Four staff members of Keck Medical Center of USC recently participated in a conference for Latina girls.
Keck Medical Center hosted two workshops at the 19th annual Adelante Mujer Latina Teen Conference on May 11. The conference is designed to educate and inspire Latina girls, while providing them with professional role models and plans for their future. … Read More »
As part of the Common Cents Penny Harvest — a nationwide program designed to empower children to donate to causes they care about — fifth graders at Sacred Heart Elementary School in Lincoln Heights recently collected $916 in pennies. … Read More »
Thanks to some cutting-edge technology, inpatient nurses and Keck Medical Center of USC will soon be able to connect with patients and other nurses and receive critical alarms just by reaching into their pockets.
In August, the center will receive 300 specialty iPhones that will enable inpatient nursing staff to work faster, smarter and easier.
“This will become their communication device,” said Keith Paul, chief technology officer for USC Health Sciences. “The idea is to give them one device to do everything.” … Read More »
The Injury Prevention Program at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles hosted a free car seat check for families at the USC Child Care Center on June 21, as part of an effort to reduce the potential for accidental injuries. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, three of four car seats are installed incorrectly, so CHLA certified safety technicians checked car seats and reinstalled them to assure best placement — and also provided new ones when needed. … Read More »
Researchers are learning how to turn regular cells into stem cells, a process called reprogramming. However, some of the mechanisms of the process remain unknown, such as why only a small proportion of the cells can be reprogrammed. Researchers have at least part of the answer: the structure of genes.
“Nobody knows anything about how the 3-D genome structure is reorganized during reprogramming,” said Wange Lu, associate professor at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “But we found out that it is a very important process. If the structure is not established correctly, the cells may cause diseases when they are used later in clinical applications.”
Lu and his team have made a series of discoveries that shed light on the process. Their findings have been published in the July issue of Cell Stem Cell. … Read More »
Zhengfei Lu, a PhD candidate in the lab of Michael Lieber, the Rita and Edward Polusky Professor in Basic Research at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, is the first author of a research study featured on the cover of the May 30 issue of Blood, the journal of the American Society of Hematology. The paper is titled “BCL6 breaks occur at different AID sequence motifs in Ig–BCL6 and non-Ig–BCL6 rearrangements.”
According to Lu, “chromosomal rearrangements are common in human cancer. By analyzing chromosomal break sequences collected from patients, we have discovered the fingerprints left by the process that caused the lymphoma. … Read More »
Researchers at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center have discovered a promising new way to treat a rare and aggressive blood cancer most commonly found in people infected with HIV.
The USC team shows that a class of drugs called BET bromodomain inhibitors effectively targets primary effusion lymphoma (PEL), a type of cancer for which those drugs were not expected to be effective. … Read More »
From left, Robert Vance, emergency management officer at Keck Medical Center, and Jim Buck, program coordinator for the Rapid Response Team, deliver advice about household fire safety to children from the USC Child Care Center.
Photo/Jon Nalick
About 40 preschoolers from the USC Child Care Program at the Health Sciences Campus attended a June 26 presentation, where they learned tools to keep safe if they encounter a dangerous situation.
Meeting in the cafeteria at USC Norris Cancer Hospital, the tots learned such safety rules as what to do if they find matches (don’t play with them) and what to do if a fire alarm goes off (find a safe place). … Read More »
Uttam K. Sinha, associate professor of otolaryngology and Watt Family Chair in Head and Neck Cancer at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, has been appointed to two key new leadership positions.
Sinha will serve as medical director of head and neck surgery, and associate dean of surgical simulation, paving the way for novel, innovative programming across clinical, research and educational practices.
As medical director, Sinha will lead the development of a Head and Neck Surgery Institute focused on providing comprehensive, translational care to patients suffering from head and neck diseases. … Read More »
John and Karen Reid requested that in lieu of traditional gifts for their wedding, guests consider donations to the Darlene Dufau Reid Endowed Scholarship Fund.
When his wife, Darlene Dufau Reid, passed away after a long illness in 2008, John Reid (USC BS ’69), a Superior Court judge for 27 years who presently sits in the Santa Monica courthouse, was not sure love would ever find him again.
