Mayo Clinic’s just launched its new and improved “front door” for translational research. The Center for Translational Science Activities at Mayo has launched its new and enhanced web site. Why is that so important? Much of what the CTSAs do is to make medical research relevant to the needs of their communities. This site goes far to help that effort as well as to interface with people who are interested in going into translational research as a career. Mayo Clinic was one of the first institutions awarded a CTSA grant by NIH – $72 million – to bring research findings into medical practice so they directly impact patients and communities. If you’ve not looked at what Mayo’s CTSA is up to, I urge you to take the opportunity. The CTSA is the integrated model of medical research for the future, breaking down the institutional “silos” in traditional medical centers. At Mayo, we welcome the concept, as integration of research, education and practice has always been part of what we are.

Three historic Mayo researchers were inducted into the Minnesota Science and Technology Hall of Fame recently. Edward Kendall, Ph.D.,  and Philip Hench, M.D., Mayo Nobel laureates who discovered cortisone, and Earl Wood, M.D., Ph.D., pioneering aerospace researcher. The honor came as part of the annual Tekne Awards. Eric Matteson, M.D., chair of Mayo’s Division of Rheumatology (fourth from left) accepted the Kendall and Hench honors on behalf of Mayo. Dr. Wood’s son, E. Andrew Wood of Rochester (far left), accepted the award for his late father. Drs. Kendall and Hench received the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology in 1950 (same year Faulkner won it for literature). They will eventually be included in a Hall of Fame display in the  Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. The event was sponsored by the museum and the Minnesota High Tech Association.

Mayo is one of those medical centers that sees rare cases,  diseases that have been diagnosed only a hundred or a handful of times. That expertise is one of the reasons why the National Institutes of Health is funding a Rare Disease Center to be based at Mayo’s Rochester campus. The grant that founded the Center is also funding a Rare Kidney Stone Consortium, headed by Mayo physician-investigators Dawn Milliner, M.D. and John Lieske, M.D. A variety of kidney disease registries will be established that will collect and track data, making it available to collaborating physicians and researchers. The consortium will also aid collaborations between doctors and patients in clinical research by working with patient organizations.

Dr. Milliner will focus on primary hyperoxaluria, a relatively rare disease that often causes kidney failure. Dr. Lieske will focus on Dent disease,  a very rare disease that causes excessive calcium in the urine, resulting in kidney stones and kidney damage. Other principle researchers in the consortium are in New York and Iceland. For more on the effort, see www.rarekidneystones.org.

An independent selection panel  has chosen a paper by a Mayo group of authors as the best article over a two year period in Mathematical Biosciences. The Bellman Prize, named for journal founder Dr. Richard Bellman, goes to David Dingli, M.D.,Ph.D.,  Matthew Cascino, Kresimir Josic, Ph.D. (University of Houston); Stephen Russell, M.D., Ph.D., and Zeljko Bajzer, Ph.D., for their paper Mathematical modeling of cancer radiovirotherapy, published in 2006. In fact, the paper proposes and validates the first mathematical model of radiovirotherapy – which predicts the therapeutic outcomes and provides guidance for dosing. This could help future researchers with dosage time windows and a range based on tumor size. For more on the award see the journal  site.

Mayo Clinic’s well-regarded clinical program in digestive disorders now has a new partner — the Mayo Clinic Center for Cell Signaling in Gastroenterology (MCCCSG). Nicholas LaRusso, M.D., an internationally-recognized clinician-investigator in gastroenterology, will serve as director.

Supported by a five-year, $5.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the MCCCSG launched in September and is one of 18 such digestive disease research core centers in the country. Its goal? Understand the signaling pathways that control the function of gastrointestinal cells in health and disease.

Research themes for the MCCCSG include genetics and gene regulation, membrane receptors and ion channels, and signal transduction. Cross-cutting these themes are three disease focus areas: carcinogenesis, enteric neurosciences and liver pathobiology.

At Mayo Clinic, “centers” serve as hubs that bring together multidisciplinary groups of basic scientists and clinical researchers. Although the MCCCSG is focused on gastroenterology, its members come from a variety of fields in addition to GI — areas like endocrinology, physiology, immunology, pathology and oncology. This team approach to research encourages collaboration, which in turn enables faster translation from the lab to clinical trials and, ultimately, from trials into widespread clinical practice.

For more on Dr. LaRusso’s research, check out the recent article “Making Sense of Cilia” from Discovery’s Edge, Mayo Clinic’s research magazine.

— Matt Sluzinski

“You never stop being a young investigator,” says Sundeep Khosla, M.D. It’s a great attitude to have after your peers nominate and select you for Mayo’s highest research honor – Distinguished Investigator. The physician scientist is internationally known for his findings in osteoporosis. After 21 years at Mayo Clinic he is still hard at it, with one of the most active investigative labs on our Rochester campus. Dr.  Khosla is a product of a medical research lineage that begins with Dr. Daniel Federman, his mentor at Harvard, Dr. Hank Kronenberg at Massachusetts General — and since arriving at Mayo — Drs. Larry Riggs and Joe Melton — all names well known in cellular, molecular or metabolic research. Dr. Khosla is a major reason why Mayo’s Metabolic Bone Group has a worldwide reputation. If you want to understand fractures, brittle bones, bone loss due to disease or other causes, his is the “go to group.”

