Show enthusiasm, ask questions and bring copies of a resume — these are some of the most common interview tips for job seekers. But one’s posture may also influence whether he or she lands a coveted position — even when the person on the other side of the desk is in a more powerful role.
According to new Kellogg School research, posture plays an important role in determining whether people act as though they are really in charge. The research finds that “posture expansiveness” — positioning oneself in a way that opens up the body and takes up space — activates a sense of power that produces behavioral changes in a person independent of his or her actual rank or hierarchical role in an organization.
When there is a discrepancy between one’s hierarchical role and one’s posture, “posture seems to be more important in determining how people act and think,” says Adam Galinsky, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decisions in Management.
These new findings demonstrate that posture may be more significant to a person’s psychological manifestations of power than their title or rank alone. Led by Kellogg School Professor Adam Galinsky and Kellogg PhD candidate Li Huang, along with Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Deborah Gruenfeld and Stanford PhD candidate Lucia Guillory, this research is the first to directly compare the behavioral effect of having a high-power role versus being in a high-power posture. The paper, “Powerful Postures Versus Powerful Roles: Which is the Proximate Correlate of Thought and Behavior?,” appears in the January 2011 issue of Psychological Science.
Though they did not anticipate it, the researchers found that posture mattered more than hierarchical role — it had a strong effect in making a person think and act in a more powerful way. In an interview situation, for example, an interviewee’s posture will not only convey confidence and leadership, but the person will actually think and act more powerfully. “Going into the research, we figured role would make a big difference,” Huang noted. “But shockingly, the effect of posture dominated the effect of role in each and every study.”
The cover illustration on the Dec. 5, 2005 issue of the New Yorker magazine “is a classic example of how indicative posture can be in determining whether people act as though they are in charge,” Professor Adam Galinsky says
“The Dec.5, 2005 cover of The New Yorker is a classic example of how indicative posture can be in determining whether people act as though they are in charge,” said Galinsky, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decisions in Management. “The image depicts the power relationships between former President George W. Bush — shown with an apron, feather duster, and a slouched, constricted posture — while former Vice President Dick Cheney has both arms expansively extended across the back of a sofa, his legs sprawled across a coffee table. When hierarchical role and physical posture diverge like this, posture seems to be more important in determining how people act and think.”
To test their theory, the researchers conducted three experiments to explore the effects of body posture versus role on power-related behaviors. The first two experiments demonstrated that when individuals were placed in high- or low-power roles while adopting expansive or constricted body postures, only posture activated power-related behaviors. In the expansive posture condition, participants were asked to place one arm on the armrest of a chair and the other arm on the back of a nearby chair; they were also told to cross their legs so the ankle of one leg rested on the thigh of the other leg and stretched beyond the leg of the chair. Conversely, in the constricted posture condition, participants were asked to place their hands under their thighs, drop their shoulders and place their legs together.
During various tasks, such as a word completion exercise and a blackjack game, participants with open body postures were thinking about more power-related words and generally took more action than those with closed body postures. Although people in a high-power role reported feeling more powerful than did those in a low-power role, the manipulation of role power had little effect on action. These findings demonstrate that role and posture independently affect participants’ sense of power, but posture is more responsible for activating power-related behaviors.
In a third experiment, the researchers demonstrated that posture also has a greater effect on action than recalling an experience of being in a high- or low-power role. Participants verbally recorded a time when they were in a high- or low-powered position while adopting either expansive or constricted body postures, and were then asked whether they would take action in three different scenarios. Participants in the expansive body posture condition took action more often than those with constricted postures, regardless of whether they recalled a time of being in a high- or low-powered role.
An understanding of the power of posture will be important for those seeking new jobs in 2011, Galinsky said. “With 1.9 million new jobs on the horizon this year, our research suggests that your posture may be quite literally the way to put your best foot forward in a job interview,” he said.
]]>A new possible application of robotic exoskeletons has now come to light, thanks to a recent study from the University of Chicago – these devices may hold the key for patients hoping to regain the use of a paralyzed limb.
If there’s anything cooler than wearable robots, it’s moving things with your mind, and that’s exactly what these robots are designed to facilitate. In their study, published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience, a research team led by Nicholas Hatsopoulos set up a system that translated brain wave activity of monkeys into the motion of a cursor on a screen, allowing a monkey to control the movement of the cursor using only its thoughts.
A robotic sleeve was fitted around the monkey’s arm, which moved the arm along with the motion of the cursor. The researchers found that the robotic sleeve, which gave the monkey sensory feedback about how the cursor was moving, greatly improved the ability of the monkey to mentally manipulate the cursor.
The idea for the use of the robot came from what is known about how the brain usually controls movement of the body. Imagine moving your arm: first, your brain tells your arm where to go. As your arm moves, nerves in your arm relay information back to the brain about the arm’s position. This allows the brain to make a new informed decision about where to move the arm next. If the arm is paralyzed due to illness or injury, the brain can’t control the movement of the arm, but can often still receive information about the arm’s position (depending on the extent of the damage).
