In a recent study, Rochester scientists made two important contributions to DNA damage research. First, though scientists could previously point to an association between DNA damage and aging, the Rochester group has demonstrated a causal relationship between reduced DNA damage and extended lifespan. Second, the researchers have identified a cellular factor—an enzyme called topoisomerase 2, or Top2, implicated in DNA damage — that can be targeted to reduce that damage. The findings are published in the journal Aging.

 “This part of the puzzle has been missing from the DNA damage theory of aging,” says David Goldfarb, professor of biology. There are many examples of DNA damage being associated with aging, but never has a reduction in DNA damage been shown to extend lifespan. The study also shows how this information may have therapeutic potential.

Goldfarb’s lab exposed yeast – which ages much like humans — to a lifespan-shortening, drug-like molecule that acts on (Top2) and helped the lab uncover Top2’s role.

Top2 introduces double strand breaks into DNA as part of its catalytic cycle. The breaks must then be resealed. “Every once in a while Top2 gets trapped on the DNA before it can seal the breaks,” Goldfarb says. “When that happens, at least in young cells, there are a number of back-up systems that recognize the breaks and repair them.”

However, a number of researchers have shown that DNA damage repair systems decline as cells age, causing the unrepaired DNA breaks created by Top2 to persist. The unrepaired double strand breaks cause aging, diseases like cancer, and, ultimately, death.

“Many investigators are trying to reverse aging by boosting the backup DNA repair systems in aging cells,” Goldfarb says. However, the new findings by his lab suggest that “a simpler therapeutic approach may be to administer drugs that reduce the activity of enzymes like Top2 that cause DNA damage in the first place.”

In the paper, his lab shows how a three- to five-fold reduction in Top2 activity in aging yeast cells resulted in a 20 to 30 percent increase in lifespan.

The lab would not have uncovered Top2’s role if it had not first discovered LSI, an unusual Top2 poison. Unlike other Top2 poisons, which are usually highly toxic, LS1 shortens lifespan without affecting the health of young cells. When introduced into yeast cells, LS1 prevents Top2 from repairing its DNA double strand breaks. That’s not a problem in young cells with healthy DNA repair systems, but deadly in older cells, Goldfarb says,

However, by transiently stopping Top2 from repairing its own breaks, LS1 enhances the potency of anti-cancer drugs that themselves target Top2 in human cancer cells.

For example, doxorubicin – a chemotherapy drug used for breast cancer, leukemia, and other cancers – causes cardiotoxicity when overused. “You can give patients only so much doxorubicin; there’s a lifetime dosage limit,” Goldfarb says. However, if the potency of doxorubicin were increased by also administering LS1, the same therapeutic affects might be achieved by using less of the drug – reducing the chance of side effects—and extending the utility of these frontline cancer drugs.

Gregory Tombline, a PhD researcher at Rochester, and postdoc Jonathan Millen are primary contributors to the study. John Nitiss, an expert on Top2 at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Pharmacy also contributed. The Drug Discovery Division at Southern Research Institute in Birmingham Alabama performed the high throughput lifespan screen that identified LS1. The project was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and a contract to the university from Calorics Pharmaceuticals.

Exercise and psychological therapy work better than medications to reduce cancer-related fatigue and should be recommended first to patients, according to a Wilmot Cancer Institute-led study published in JAMA Oncology.

“If a cancer patient is having trouble with fatigue, rather than looking for extra cups of coffee, a nap, or a pharmaceutical solution, consider a 15-minute walk,” said lead author Karen Mustian, associate professor of surgery (Cancer Control Program).  “It’s a really simple concept but it’s very hard for patients and the medical community to wrap their heads around it because these interventions have not been front-and-center in the past. Our research gives clinicians a valuable asset to alleviate cancer-related fatigue.”

Scientists analyzed 113 unique studies — all of them randomized clinical trials — that tested various treatments for cancer-related fatigue. Nearly half of the 11,000 patients involved in the studies were women with breast cancer; ten studies focused on other types of cancer and enrolled only men.

Data show that exercise alone—whether aerobic or anaerobic—reduced cancer-related fatigue most significantly. Psychological interventions, such as therapy designed to provide education, change personal behavior, and adapt the way a person thinks about his or her circumstances, similarly improved fatigue.