He works every day at the intersection of Mayo’s research realm and its clinical practice, seeing patients in the morning and seeking answers in the lab after lunch. That perspective provides his motivation. “You have to be excited about your work, and passionate about helping the patients,”  he says.  I’m  going to stop there, I think, because nothing better sums up medical science at this place. To learn more about Dr. Khosla’s research, check out his lab page or this overview on his research in bone health from Discovery’s Edge.

Four new features plus, from Mayo’s research magazine:

Data Mining to Redesign Critical Care Services

Using informatics, epidemiology, systems engineering and in-depth medical-record studies, this groundbreaking work is improving patient safety in ICUs and significantly cutting the cost of health care. It’s all part of Mayo’s continuing innovation in the Science of Health Care Delivery. 

Zebrafish Genetics

Molecular biologists are using the zebrafish to investigate new treatments for cancer and nicotine addiction, and as a foundational way to get students excited about science.

Diabetes and Heart Damage – an iPS Cell Approach

Building on recent discoveries in converting normal cells into cells with stem cell characteristics, Mayo researchers are exploring the potential of iPSC’s or induced pluripotent stem cells in regenerating organs. Among the goals: alleviate heart damage and Type 1 diabetes. 

Brain Cancer: Angling for its Origins

What causes brain tumors? Using statistics from Mayo’s enormous patient databases, genetics researchers are learning how genetic mutations and environmental triggers increase the risk of developing brain cancer. 

Snapshot:
Changing Science Education
— one school, 18 teachers and a couple thousand zebrafish at a time

Dilated cardiomyopathy, a congenital condition that weakens the heart, is the top reason people end up having heart transplants. The organ simply begins to fail on them. If caught early enough, the condition can be treated with medication, but in most cases it’s diagnosed too late. Without transplant, the survival rate, even in pediatric diagnoses, is only 42 percent after ten years. Mayo genetic cardiologist Timothy Olson, M.D. and his team embarked on a study of families with a history of the condition. In doing so, they were able to find a new gene that caused the condition in this clinical subset of patients. He says it would have been like trying to find a needle in a haystack, were it not for recent advances in science.

Hear Dr. Olson discuss how the study was done.

Dr. Olson says now that the gene has been identified, research can begin at understanding the mechanism of the gene and its specific purpose. The study appeared in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (Brauch et al).

No, this isn’t about the spores you learned about in high school biology. This is the highly regarded grant from the National Cancer Institute. It stands for Specialized Program for Research Excellence and with this one, for ovarian cancer research, comes $11.5 million.  The principal investigator is co-director of the Women’s Cancer Program in Mayo’s Cancer Center, Lynn Hartmann, M.D.  She took a moment from her busy patient schedule to tell me  about the benefits and advantages the SPORE grant will bring.

Click here to view Dr. Hartmann’s comments.

Long a leader in multiple sclerosis research, Mayo Clinic has launched an MS Center with senior investigator Moses Rodriguez, M.D., at the helm.

“When I came to Mayo in 1983, there was not a single investigator doing MS research,” recalls Dr. Rodriguez. “Over the years we’ve built a strong, interdisciplinary faculty for MS and demyelinating disease research. With the creation of a Mayo Clinic MS Center, we are formalizing the collaborations that have gone on for more than 25 years, and laying the foundation for increased integration of our efforts and the ability to attract additional extramural funding.”

The inaugural faculty of the MS Center represents the entire spectrum of basic, clinical and translational science as well as a wealth of clinical disciplines, including neurology, immunology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, laboratory medicine and pathology, biochemistry and molecular biology, and radiology. This multidisciplinary group has a long history of working together to advance discoveries from the lab to clinical trials to patient care. The Center’s four goals demonstrate its commitment to this translational chain:

• Promoting remyelination in MS patients
• Understanding the immunopathogenesis of MS and related CNS demyelinating disorders through tissue specimens and animal models
• Understanding the genetic factors that determine whether the disease has a benign or severe course
• Developing new symptomatic and curative therapies for MS and other demyelinating disorders

The use of plasma exchange for MS patients in crisis, now a standard treatment, was pioneered by Dr. Rodriguez and his Mayo colleagues 15 years ago. More recently, Dr. Rodriguez’ work in remyelination (using antibody therapy to restore the myelin sheath over spinal cord nerves) has reversed neurological damage in mice and given hope to thousands of MS patients.

The Center’s complete name will be the Mayo Clinic Center for Multiple Sclerosis and Central Nervous System Demyelinating Diseases Research and Therapeutics.

– Joan Gorden