News

The lineup is set for the Weekly Colloquium on Problems in the Biology of Complex Diseases, which once again features several speakers and topics of interest to University of Arizona Department of Medicine physicians and investigators.

UA researchers are studying if the combination of dispensing asthma inhalers (corticosteroids) in the emergency department and supervising their use in elementary schools will increase the medication’s use among children with asthma and decrease emergency department visits.

Interim Chief of the University of Arizona Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine Sairam Parthasarathy, MD, has been hired by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as an expert advisor to complete the collaborative effort on a five-year, strategic plan to lay out research goals for sleep medicine and circadian sciences.

Individuals with a particular genetic factor may be more resistant to plaque build-up and have a reduced risk for coronary artery disease.

An $8 million project aims to change the health of this tribe’s children, who suffer an alarming rate of asthma and lack disease control.

A renowned University of Arizona pulmonary physician-scientist whose research and clinical interests focus on severe asthma, Monica Kraft, MD, is featured in four articles with videos in MD Magazine

Christian Bimé, MD, a UA assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine and medical director of the Medical Intensive Care Unit at Banner – University Medical Center – Tucson, was asked by the president-elect of the American Thoracic Society to serve on the ATS Health Equality and Diversity Committee.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved a new drug to treat a severe form of asthma, based in part on research conducted by Eugene Bleecker, MD, co-director of the Division of Pharmacogenomics in the UA Health Sciences Center for Applied Genetics and Genomic Medicine (TCAG2M) and a professor and co-chief of the Division of Genetics, Genomics, and Precision Medicine in the UA Department of Medicine.

UA Health Sciences Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center respiratory scientist Dr. Stefano Guerra will lead an international effort—in partnership with investigative cohorts in Sweden and the UK—to target deficits of the protein CC16 as an indicator of likely persistence of asthma into adulthood.

In case you missed it, here’s a link to an op-ed article co-written by the University of Arizona’s Kimberly Andrews Espy, PhD, senior vice president for research, and Leigh Neumayer, MD, interim senior vice president for health sciences, on federally funded research under way at the UA to ease breathing woes of those suffering from asthma that advances a personalized medicine approach to diagnoses and treatment.