Studies that delivered a combination of exercise and psychological therapy had mixed results; drugs tested for treating cancer-related fatigue were not as effective.

Read more here.

A pilot study by Medical Center researchers showed a 39 percent reduction in the readmission rates of stroke patients at Strong Memorial Hospital when they are paired with caregivers who help them transition back to their homes.

The program, described by Ann M. Leonhardt Caprio and Curtis G. Benesch of the UR Medicine Comprehensive Stroke Center and Denise Burgen of UR Medicine Home Care, starts when the patient is still in the hospital and is introduced to a “coach” with UR Medicine Home Care.

The coach participates in the discharge planning and works with patients to help them distinguish between symptoms that may be normal during recovery and those that require medical attention, helps them understand their medications and when and where their follow-up appointments will occur, and ensures that the patients have the necessary support waiting for them at home.

Once discharged, the coach follows up with a home visit within 24 to 48 hours and with weekly phone calls.

Strong Memorial Hospital’s 30-day readmission rate for stroke patients dropped from 7.8 percent to 4.7 percent after the home care program was implemented.

Sally Norton, the Independence Chair in Nursing and Palliative Care at the School of Nursing and a nationally recognized expert in improving the care of patients with advanced illnesses. She has been honored with the prestigious Distinguished Researcher Award from the Hospice & Palliative Nurses Association. The award recognizes nurse researchers who have made significant contributions to the science that have allowed the specialty of palliative nursing to evolve and mature. Norton’s research is focused on palliative care and end-of-life decision-making, with emphasis on the communication processes and practice patterns of care delivery in acute and long-term care settings. Over the past two decades, she has played a role in dozens of funded research studies on palliative care and has authored (or co-authored) more than 70 papers. Read more here.

Ulrik Soderstrom ’16, ’17 (MS) has found myriad ways to apply his knowledge of data science and machine learning: everything from bringing solar energy to low-income communities, predicting weather patterns for farmers, modeling ocean wave patterns, and solving Sudoku puzzles.

Soderstrom is one of the first students to graduate with a BA in data science (and a joint BA in earth and environmental sciences), and also go on to the data science master’s degree program, which he will complete in May. Along with finishing his coursework, he is currently working as a data scientist with Arable Labs, where he uses machine learning algorithms to create weather forecasts from aggregated weather data, and as a data science consultant for ROCSPOT, where he connects utilities, homes, and corporations to solar installers to increase use of solar power.

Click here to read his Q&A with Lindsey Valich.

Also in the series:

• Student athletes find big wins in big data.
• Warner professors Kara Finnigan and Karen DeAngelis talk about the opportunities and challenges data science presents to education researchers.

Students from the Center for Medical Technology & Innovation master’s program won first and second place in the University’s fourth annual “America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent” competition, hosted by the Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Regulatory Science program.

Eight teams of students competed for a chance to present their ideas on how to solve regulatory science issues in person at the Food and Drug Administration.

The winners:

First place: Bethany Lennox, CMTI graduate student. Her “Simple English Explanation Directive (SEED)” would require clinical trial sponsors who register their studies on Clinicaltrials.gov, the FDA’s online clinical trial warehouse, to provide a cover page describing the study, its purpose, and any results in plain language. This would help consumers understand the scope, design, and impact of clinical trials and possibly find studies to participate in. It could also help doctors and industry professionals find studies more quickly, which would keep them abreast of treatment options for patients, spark collaborations, and expand research.

Second place: Kerry Donnelly and Brittany Garrison, CMTI graduate students. Their “3-Defining Patient Matched Implants” proposes a streamlined system to identify the weakest component of a 3-D printed personalized implant and print a duplicate of that “weak link” for destructive testing. The weakest link would be identified using finite element analysis software that predicts a product’s reaction to real-world forces.

Third place: Simeon Abiola, translational biomedical sciences graduate student, and Solomon Abiola, computer science and translational biomedical sciences graduate student. They propose the “Regulatory Innovation Science Expert (RISE) Initiative,” a computer expert system that would provide guidance on how to navigate the FDA approval process. RISE would analyze clinical trials and FDA predicate device databases to determine which new devices are likely to succeed.

Read more here.

The Clinical and Translational Science Institute offers a new Matchmaking service to connect faculty members with established researchers who have obtained funding in their field.