This is where the wearable robots come in – the robot does the job of moving the arm in response to instructions from the brain, and the arm keeps the brain updated about its motion. In the study, this sensory feedback, so-called proprioception, allowed the monkeys to more quickly and more directly move the cursor on the screen towards targets compared to the case where the arm remained stationary.
Previous instances of devices that can be controlled by brain activity have relied on visual feedback alone, where the patient must watch the movement of the device. The use of the robotic arm to add proprioceptive feedback more closely mimics motor control in healthy individuals.
The results presented by Hatsopoulos and his team are promising for patients with a paralyzed limb – devices with proprioception capabilities would offer a patient not only improved control, but also the ability to move the limb while looking away or with closed eyes.
Are robotic exoskeletons in the future for restoring the use of paralyzed limbs? Only time will tell, but it’s safe to say that robot suits aren’t just for Ironman anymore.
See the press release from the University of Chicago here: http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/2010/20101214-robot-arm.html
Want to learn more about devices that can be controlled by the brain? Watch this video of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh explaining how monkeys mentally control a robotic arm!
About the Author
Minna is a Ph.D. candidate in Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University
In her current research, Minna is working to solve mysteries about how organisms form biological minerals (such as bones and shells) by looking at them in new ways using X-ray microscopes at the Advanced Photon Source. Most of her work involves a type of green algae that she hopes to use for cleanup of radioactive waste, but she’s also had the opportunity to work with other fun organisms such as bees, sea urchins, mussels, and clams (although she definitely could have done without the bees).
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The standard approach to cancer therapy today is to mix and match chemotherapy drugs in order to attack tumors in multiple ways. Now, two separate teams of investigators have demonstrated that using nanoparticles to deliver multiple drugs simultaneously can produce a synergistic effect that boosts the cell-killing ability of both drugs.
In one study, a team of investigators at Northwestern University has shown that they can combine two powerful but extremely toxic anticancer agents - cisplatin and doxorubicin – in one polymer nanoparticle, producing a substantial boost in their ability of the combination to destroy tumors. In addition, the two-in-one nanoparticle reduces the amount of both drugs needed to kill cancer cells, which presumably would reduce the toxic side effects associated with these drugs.
SonBinh Nguyen and Thomas O’Halloran led this study, which was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Dr. O’Halloran is the co-principal investigator of one of 12 Cancer Nanotechnology Platform Partnerships funded by the National Cancer Institute Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer. He is also a member of the Northwestern University Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNE), which is also part of the Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer.
Though originally designed to carry arsenic trioxide to solid tumors, the nanoparticles used in this study are proving to be quite versatile in their ability to ferry a wide range of cargos to malignancies. In this study, the investigators wanted to see if delivering two drugs in one nanoparticle offered any advantages of delivering them without the nanoparticle or in separate nanoparticles. The nanoparticles, which the researchers call nanobins, are made by encasing a liposome inside a pH-responsive polymer cage. In this case, doxorubicin is entrapped within the liposome’s core, while cisplatin was entrapped in the polymer cage.
In an initial set of experiments, the investigators determined that a 5 to 1 ratio of cisplatin to doxorubicin was the most effective at treating ovarian tumors when the two drugs were combined in the same nanoparticle. When the two drugs were administered at this ratio but with each in its own nanoparticle, the combination was not only less effective at killing malignant cells, but the two drugs appeared to be interfering with each other, a phenomenon often observed in clinical practice. Administering the two drugs in the same nanoparticle ensures that the drugs are hitting their intracellular targets at the same time, which is what likely leads to the synergism observed in this study.
Meanwhile, Mansoor Amiji and Zhenfeng Duan, co-principle investigators of the Cancer Nanotechnology Platform Partnership at Northeastern University, have shown that a different type of polymer nanoparticle can also deliver two anticancer agents simultaneously and as a result can kill cancer cells that have become resistant to drug therapy. In this case, the researchers synthesized biocompatible polymer nanoparticles that entrapped paclitaxel and lonidamine and that targeted the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) that is overexpressed on highly aggressive tumors. When added to tumor cells growing in culture, the nanoparticle containing both drugs was far more effective at killing the drug-resistance cells than when the two drugs were co-administered in separate nanoparticles. The investigators reported their findings in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.
In a separate set of experiments, the results of which were published in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Drs. Nguyen and O’Halloran, joined by Thomas Meade, another member of the Northwestern CCNE, demonstrated that nanobins can also co-deliver a therapeutic and magnetic resonance imaging agent to tumors. In this study, the researchers loaded the anticancer agent gemcitabine into the nanobin’s core and added a gadolinium magnetic resonance contrast agent to the nanobin’s surface. When added to mouse tumor cells, the nanobins were taken up rapidly and the nanobins were clearly visible in magnetic resonance images. In addition, the nanoparticles released their gemcitabine payload once the nanobins were taken up by the cultured cells.
