'A new age of medicine': University researchers developing promising procedures

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'A new age of medicine': University researchers developing promising procedures

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

02-19-07

Feb. 18--People with Type 1 diabetes are traditionally faced with two options -- and neither is appealing.

They could choose to inject insulin into themselves on a regular basis, possibly every day for the rest of their lives. Or they could opt for a painful pancreas transplant.

But now researchers at the University of Virginia Medical Center are curing potentially deadly cases of Type 1 diabetes with a third, more agreeable alternative.

In the new treatment, known as self-therapy, or regenerative medicine, physicians on the second floor of the Aurbach Research Building in the Fontaine Research Park squirt insulin-producing islet cells into patients' livers, renewing the patients' ability to generate insulin on their own.

"This is the new age of medicine," said Dr. Ken Brayman, director of UVa's Center for Cellular Transplantation and Therapeutics. "This is the next

level. The traditional concepts of surgery and medicine are going to be broken down -- and this type of research is going to do it."

Brayman's cell transplantation work is but one example of the promising new medical procedures being developed in UVa's research labs to treat disease at the microscopic level.

"We are on the cusp of a revolutionary change in health care," said Ed Howell, chief executive of the UVa Medical Center. "I believe we're entering the second golden age of medicine."

Medicine's first golden age spiraled out of the medical breakthroughs of World War II. Running from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s, the period was marked by the advent of the polio vaccine, blood typing and antibiotics.

The second golden age, Howell believes, will be an era in which physicians move away from "mechanical" medicine -- such as orthopedic surgery or the use of stents to unclog arteries -- and instead treat ailments by targeting a disease's genetic profile.

"Just on the horizon, we will transfer from a mechanical management of disease to the genetic management of disease," Howell said.

In the coming era, Howell said, nanotechnology will deliver medicine precisely where it is needed, rather than through ingestion of a pill that affects the entire body. Lost human limbs might be regrown. And organ transplants could become obsolete, as procedures like Brayman's islet cell transplants are extended to other damaged organs.

Another example of the research is Dr. Craig Slingluff's hunt for a cancer cure.

Treating cancer has long been done by trial and error. Oncologists prescribe a regimen of drugs or chemotherapy that may or may not work, depending on the patient.

Slingluff, director of UVa's Surgical Oncology Lab, and his team of 30 researchers believe they can eliminate the guesswork by targeting the genetic makeup of the various strains of cancer cells.

"It's going to change the face of medicine," Slingluff said.

Within the next month, Slingluff expects clinical trials will begin at UVa in which researchers will take non-invasive samples of cancer cells and attempt to kill them on a microscopic level in the lab.

"We're on the verge of being able to perform non-invasive methods of diagnosing cancer cells," he said.

In the coming decades, Slingluff thinks the old labels of cancer -- breast cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer -- will be forgotten. In the future, he said, cancer likely will be identified by its genetic profile, rather than its location in the body.

One thing that sets UVa apart from its peer institutions, Howell said, is its emphasis on "translational research," meaning its effort to harness emerging treatments in the lab and then put them into practice in the hospital.

"In the past, there were barriers between the lab and the bedside," said Dr. Bankole Johnson, chairman of the department of psychiatric medicine. "At UVa, we're increasingly putting research doctors and clinical physicians to work side-by-side."

Take Johnson's research into addiction. He is studying how to treat alcoholism by targeting drugs at a patient's personal genetic makeup. Individualizing medicine, he said, could increase a drug's effectiveness and minimize side effects.

"We all have different responses to alcohol. Some people want to dance on the table, others just want to sit and drink quietly," Johnson said. "We now know that these responses are caused by genes. We believe we can treat addiction on that genetic level."

As CEO of the UVa Hospital, Howell said one of his top priorities is to promote medical research that treats disease on the microscopic level.

"At the end of the day, somebody is going have to be a leader for this new era," he said. "I believe UVa can be that leader."
 
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Deliver steroids to my muscles and no where else. That would be nice.
 

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