A personalized Matchmaker report created by the CTSI is broken into two sections: a funding climate report at the top and then a ranked listing of the top six research projects that most closely match the supplied text at the bottom.

This information can be used to:

• Forge new research collaborations.
• Recruit new faculty members.
• Identify mentors for junior faculty members and students.
• Help faculty better understand the types of research projects that are already underway.

Click here to read more.

The Upstate New York I-Corps Node (UNY I-Corps) has launched its new website – www.unyicorps.org – providing academic researchers with the opportunity to combine their technical and scientific knowledge with an entrepreneurial mindset. The goal is to discover new technologies that can be developed for market.

UNY I-Corps – a partnership of the University, Cornell University, and Rochester Institute of Technology – provides targeted curriculum and mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs. Registration for short courses, which provide researchers with a way to get involved in the I-Corps network, is now open.

Each year, the UNY I-Corps Node recommends 20 to 30 teams to receive up to $50,000 in funding and other opportunities.

Read more here.

The 2017 CEIS (Center for Emerging and Innovative Sciences) Technology Showcase will allow researchers to share their work in optics, imaging and photonics, energy and materials, biomedical technology, and IT with industry professionals.

The showcase, from 1 to 5 p.m. April 13 at the Doubletree Hotel, 1111 Jefferson Road, is an opportunity for researchers to explore with companies the possibility of future collaborations and technology transfer.

The showcase is free and open to the public. Register online.

Amy Vierhile, School of Nursing, “Feasibility of Providing Pediatric Neurology Telemedicine Care to Youth with Headache.” Noon, March 7, 2017. Helen Wood Hall (4w301). Advisors: Erin Baylor, Jane Tuttle, Heather Adams.

Deborah Hurley, School of Nursing, “Optimizing Outcomes for Patients Who Survive Critical Illness: A Feasibility Study to Evaluate the Implementation of a Music Intervention.” 10:30 a.m., March 9, 2017. Helen Wood Hall (4w301). Advisors: Susan Ciurzynski, Ying Xue, Anthony Pietropaoli.

Rebecca Kreuzer, Geosciences, “A Structural Framework for Understanding the Spatial Distribution and Geochemical Variation of Natural Gas- and Salt-Rich Groundwater in Shallow Aquifers of South-Central New York.” 10:30 a.m., March 10, 2017. 229 Hutchison Hall. Advisor: Robert Poreda.

March 19: Deadline to register for the University’s preliminary Falling Walls competition, to see who will represent Rochester at the final competition in Berlin, Germany this fall. This year’s Falling Walls preliminary contest will be held April 20 in Schlegel Hall’s Eisenberg Rotunda on the River Campus. Register here. Contact Adele Coelho, faculty outreach coordinator, at adele.coelho@rochester.edu for additional information.

March 20: Deadline to submit applications for a University Research Award of up to $37,500, matched by the applicant’s home school for a total of $75,000. The program provides seed money on a competitive basis for innovative research projects that are likely to obtain external support.  Completed applications should be directed to adele.coelho@rochester.edu. Click here to view the full RFP.

March 20: Deadline to submit applications for an AS&E PumpPrimer II award. Click here for more information. Faculty in the School of Arts & Science should refer questions to Debra Haring, and those in the Hajim School of Engineering to Cindy Gary.

March 20: Deadline to nominate early career faculty in AS&E and SMD natural and biological sciences for Furth Fund awards. Additional information can be found here.

March 25: Brainstorming for the Healthy Weight Initiative, which aims to increase the proportion of people with healthy weight in Rochester and beyond. The goal is to identify potential collaborators and research topics in any area related to body weight development as a first step toward developing new transdisciplinary research teams to obtain more research funding.  For more information, contact Diana Fernandez.

April 10: Deadline to apply for pilot and feasibility awards offered by the Schmitt Program in Integrative Neuroscience (SPIN), in conjunction with the Ernest J. Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience. Click here for more information and to download the RFA.

April 13: CEIS (Center for Emerging and Innovative Sciences) Technology Showcase. Researchers share their work in optics, imaging and photonics, energy and materials, biomedical technology, and IT with industry professionals. 1 to 5 p.m., Doubletree Hotel, 1111 Jefferson Road. Free and open to the public. Register online.