School Notes: School of Medicine
September/October 2010

Innate immunity innovator joins National Academy

In April, Yale immunobiologist Ruslan Medzhitov received one of the highest honors bestowed on American scientists when he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Medzhitov, the David W. Wallace Professor of Immunobiology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, has pioneered research on the innate immune system, a physiological system that launches first-line defenses against bacteria and viruses. As a doctoral student at Moscow State University, Medzhitov was fascinated by a new theory—put forth by the late School of Medicine immunobiologist Charles A. Janeway Jr.—that the innate immune system provides guidance to the slower but more fine-tuned responses of the adaptive immune system. In 1994, Medzhitov came to Yale as a postdoctoral fellow in Janeway’s laboratory, and the two made the groundbreaking discovery that receptors in the innate immune system, known as Toll-like receptors, indeed provide the adaptive system with the necessary information to create custom-made B and T cells that target specific bacterial or viral invaders. Since then, Toll-like receptors have become the subject of intense research activity in laboratories around the world.

New sort of stem cell is aimed at Parkinson’s

Yale researchers led by Hugh Taylor ’83, professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences, have explored the potential of cells from the lining of the uterus, or endometrium, in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s disease, which degenerates speech and motor function, is a result of the loss of dopamine-producing cells in the brain. In experiments reported online in the April issue of the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Medicine,transplanted endometrial cells migrated to damaged brain tissue in Parkinson’s mice and differentiated into dopamine-producing brain cells, significantly raising dopamine levels.

“Endometrial tissue is probably the safest, most easily attainable source of stem cells currently available,” Taylor says. “I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for what we will be able to do with these cells.”

Combined glucose monitor and insulin pump helps kids control diabetes

Type 1 diabetes, in which the pancreas cannot produce enough insulin to control blood sugar, is extremely difficult to manage with current methods of self–glucose testing and multiple daily insulin injections, especially for children. Continuous glucose monitoring and insulin pumps have each proven to better control blood sugar in adults, but not necessarily in children.

In a year-long, multi-center trial known as STAR 3, led at the School of Medicine by William V. Tamborlane, professor of pediatrics and chief of the section of pediatric endocrinology and diabetes, sensor-augmented insulin pumps, which combine insulin infusion with continuous glucose monitoring, better controlled blood sugar in type 1 diabetics of all ages. The study, published June 29 in the online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first to show consistent results in children.