film Fest throughout the entire week. 

Penn Med folks will also be part of discussing lively topics during “science cafes” at local restaurants; educating visitors about our medical history during a scavenger hunt in Old City; and discovering science in our own back yard at Science Day in Clark Park.

Building on Philadelphia’s rich history of innovation with dozens of events at museums, universities and neighborhood libraries, the Festival offers something for everyone. Learn more about about all of the festival activities, how to register for free events, buy tickets for other events, or volunteer to be part of the action.

Studying live cells must be the ultimate for physiologists. Imagine seeing the inner workings of a cell instead of static, stained snap shots of processes over some period of time. It’s like seeing a favorite book whose scenes you’ve played out in your head come alive on a movie screen.

The lab of Erika Holzbaur, PhD, has been studying molecular motors  -- proteins that function as tiny machines within a cell -- for almost two decades. For the last few years they have been using live-cell imaging to get a better handle on what happens when the transport of cellular cargo goes off track, and how that may be the start of certain neurodegenerative diseases.

Autophagy, literally self-eating, is an essential cellular process for recycling proteins and organelles. It’s complicated and involves the formation of sacs called autophagosomes that engulf the proteins to be degraded in one part of the cell; the proteins’ transport along microtubule tracks by the molecular motor dynein to another area, and the degrading of proteins into basic amino acids in a mature sac called an autolysosomes. Mislocation of the protein tau – the cross ties of the microtubule railroad on which the trash sacs move -- in some neurodegenerative diseases may disrupt normal nourishment and waste removal in nerve cells.

In a recent Journal of Cell Biology study Holzbaur, a professor of Physiology, postdoctoral researcher Sandra Maday, Ph.D., and Karen E. Wallace, all from the Perelman School of Medicine, examined autophagosomes in neurons from transgenic mice reared with a handy florescent green biomarker. These neurons, when grown in culture, send out axon-like projections, which grew 1 mm in two days, making it easier for the team to record movies of the sacs moving along the projection.

Sleep keeps neuroscientist Marcos Frank, PhD awake, studying the importance of slumber during early life when the brain is rapidly maturing and highly changeable. Building on his research showing that the brain during sleep is fundamentally different from the brain during wakefulness, Frank has found that cellular changes in the sleeping brain may promote the formation of memories.
When an animal goes to sleep it's like a switch is thrown, he says, and everything is turned on that's necessary for making synaptic changes that form the basis of memories. The team used an animal model of cortical plasticity – the making and breaking of neural connections -- in response to visual cues. 

With this year’s Super Bowl setting a record for being the most-viewed show in U.S. television history, concussions – more technically, mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) – have probably been on many a mind this week. TBI has long been a leading cause of death and disability, with over 1.7 million cases in the US alone each year.
 
Misshapened, swollen nerve fibers called axons in the post-mortem brain tissue of TBI patients have been noted by pathologists for years. They assumed the swellings arose from a complete interruption in what the axons were normally transporting between nerve cells. Due to their elastic nature, white-matter axons are susceptible to damage by the stretch and strain produced during TBI.
 
Using a high-powered microscope called TEM, for transmission electron microscopy, a team from Penn Medicine viewed damaged axons in two ways to gain a better idea of what causes the damage: in those grown in the lab and stretched mechanically and in those from post-mortem samples from TBI patients. In both types of axons, they found at each site of swelling mechanical breakage of individual microtubules – tubes for transporting proteins within a cell. This break in the cell’s transport system causes accumulation of the protein cargo. Breakage of different microtubules at different locations on the axons can also cause a series of swellings along the entire length, creating the appearance of beads on a string.

According to the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), up to one quarter of adults are diagnosed for a disorder annually in the United States. Although mental disorders are widespread in the population, the main burden of illness is concentrated among a smaller proportion (about 6 percent, or 1 in 17) who suffer from a seriously debilitating mental illness.

Despite the scope of such disorders, researchers are only beginning to understand the underlying neurobiological causes of these diseases. At the last Society for Neuroscience meeting, in late 2011, many presentations addressed these issues.

Closer to home, work from a team at Penn was featured on the cover of a recent Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences. The article was authored by nine members of the Department of Psychiatry, in the Perelman School of Medicine. Their collective work connects reductions in a brain protein that has been identified as a possible risk factor for schizophrenia – dysbindin – and illustrates how disruption in this protein leads to impairments in how the brain processes sensory stimuli such as sound.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides exquisite structural detail of the brain. However, current MRI methods can't image the detailed distribution of neurotransmitters – the brain’s chemical messengers -- across the whole brain.

Current imaging techniques for glutamate, a major neurotransmitter, is anything but perfect, but it still lets physicians and researchers gain fleeting glimpses into one of biology’s greatest mysteries: the inner workings and connectivity of the human brain.

A new Nature Medicine paper out this week from Perelman School of Medicine researchers led by Ravinder Reddy, PhD, professor of Radiology, describes a first-of-its-kind MRI technique (GluCEST) to measure glutamate concentration and local changes across the whole brain. The technique is based on chemical exchange effects on water proton MRI.