The transplant immunology 2006 FASEB Summer Research Conferences will take place June 3-8, 2006 in Snowmass Village, Colorado.  The conference is co-organized by U of C faculty member Anita Chong (Associate Professor, Transplact Srugery).  Maria Alegre (Assistant Professor, Rheumatology) will chair the session entitled "T Cells, B Cells, and More!" and will give a talk on "T Cell Activation in Alloimmunity".  (The Imprint, Spring 2006)

On April 26, the University of Chicago officially opened its largest science building and announced that Ellen and Melvin Gordon, who operate Tootsie Roll Industries, Inc., have donated $25 million to name the building.  The Ellen and Melvin Gordon Center for Integrative Science houses scientists in the Divisions of the Biological Sciences and the Physical Sciences, allowing them to pursue innovative research that crosses traditional boundaries between physics, chemistry, and biology. (The University of Chicago Legacy, Volume 18, The Forefront, May/June 2006,  The University of Chicago Chronicle, Vol. 25 No. 15, Peer Review Spring 2006).

Three new high-tech facilities in the Center for Integrative Science will augment the University’s research in a range of projects that include the fabrication of nanostructures, studying how catalysts drive chemical reactions and probing conditions inside various parts of a cell.
The facilities will be equipped with an array of new research instruments: a scanning electron microscope, an electron paramagnetic resonance instrument, and a time-resolved luminescence spectrometer and microscope, which will be available for use by University and Argonne scientists. Scientists at the University and Argonne already share the Enrico Fermi Institute’s electron microprobe facility, which has been operating for about one year. University scientists use the microprobe to study the chemical composition of meteorites and other materials (The University of Chicago Chronicle, March 2006).

Dr. Kee's research investigates the role of transcription factors of the E2 family in lymphocyte development and carcinogenesis. The AAI award honors the memory of Dr. Cynthia Chambers and was established to advance the career of junior scientists, specifically in the area of cancer biology. Dr. Kee will present her research at the next Annual Meeting of the American Association of Immunolgists, held May 12-16, 2006 in Boston, MA.

Katie Sawai presented a poster entitled "A unique role for cyclin D3 in early B cell development".

In a paper now in press in Nature Immunology entitled "Hedgehog signaling controls thymocyte progenitor homeostasis and differentiation in the thymus" and co-first authored by postdoc Abdel El Andaloussi and MSTP student Stephanie Graves, the lab used T cell specific conditional deletions of the Hedgehog receptor Smoothened to demonstrate that the Hedgehog signaling pathway is one of the important regulators of lymphocyte progenitor development in the thymus.

Raymond Roos, M.D./Ph.D., professor and former chair of neurology, has been elected to the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars as one of 15 esteemed scientists and clinicians honored during the society's 37th induction ceremony.  Roos is a nationally recognized researcher and leading clinician in the field of neurodegenerative disorders, particularly amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis and prion diseases. (Medicine on the Midway, Winter 2006)

Recent attempts to manipulate the immune system of mice that have Type I diabetes have shown measured success.  In three seperate studies at the University of Chicago, Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis, researchers successfully reversed Type I diabetes in 32 percent of 22 mice in the experiments.  However, the scientists found no evidence of insulin-producing beta cells derived from donated spleen cells, which initially had been thought to be a crucial component of therapy, transplant immunologist Anita Chong said.  The study offers hope for reversal of the disease for recently diagnosed patients, but may disappoint those who hoped to cure established diabetes by using stem cells from donor spleens to help patients grow new pancreatic islets.  The three studies sought to confirm the results of a high-profile 2003 study in which those hurdles appeared to have been overcome. (Medicine on the Midway, Winter 2006)

A post-doctoral fellow in the Alegre lab, Luqiu Chen, was awarded an AHA fellowship to continue a collaborative project between the Alegre and Chong laboratories. Luqiu Chen studies the role of TLR signaling during immune responses to transplanted organs.

Ruth Taniguchi's thesis research in the Kumar laboratory focuses on the function of the surface receptor 2B4 expressed at the surface of mouse and human NK cells. Ruth is in her 3rd year of graduate studies in the Committee on Immunology at the University of Chicago.

While FADD is a well-established regulator of apoptosis mediated by Death Receptors such as CD95 (APO-1/Fas), a number of studies have indicated interferences with cell cycle and cell proliferation. The Peter lab has now uncovered the role of Caseine Kinase Iα as regulator of FADD through phosphorylation of Serine 194. FADD and CKIα colocalize on the spindle poles in cell metaphase, representing a crucial event during mitosis. This pathway also regulates the ability of Taxol to arrest cells in mitosis, raising the possibility that compounds that activate CKIα to increase FADD phosphorylation may act as chemosensitizers for cancer treatment (E. Alapatt et al., Molecular Cell 2005, 19, 321-332)

Bana Jabri MD, PhD, who joined the Faculty at the University of Chicago in 2002 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology with secondary appointments in Pediatrics and Medicine, was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. Bana’s laboratory is in the Center for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases and studies Celiac Disease, a human disease resulting from an aberrant immune response in the small bowel to the gluten found in wheat. Her work has elucidated the mechanism leading to the destruction of intestinal epithelial cells by intraepithelial lymphocytes in patients with celiac disease. More generally, her research demonstrates new elements of a cross talk between the tissue and the immune system that regulates cytolytic responses in the mucosal environment.

Shayla Hesse and Dustin Guzior, two University of Chicago undergraduate students, received a Best Presentation Award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Summer Research Program for their studies in COI laboratories. Shayla Hesse has been working in the Alegre lab and presented her unexpected observation that reduced T cell NF-kB promotes the formation of anti-nuclear antibodies in a mouse model of lupus. Dustin Guzior was working in the Kumar lab, establishing a role for 2B4 in NK cell self-tolerance.