News
Briefs
-
UB first site for trial for stroke drug
UB’s Department of Neurology/Jacobs Neurological Institute is the first site in the U.S. approved to enroll patients in a clinical trial of the drug desmosteplase, a new treatment for acute ischemic stroke.
The trial will be conducted in the Kaleida Health Stroke Care Center in Millard Fillmore Gates Circle Hospital in Buffalo.
Marilou Ching, assistant professor of neurology and program director of the Vascular Neurology Fellowship Program and the Kaleida Health Stroke Unit, is principal investigator at the Buffalo site. Overall, the study will enroll 400 patients worldwide.
“Each site is expected to enroll five patients per site,” says Ching, “but we are hoping to enroll 10 because our stroke center at Gates Circle sees about 1,600 strokes per year, which makes us the busiest stroke center in the Northeast.”
This trial is particularly interesting because the drug is based on a genetically engineered protein found in vampire bat saliva. Its European developers say it has the potential to open blood vessels, restore blood flow and minimize damage to the brain.
One of the major benefits of the drug is its ability to be administered up to nine hours after the onset of stroke symptoms. Currently, the only FDA-approved medication to treat acute strokes must be administered within three hours of the onset of symptoms.
Auction to benefit internships
The Buffalo Public Interest Law Program (BPILP) will host its 15th annual auction to benefit scholarships for law students interested in working this summer for public-interest organizations and agencies at 6 p.m. Friday in the Pearl Street Bar & Brewery, 76 Pearl St., Buffalo.
The event will feature a silent and live auction. Prizes include tropical vacations, jewelry, sports and theater tickets, signed sports memorabilia, and restaurant and salon gift certificates. Tickets are $35 for the general public and $20 for law students, and include a two-hour open bar and appetizers. They can be purchased by e-mailing BPILP President Marize Ayob at ayob@buffalo.edu.
The program has helped numerous students find valuable professional opportunities in public-interest agencies locally, as well as throughout the U.S. Last summer, Jared Vega ’11 worked in Buffalo for the Volunteer Lawyers Project, where he represented clients in unemployment hearings at the Department of Labor.
“The fellowship money helped supplement my income for the summer,” said Vega, who worked a second job besides his fellowship. “Students should apply for the fellowship because it can really help you get a lot of hands-on experience without having to work an extra full-time job.”
Sara Korol ’11, another recipient of the fellowship, spent her summer in Richmond, Calif., working at Bay Area Legal Aid, where she assisted low-income, Spanish-speaking clients with their public benefits claims. She also drafted special visa applications for victims of domestic violence.
Korol said she would not have been able to afford working and living in San Francisco if she did not get receive the BPILP fellowship.
For more information about the auction or summer fellowships, e-mail Emily Catalano, BPILP’s vice president for fundraising, at EGCatalano@gmail.com, or call 645-6261.
Symposium to honor King
Chemistry professor Harry King, a founding member of the Center for Computational Research (CCR), is retiring at the end of the academic year after 48 years on the UB faculty.
To mark King’s retirement—and to celebrate his 80th birthday—UB will honor him with a symposium on quantum chemistry, to be held May 10 in UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences.
King is internationally recognized as a leader in the field of molecular electronic structure computation, which is widely used in chemistry, material science, chemical engineering and rational drug design. His work focuses on the design of computer algorithms—inventing new mathematical methods for solving the underlying laws of physics and their implementation on supercomputers.
Thomas Furlani, director of CCR and a former student of King, notes that King’s work on the numerical evaluation of molecular integrals over Gaussian basis functions “is cited as one of the 150 seminal papers in the field of quantum chemistry and still widely used.”
A number of distinguished scholars in the field of quantum chemistry have been lined up to speak at the symposium, among them Thom Dunning, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois; Michel Dupuis (another former student of King), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Jiali Gao, University of Minnesota; Mark Gordon and Klaus Ruedenberg, Iowa State University; Robert Harrison, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Roland Lindh, University of Lund, Sweden; Keiji Morokuma, Emory University; Peter Pulay, University of Arkansas; Ron Shepard, Argonne National Laboratory; and Peter Taylor, University of Warwick, Coventry, England.
Registration for the symposium is now open. Those wishing to attend should click here.
Reader Comments