Advances

(Advances gives a glimpse of the many significant research projects at the university. Tell us about your discoveries by e-mailing: wisweek@news.wisc.edu.)

Nobel winner recalled
A university professor who was adviser to Nobel Prize-winning cell biologist Güenter Blobel while he studied oncology here says he’s not surprised the one-time doctoral candidate has received the international honor.

“This has been building for the last 10 years at least,” says professor emeritus Van R. Potter of the McArdle Lab for Cancer Research. “His name has come up before. It’s not a surprise at all.”

Blobel received a doctoral degree in oncology in 1967 from UW–Madison, where he worked with Potter in the McArdle Lab. Blobel was in Madison from 1962-1967.

“I remark with a wink that he’s the first of my students to get a Nobel prize, but there are several out there who deserve it,” Potter says. “There have been some very outstanding people who have gone through here, and we’re proud of Blobel because he came from here.”

While in Madison, Blobel’s research interest was in methods for separating cells into their different components. Today, Blobel, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Professor at The Rockefeller University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, studies the process by which newly made proteins are transported across the membranes of cell structures called organelles. The research has an immediate bearing on many diseases, including cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s and AIDS.

Study looks at effects of laser eye treatment
The Medical School Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences is recruiting patients to participate in a five-year clinical trial to determine whether laser treatment can decrease vision loss for older individuals at risk of developing severe age-related macular degeneration.

Age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, affects an estimated 1.7 million older Americans, and is the leading cause of severe visual impairment in individuals over 60. Over the last several years, the use of photodynamic therapy (lasers) to treat eye conditions has continued to gain attention in the medical community. According to ophthalmologist Suresh Chandra, the study’s principal investigator, the risk to the patient in this particular trial is minimal. But the results of the trial, if encouraging, could be highly significant.

“The long-term significance of this study could be tremendous,” said Chandra. “If we find out that the use of mild laser is helpful, we can pick out patients in the early stages of AMD, apply the treatment and save them from blindness.”

More information: 263-9035; wwalker@facstaff.wisc.edu.

Nasal spray tested as common cold remedy
Medical School researchers are now testing a nasal spray that may suppress the common cold. The spray, which contains a protease inhibitor called AG7088, was developed by researchers who were looking for a treatment for HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS, says professor James Gern, who is directing the study.

The treatment – which has successfully fought rhinoviruses, the most frequent cause of the common cold, in test tubes – is being tried out on 900 people at 55 sites around the country, Gern says. AG7088 has proven effective when taken within 36 hours of a cold’s first symptoms.

“What makes this new treatment so revolutionary is that it attacks the virus directly and in its infancy, potentially inhibiting its ability to ever cause a full-blown cold,” Gern says.