As hospitals prepare for new medical privacy rules, physicians can expect changes

Online incident-reporting system will allow hospital to respond more quickly, identify trends

Gerardi appointed as new patient safety program manager

Profile: Michael Bellino (chief of Stanford's orthopedic trauma service)

Infectious disease specialist helps launch AIDS training program in Uganda

SF Giants event raises liver transplant funds

Correction

Below are selected highlights of recent medical research
conducted at Stanford Medical Center.
Detailed news releases are available on the Internet at
http://mednews.stanford.edu

DRUG RESISTANCE IN AIDS. At the 2002 World AIDS Conference in July in Barcelona, Stanford researchers made presentations based on two studies: one that addressed the challenge of drug resistance in AIDS care, and another that looked at how doctors treat patients with medication. Stanford Positive Care Clinic director Andrew Zolopa reported on the first study, which was based on a panel of 12 international experts who had been given 50 complex genotypes from real patients and asked to predict resistance to each of 16 drugs. He found that the experts were good at predicting resistance and were highly consistent with one another. In the second study, Stanford researchers addressed whether drug-resistance testing can be used in countries where the two most prevalent strains of HIV are subtypes C and A. Assistant professor of medicine Robert Shafer, working with postdoctoral fellow Rami Kantor and associate professor David Katzenstein, reported on findings based on an analysis of sequences from subtype A- and subtype C-infected individuals compared with sequences from subtype B-infected persons. The researchers noted that major mutations in subtype B are also seen in subtypes A and C but cautioned that larger data sets are needed for confirmation of their findings.

CANCER GENE SWITCH. Scientists at Stanford were able to trick cancer cells in mice into self-destructing by briefly disabling a cancer-causing gene, thereby giving affected cells a chance to change their cancerous destiny. The researchers created bone cancer cells containing an altered version of the gene MYC that could be shut down by adding a molecular off switch. With the MYC gene turned off for 10 days, treated mice with bone cancer survived four times longer than untreated mice. The results were reported by oncologist Dean Felsher, an assistant professor, and colleagues in the July 5 issue of Science.

SHINGLES PREVENTION. Researchers at Stanford studied the effects of an inactivated form of the chicken pox vaccine in cancer patients who were very likely to develop shingles (also called zoster), a painful condition which strikes the elderly and those with weakened immune systems. In the July 4 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, professors Ann Arvin and Karl Blume and colleagues reported that of the 53 lymphoma patients who received one dose of the inactivated vaccine within 30 days prior to hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, followed by three post-transplant doses, only 13 percent developed shingles. In the unvaccinated control group, 30 percent of 56 participants contracted the disease, the researchers found.