School of Medicine

Dr. James P. Griffith and his wife Marla have established the Dr. James P. and Marla R. Griffith Mountaineer Medical Scholar program. A $20,000 commitment, the scholarship will be awarded to a student who chooses to further his or her education on the West Virginia University Health Sciences Charleston Campus, with preference given to those from West Virginia and/or Roane County and who have an interest in internal medicine and/or psychiatry.

Megan Burkart, assistant professor in the West Virginia University School of Medicine’s Division of Physical Therapy, is the first physical therapist in West Virginia to achieve specialization as an Oncologic Clinical Specialist.

Amelia Adcock, associate director of the West Virginia University Stroke Center, is customizing an app that helps first responders in West Virginia triage stroke patients efficiently when they respond to a 911 call.

West Virginia University researcher Steve Davis is piloting an intervention program that uses telehealth to connect rural West Virginians with nurses who can help them manage—and even prevent—conditions like these. The program will focus on individuals being discharged from long-term care facilities as they transition to life back at home.

West Virginia University researcher Jianhai Du is investigating how the retina pigment epithelium turns proline—an amino acid—into fuel that the retina can easily burn. Using animal models and primary human cells, he and his team discovered that if the RPE can’t process proline properly, the retina is undernourished, and retinal degenerative diseases result. Their findings, which appear in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, may point to innovative treatments that make incurable blindness preventable.

Do the nutritional supplements people take or the diets they adhere to actually protect them against cardiovascular problems and death? Maybe not, suggests a new umbrella review of meta-analyses and randomized controlled trials by Safi Khan, an assistant professor in the West Virginia University School of Medicine. His findings appear in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers at West Virginia University have mapped the crystal structure of a protein that resides in our cells and determined—for the first time—how a drug latches onto it. The findings appear in Communications Chemistry, a Nature research journal.

One reason pancreatic cancer is so lethal is its resistance to traditional chemotherapy. But West Virginia University surgical oncologist Brian Boone is exploring whether FOLFIRINOX—a new combination of cancer drugs—can improve outcomes in patients whose pancreatic cancer is “borderline resectable,” meaning that a tumor may be too close to a blood vessel to be removed safely.

Sundus Lateef, a second year medical student in the WVU School of Medicine and Bridgeport native, was one of only 50 students selected from across the nation to participate in the NIH Medical Research Scholars Program.

There’s a fine line between helpful and harmful inflammation. WVU School of Medicine researchers Gordon Meares and Savannah Sims want to explore it. They and their colleagues are investigating how inflammation spreads throughout the brain and what makes it protective—or perilous.