Health and Medicine

Parkinson's disease researchers at the University at Buffalo have discovered how mutations in the parkin gene cause the disease, which afflicts at least 500,000 Americans and for which there is no cure.

The stage is set for some important medical advances at the University at Buffalo's Clinical and Translational Research Center (CTRC). The new UB facility will be housed in the top four floors of the new $291 million joint UB-Kaleida Health building now under construction at Goodrich and Ellicott streets on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

A free dental check up and cleaning will be available to UB employees and students at the third annual, "Give UB a Smile Day""hosted by the School of Dental Medicine on Saturday, February 18 beginning at 9 a.m. in the UB dental school clinics.

Dental exams for Teddy Bears and a proclamation by Mayor Byron Brown will be just a few of the highlights when the University at Buffalo holds its 11th annual "Give Kids a Smile Day" from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 3, in the Squire Hall lobby and dental clinics on the first and third floors of the dental school on UB's South Campus.

The Cystic Fibrosis Therapeutics Development Center of the University at Buffalo and Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo played a critical role in the development of the new breakthrough drug called Kalydeco, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved today for the treatment of a less-common mutation of cystic fibrosis.

The University at Buffalo's downtown campus is growing. By early February, nearly 100 UB employees who had been based at various sites will have moved into new digs at the UB Gateway (the former M. Wile building) at Goodell Street. The historic structure is undergoing a $4 million renovation.

Vijay S. Iyer, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and TAVR program director at Buffalo General Hospital, has successfully led a team of highly trained physicians to implant aortic valves in two patients last week. Iyer, a board-certified interventional cardiologist, is available to speak with media today about this new procedure.

Chiedza Maponga '88, director of the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) pharmacy program, knows that he alone can't treat the hundreds of thousands of patients with HIV in his native country. But he believes he can do it with help. This year, help arrived in the form of four graduate students who traveled with Maponga from Zimbabwe to the University at Buffalo to train in a collaborative program that prepares them to treat HIV/AIDS patients.

Chinese families must confront very specific cultural hurdles when placing a relative with dementia in a nursing home, according to a recently published UB study.

Thomas R. Insel, MD, director of the National Institute for Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health, has selected research by a University at Buffalo professor as one of the top five most important findings of 2011. In his Director's blog on the "NIMH's Top Ten Research Advances of 2011," Insel includes at number five "Epigenomics: How Experience Alters Behavior" and references research by David Dietz, PhD, assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.