Then one day, John bumped into his future wife, Karen, by chance. “Darlene had been gone a couple of years and I was tired of eating my own cooking,” recalled John. “I wandered down to the pier in Malibu, and Karen was standing on the pier talking on the phone to her son. I looked at her, and she looked at me, and I couldn’t help myself — I asked her out to dinner. We stayed talking that evening until the restaurant closed.”
John and Karen were married on April 6, 2013. In lieu of gifts, the couple requested donations in support of the Darlene Dufau Reid Endowed Scholarship Fund at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. The scholarship is presented annually to an outstanding medical student. To date, donations in honor of the ceremony have reached nearly $13,000. … Read More »
Following the expiration of an agreement with the Doheny Eye Institute, the Keck School of Medicine of USC’s Department of Ophthalmology will now be known by a new name, USC Eye Institute, under the campus clinical branding Keck Medical Center of USC.
The new name will be used throughout the organization, and signs bearing the new name will begin to appear in coming weeks. Newspaper and radio ads announcing the change have already begun running. … Read More »
Keck School of Medicine Dean Carmen A. Puliafito recently celebrated the recruitment of world renowned neuroscientists Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson — and more than 100 faculty, researchers and staff — to the Keck School. … Read More »
The cellular and molecular composition of feathers can be experimentally manipulated to test the hypothesis that certain molecular components may enhance or suppress pigment differentiation.
To eventually use stem cells in regenerative medicine, scientists need to understand how stem cells become organized into particular tissue patterns and shapes. With that in mind, researchers at USC recently found clues by studying the cellular and molecular basis of complex pigment patterns in bird feathers.
Keck School of Medicine of USC researchers uncovered several fundamental rules of morphogenesis ─ the organizational process of functional cellular patterning. Their study appeared on April 25 in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science.
“Feathers are a good research model because they are unique, able to regenerate repetitively under normal conditions and are positioned at the surface of the body so that we can see their patterns,” said Cheng-Ming Chuong, the study’s team leader and professor of pathology at the Keck School. “Therefore their cellular and molecular composition can be experimentally manipulated to test the hypothesis that certain molecular components may enhance or suppress pigment differentiation.” … Read More »
A new study has found that stroke patients’ brains show strong cortical motor activity when observing others performing physical tasks — a finding that offers new insight into stroke rehabilitation.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a team of researchers from USC monitored the brains of 24 individuals — 12 who had suffered strokes and 12 age-matched people who had not — as they watched others performing actions made using the arm and hand that would be difficult for a person who can no longer use their arm due to stroke — actions such as lifting a pencil or flipping a card. … Read More »
PharmD candidate Cedona Watts is researching gene expression and translocation at the Center for Cancer Research in Bethesda, Md.
Photo/Lillian Insalata
After watching a YouTube video about the USC School of Pharmacy, Cedona Watts was convinced that she should leave her hometown of Huntsville, Ala., and head west to Trojan town. Now entering her fourth year as a PharmD candidate, Watts credits her USC education for the multitude of fellowships, scholarships and awards she’s received.
“That one YouTube video really inspired me,” said Watts, who graduated from the University of Alabama with bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and biological sciences. “I saw the dean and the different faculty in the video. Their message was to increase diversity within the pharmacy profession, and the other important things were the opportunities to do research and dual degrees.” … Read More »
In honor of National CPR Week, the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency offered a countywide CPR training program to the greater Los Angeles Area. … Read More »
A significant number of drugs originate in the academic medical community, but progress toward translating new pharmaceutical breakthroughs to the clinic is often slow and prohibitively expensive.
Research suggests that since the early 1980s, the number of Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs has stayed the same, while investments in research have increased from $5 billion to $35 billion. … Read More »
A team of graduate students from the Keck School of Medicine Department of Preventive Medicine’s Health Behavior Research PhD Program recently won the Sloboda Bukoski Cup competition at the Society for Prevention Research conference. … Read More »
Tuition was a few thousand dollars. The campus was dotted with open fields. There were a handful of women students.
A lot has changed since Robert Ouwendijk graduated from the Keck School of Medicine of USC. But one thing hasn’t — the camaraderie he shared with his fellow members of the Class of 1963.
Fifty years later, on May 31, he joined many of his classmates for induction as a 50-Year Fellow, a distinction that is bestowed only on former students who graduated at least 50 years ago. … Read More »