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	HEADLINES ARCHIVES MEDIA CENTER

June 2006 Issue

• Unraveling Endemic Burkitt's Lymphoma
• Trento Opens Microsoft Centre for Computational and Systems Biology
• Health Briefs

Unraveling Endemic Burkitt's Lymphoma

By Ilene Raymond
Editor-in-Chief
June 15, 2006

For ten years, Lorenzo Leoncini, MD, professor of pathology and professor of the SHRO labs in University of Siena, Italy, has traveled to sub-Saharan Africa to study endemic Burkitt's lymphoma, the most common childhood cancer in Africa.

Although the cancer affects adults and children around the world, it is most prevalent in equatorial Africa, where it strikes ten out of 100,000 young boys between the ages of 2 and 14. The concentration makes a perfect “genetic footprint” for endemic Burkitt's lymphoma researchers.

“The area is like a natural experimental model,” says Leoncini, whose office is dotted with elephant carvings and photos of his African travels.

Burkitt's lymphoma most often begins with a tumor in the jaw. The rapid rate of growth in the cancer leads to large tumors that, if left untreated, are ultimately fatal. While the disease is curable through chemotherapy, many African patients still die, in part because the inadequate hospital conditions in the area make chemo treatments difficult.

“For that reason, we're very interested in exploring alternative methods of treatment,” says Leoncini.

“Burkitt's lymphoma was a disease of firsts,” says Leoncini. “It was the first time we recognized that an environmental factor combined with a virus and chromosomal damage to cause cancer. It was also the first cancer to be successfully treated with chemotherapy alone.”

Denis Burkitt, an Irish surgeon working in Uganda, described the endemic form of the disease in 1958. Three subtypes of Burkitt's lymphoma exist: endemic, sporadic and a form associated with HIV. Though all of the Burkitt's lymphoma tumor cells show damage in the set of chromosomes that include c-myc, a gene involved in cellular proliferation, two other factors play a role in endemic Burkitt's lymphoma in Africa: malaria and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection.

Yet, according to Leoncini, little recent research has examined the potential mechanisms between these two pathogens.

To help explore how these pathogens interact in Burkitt's lymphoma , Leoncini and his colleagues have been collecting Burkitt's lymphoma tissue samples in equatorial Africa. They plan to use the tissues to try to better understand the mechanism of Burkitt's and then compare that data with cases in Europe and North America.

“We suspect that there will be differences which will help us to better define the role of EBV infection and malaria in the African cases,” he says.

One step towards that goal is a forthcoming meeting planned to mark the 50th anniversary of the discovery of endemic Burkitt's lymphoma to be held in Kampala, Uganda in 2008. Designed to foster new approaches to treatment, the meeting will gather hematologists, pathologists, and biologists to create links between the clinical aspects, biological and pathological features and basic research.

“The meeting aims to bring clinicians and pharmaceutical companies to where Burkitt's lymphoma remains the most common childhood cancer,” says Leoncini. “We want to set up large scale clinical trials and cooperative projects so we can combine resources and expertise from many countries and different medical specialties to improve the treatment of this disease.”

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June 2006 Issue

Trento Opens Microsoft Centre for Computational and Systems Biology

By Pierpaolo Basso
SHpress Editor
June 15, 2006

The Microsoft Centre for Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Trento, Italy, celebrated its scientific opening this spring.

The Centre represents an important step in giving Italy a boost in sectors critical to the convergence between sciences, medicine, biology, genetics and information technology.

The Centre will try to apply new techniques emerging from programming languages and the concurrency theory, which is concerned with the modeling and verification of concurrent systems.

“Our goal is to use new computer science approaches to help enhance research in the life science field,” says Dr. Corrado Priami, president and CEO of the centre.

“Some of the main problems we will address are a better understanding of the etiology of diseases sand the design of new drugs,” says Dr. Priami. “We can create a model of a system that represents small molecules, for example, then see how the system behaves. While such observations must be tested in vitro and/or in vivo, we can reduce the number of wet experiments by suggesting ways to better plan for them.”

“The convergence of biology and information technology will lead to new methodologies of research,” says administrator Elisabetta Nones. “We want to facilitate a convergence between information technology and the science of life.”

see: www.msr-unitn.unitn.it

For more on systems biology see: www.systemsbiology.org

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June 2006 Issue

• Analyzing Anger
• For Men Only: Drink Up

By Ilene Raymond
Editor-in-Chief
June 15, 2006

Analyzing Anger
Uncontrollable anger that leads to road rage incidents or domestic violence affects about 7 % of all Americans, according to a new study headed by Ronald Kessler, PhD, of the Harvard Medical School. Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED) often begins in early teenage years, and can predispose individuals to depression, anxiety or substance abuse disorders. Despite the prevalence of the disorder, only 28.5 percent of those in the study currently reported treatment for anger. Kessler and his colleagues are currently working with the World Health Organization to assess and compare the prevalence of IED in 30 nations.

For more see: Archives of General Psychiatry (vol.63, p. 669-678, 2006)

For Men Only: Drink Up
A drink a day can lower the risk of heart disease for men, but not for women, reports an editorial in the British Medical Journal. While it has long been reported that moderate drinkers have a lower risk of coronary heart disease than those who abstain, most research in the field has been done on men. Researchers studied over 50,000 Danish men and women aged 50-65 years who took part in a national health study. Women who drank one day a week reduced their risk (by 36 percent), but those who drank seven days had about the same risk reduction (37 percent), suggesting the amount of alcohol consumed is more important than the drinking frequency. By comparison, men who drank frequently had the lowest risk of heart disease. For example, men who drank one day a week showed a 7% reduced risk, while those who drank daily had a 41% reduced risk. It didn't matter how much men drank, only that they did it daily.

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