Month: August 2017

Biology students’ stem cell/organoid research takes off

By Chris Machado

Whether it’s cataracts, kidney stones, or cancer, advances in treating these diseases and disorders have begun under a microscope at the cellular level. If you think the road to discovery requires a Ph.D., a group of Providence College biology students recently proved otherwise.

This past semester, Dr. Charles Toth, associate professor of biology, led a first-time seminar entitled Human Organoids. The aim of the lab-intensive course was to grow cellular versions of human organs, such as a kidney, pancreas, and a retina.

“When Dr. Toth introduced us to this, I was excited because we were going to be working on something that is happening in research right now,” said Joseph Dowling ’18 (Ronkonkoma, N.Y.), a biology major who worked in a retina group.

The teams of students created organoids — artificially cultivated masses of cells or tissue that resemble an organ — using human-induced pluripotent stem cells, which were made possible through a gift by Dr. John Mullen ’78.

“Stem cell research is so incredibly important, as this might be the true pathway — along with immunotherapy — to cure so many conditions that plague humanity,” said Mullen, an orthopedic physician. “It can’t be stressed how important this is.”

The stem cells used in the PC lab, which are human cells that are reprogrammed into stem cells, were subjected to various tests that were intended to see if the organoids could mimic natural human behavior. In each group, that happened.

In offering the course, Toth said he wanted to create an open-ended, project-based learning exercise that put the students in control. He charged the students with determining which organoid to grow and which research protocols to follow and scientists to contact, as well as performing the cell cultures and analyses.

“I was extremely proud of the students for stepping up to the plate and owning their work,” he said. “I attended an international stem cell conference recently and met up with a kidney organoid scientist that the kidney group was working with. He saw their completed poster and commented that he was surprised it worked. But, he was very impressed with how well the students did on their project.”

While Dowling admitted that there were disappointments throughout the semester, after weeks of tests he said the outcomes were staggering. The group’s data showed that several of the organoids matured into a tissue known as RPE (retinal pigment epithelium), which has several functions, including light absorption.

“Our main goal was to see if what is being done by researchers was replicable in a classroom environment,” Dowling explained. “We were holding our breath trying to keep these organoids alive. When we got the last (cell) line to work, it was super rewarding.”

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JWU’s PA Program Achieves 100% Pass Rate

7/28/17 | For the second year in a row, 100% of JWU’s graduating class of physician assistants have passed the board certification exam administered by the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants. All 24 Class of 2017 students passed on the first try.

“This is truly a remarkable achievement,” notes George Bottomley, DVM, PA-C, dean of JWU’s College of Health & Wellness and founding director of JWU’s physician assistant studies program. “We set the bar high when we first selected students for the inaugural class that began in 2014. All 23 students graduated on time and achieved a 100% pass rate of the Physician Assistant National Certifying Exam (PANCE). Our second class has followed suit by doing the same.”

Of the 24 physician assistant students who graduated this May, 10 have accepted positions in Rhode Island.

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With lessons from the Holocaust, medical students consider health care ethics

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — By the time the students arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were prepared — they had read texts about the Holocaust, spoken with a survivor, viewed Berlin’s memorials and toured the halls where the Nazi regime planned its “euthanasia” and Final Solution campaigns to murder millions. But for Hyunwoo June Choo and Alexa Kanbergs, standing on the grounds of the Nazi killing center transformed merely knowing of these historical events into feeling them, vividly and palpably.

Monday, June 26, was a lovely summer day in Poland, Kanbergs recalled. She was struck by how the buildings of Birkenau, where Nazis gassed as many as 6,000 Jews a day to death, stood in juxtaposition with the beautiful surrounding landscape and the ubiquitous sounds of chirping birds.

“I viscerally felt something when I went to that site,” said Kanbergs, a third-year Warren Alpert Medical School student from Portland, Ore. “We had been reading about it, but you are removed from it because you are just learning about it. Then when you actually visit, it makes it a lot more real.”

Choo, a fourth-year medical school student from Los Angeles, was similarly struck. Organizers of the two-week program that had brought them to Germany and then Poland, the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, had told them that “place has power.” In a huge camp built for the sole purpose of genocide, the meaning was clear.

“The entire week, we had been building up to this point,” Choo said. “We went to where the leaders had planned and strategized how to exterminate large masses of people. When I was actually there, I was just standing aghast at the expanse and the sheer vastness of this institution. Everything was deliberate. Everything was calculated.”

The Fellowships at Auschwitz program teaches medical, legal, business, journalism and divinity students to consider the ethics of their future professions in the context of the Holocaust’s catastrophic moral failings. Choo and Kanbergs had applied to the competitive fellowships out of a desire to transcend and therefore contemplate the day-to-day experience of their medical training.

“In medical school as students, we’re sort of thrown into wards and hospital systems and we see things — a lot of injustices play out on individual bodies,” Choo said. “We don’t really have the time or space to think through the systems behind a lot of the social circumstances that bring a patient in front of us. What this program allowed us to do was to think about ethics not as this lofty, abstract idea, but as something grounded in history.”

The point is not that inequities and injustices in the U.S. health care system have equivalence with the Nazi regime’s meticulously planned policies of mass murder, Kanbergs said. Instead, the point is to learn how to recognize and sustain clear moral vigilance in systems that produce injustice, regardless of its scale or whether it was intended.

“I don’t ever want to take away from the events that happened in the Holocaust and say that this is the same situation,”  Kanbergs said, “but I think about prisoners a lot, and I think about how we incarcerate individuals of color. I see these parallels with how we strip the rights of individuals and target certain classes of individuals. As physicians, we are put into these systems that allow for that to happen.”

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New fund for nutrition, health education will promote healthy lifestyles for Bryant students

It’s a common concern among parents and college-bound students: Will students successfully manage the responsibilities and challenges they face when living away from home for the first time? Will the healthy habits they have acquired withstand the stressors that are sure to arise?

Richard Leto ’73 and his wife, Bonnie, first became aware of the prevalence of eating disorders when their daughters were undergraduates at universities in Florida and North Carolina. “As we researched it and learned more, we saw that many more people than you want to image are affected by this,” explains Richard.

The Letos felt this was a health issue that needed to be elevated in importance and considered what campus programs could be developed to address it. Believing that a positive, preventative approach to health and nutrition can make a real difference for vulnerable students, they made a $200,000 gift to Bryant University to establish the Richard and Bonnie Leto Nutrition and Health Education Endowed Fund.

An additional gift of $25,000 ensures that the initiative will begin immediately. A part-time health and nutrition educator will begin overseeing a range of holistic educational and awareness programs beginning in the fall 2017 semester. The goal is to create and sustain an environment at Bryant that promotes healthy lifestyles in which students maintain a wise and balanced relationship with food.

The Letos’ gifts were made in support of Expanding the World of Opportunity: The Campaign for Bryant’s Bold Future.They worked thoughtfully with Bryant leaders, including John R. Saddlemire, Ed.D., Bryant’s Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students, to develop a meaningful initiative that would complement the student-centered objectives of the campaign.

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