Pathology and Lab Medicine

Host: Jennifer Caudle, DO

Guest: Todd Askew

What’s being done to address the range of issues like the PPE shortage, lack of testing, and financial shortfalls encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic? Here to share his team’s advocacy efforts to help tackle these and other challenges is Todd Askew, the American Medical Association's Senior Vice President of Advocacy.

Guest: Mary Beth Pfeiffer

With cases being reported in every state and across 80 countries, Lyme disease has become one of the fastest growing vector-borne illnesses in the world. But have you ever wondered how this global health threat came to be? That’s what journalist Mary Beth Pfeiffer investigates in her book, Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change, and with the ReachMD team.

Host: John Russell, MD

Guest: Meredith Wadman, BM, BCh, M.S.

Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses.

In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using human tissue samples sent from Sweden, produced a line of cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a massive German measles epidemic, the vaccine that would one day wipe out homegrown rubella was introduced. This vaccine has since protected more than 150 million people in the United States, and its development method has also led to other vaccines that have protected billions of people around the world from polio, rabies, chicken pox, measles, hepatitis A, shingles, and adenovirus.

Host Dr. John Russell chats with Meredith Wadman, author of The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, about the story of both the science of this urgent race and the political and ethical controversies that nearly ended it prematurely.

Host: Matt Birnholz, MD

Guest: Robert McNally, MD

From the Villanova Health Summit's Speaker Event, host Dr. Matt Birnholz speaks with guest Dr. Robert McNally, President, and CEO of GeoVax, Inc. They discuss the challenges that biotech companies face when bringing vaccines through clinical trials, and the long-term project being conducted by his colleagues to deliver an HIV vaccine to market.

Host: Matt Birnholz, MD

Several new screening tests have been developed to help doctors find colorectal cancer early when it's most treatable and can reduce the burden of this disease and the death toll nationwide.

Host Dr. Matt Birnholz chats with Dr. John Kisiel, gastroenterologist and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, about new screening guidelines for detecting colorectal cancer.

Host: John Russell, MD

Guest: David Fajgenbaum, MD

Castleman disease, a rare idiopathic multicentric disorder, is diagnosed in approximately 5000 people in the United States each year. When one 3rd year medical student suddenly found himself facing this diagnosis personally, at a time when knowledge about the disease was minimal, he helped create a broad-based initiative to address this knowledge gap.

Host Dr. John Russell talks with Dr. David Fajgenbaum, a Research Assistant Professor of Medicine in Translational Medicine/Human Genetics and Associate Director of Patient Impact for the Penn Orphan Disease Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also co-founder of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, a global initiative dedicated to accelerating research and treatment for Castleman disease and improving survival for all patients.

A protein homeostasis signature in healthy brains recapitulates tissue vulnerability to Alzheimer’s disease

Rosie Freer, Pietro Sormanni, Giulia Vecchi, Prajwal Ciryam, Christopher M. Dobson, and Michele Vendruscolo

Science Advances 10 Aug 2016: Vol. 2, no. 8, e1600947 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600947

Abstract: In Alzheimer’s disease, aggregates of Aβ and tau in amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles spread progressively across brain tissues following a characteristic pattern, implying a tissue-specific vulnerability to the disease. We report a transcriptional analysis of healthy brains and identify an expression signature that predicts—at ages well before the typical onset—the tissue-specific progression of the disease. We obtain this result by finding a quantitative correlation between the histopathological staging of the disease and the expression patterns of the proteins that coaggregate in amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, together with those of the protein homeostasis components that regulate Aβ and tau. Because this expression signature is evident in healthy brains, our analysis provides an explanatory link between a tissue-specific environmental risk of protein aggregation and a corresponding vulnerability to Alzheimer’s disease.

Laboratory safety may sound straightforward, but in reality it is supported by complex and ever-changing science. Safety standards and practices evolve as scientists learn more about the materials they handle regularly.

In this session of Public Health Grand Rounds from the CDC, presenters will discuss how standards of laboratory safety have improved over the years, what we’ve learned from past incidents, and how establishing safety protocols and training systems can lead to an overall culture of workplace safety, resulting in continued public trust in our science and recommendations.

For more details on this Grand Rounds session and its participants, click here.

Host: Harold Bays, MD, FNLA

Dr. Harold Bays welcomes Dr, Alan Remaley, clinical pathologist and Section Chief of the Lipoprotein Metabolism Section in the Cardiopulmonary Branch of the National Heart Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, MD. Their discussion centers on LDL cholesterol from a variety of little-known aspects: its history as a biomarker for disease status, the ways in which it gets specifically measured, and the rise of lipid-altering pharmacotherapies to combat excessive LDL levels.

Host: Ana Maria Rosario

Pancreatic Cancer strikes fear into the hearts of every practicing internist, pathologist, oncologist, and general surgeon on behalf of their patients, and unfortunately for us all, it’s on the rise. By 2030 it will be expected to climb to the number-2 spot for causes of cancer death. What new insights can we bring to the recognition and identification of pancreatic cancer to help curb that trend? Joining host Ana Maria Rosario at Omnia Education’s Stages in Women’s Health in New York is Dr. Aimee Lucas, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.