]]>Mark Ratner, chair of Northwestern University’s chemistry department, Dumas University Professor of Chemistry, and co-director of the Initiative for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN), talked to Medill Reports about molecular electronics, what it means to be a theoretical chemist, and the gratification that comes with science.
Mark Ratner, chair of Northwestern University’s chemistry department
How would you describe what you do as a theoretical chemist?
I am a chemist that studies molecules, and I happen to study them using computations and models rather than doing experiments. I research how electrons move through molecules.
Why is this important?
Fundamentally I am interested in how nature works, but secondarily and very importantly I am interested in what you can do with that knowledge once you have it. For example, those green leaves out there are capturing energy and they are turning it into chemical energy, [but] they do it very inefficiently. How do you make that better? Well, you make that better by studying how molecules absorb light and what they do with light.
How does the work you are doing fit into a bigger picture?
All molecular electronics have to do with energy in one way or another – light energy, heat energy, displays, photovoltaics, capturing electricity, photo fuels, etc. It is all a part of the energy problem, which is one of the problems, if not the major problem, that is confronting us at the moment with sustainability and climate change. So chemistry has a big part to play in this.
What is your favorite lesson when you are teaching?
There is a series of laws of thermodynamics. The first one is the concept of conservation of energy. If I take this [a pen] and drop it, the energy that was gravitational energy becomes kinetic energy and then becomes heat energy and sound energy. Do it again and it becomes work, so energy and work are related and conserved.
The second one is much more interesting. It says there is also an addition to work and energy, a second component and that is disorder. It is called “entropy,” and the way equilibrium systems are governed is a competition between energy and disorder. That is the second law of thermodynamics. You could argue that it is the most important truth that science knows. If you don’t know much about the second law of thermodynamics, then you don’t know much about science.
Can you tell me about the moment you knew you wanted to be a chemist?
Everybody says it was because of my chemistry set when I was a kid. You could get these little bottles and see reactions of color and smoke and flames, and it was really fun. But that is only part of it. I mean it is a mystery. It’s how these things work.
What has been the best thing that has happened in your career?
The rewards of science are delayed gratification – let’s put it that way. You can’t arrange for high-five moments, even when things go well. I had a conference with one of my [postdoctoral fellows] yesterday who just did something wonderful, and we did the high-five thing. Those are the things you live for, the moments when it all works – when you get some new idea that works, [or] you get an experiment that works.
What do you do outside of studying chemistry?
Anything having to do with water. I like to swim in it, I like to fish in it, I like to canoe in it, I like to kayak on it, I like to sail on it, I like to hike along it and I like to ski on it. You go out to this little river, and you don’t think about anything but you and the river – it’s good. The only time I don’t think about science is when I’m fishing.
- Sarah Plumridge
]]>Vinayak Dravid and David N. Seidman, professors in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, have been named 2010 MRS Fellows by the Materials Research Society (MRS).
The fellowship honors MRS members for distinguished research accomplishments and outstanding contributions to the worldwide advancement of materials research. Each year, only up to 0.2 percent of MRS members are selected for the honor.
Dravid is professor of materials science and engineering and director of the University’s NUANCE Center (Atomic and Nanoscale Characterization Experimental Center). He is recognized for sustained seminal contributions to the science and technology of advanced materials using the power of electron and scanned probes and for his passionate commitment to facility infrastructure development.
Seidman is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of materials science and engineering and founding director of NUCAPT (Northwestern University Center for Atom-Probe Tomography). He is recognized for pioneering achievements involving experiments and simulations and for understanding internal interfaces associated with precipitates, dispersoids and grain or heterophase boundaries in a wide range of hard materials.
Dravid’s research interests revolve around nanoscale phenomena in materials. Some previous honors include being named to the inaugural class of Microscopy Society of America (MSA) fellows, the Richard M. Fulrath Award from the American Ceramic Society and a McCormick Faculty Excellence Award. He serves or has served as editor or reviewer for a number of publications, including editor of the journal Microscopy and Microanalysis and principal editor of the Journal of Materials Research. Dravid serves as the coordinator for global program development at McCormick.
In his research, Seidman aims to understand physical phenomena on an atomic scale in a wide range of material systems. He will give the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) Institute of Metals Lecture and receive the Robert Franklin Mehl Award for 2011 at the 140th TMS meeting in San Diego. He was selected as the MRS 2008 Turnbull Lecturer and was the recipient of the 2006 Albert Sauveur Achievement Award from the American Society for Materials (ASM) International, where he was named a fellow in 2005. Seidman has served as editor of several scholarly publications including Interface Science, Journal of Materials Science and the Materials Research Society Bulletin. He is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and the TMS. Seidman also was awarded a Max Planck Research Prize of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and the Alexander Von Humboldt-Stiftung Prize jointly with the late Prof. Peter Haasen
Both were honored at the 2010 MRS spring meeting in San Francisco.
- Andrea Albers
]]>Busy doctors can miss important details about a patient’s care during an office examination. To prevent that, Northwestern Medicine researchers have created a whip-smart assistant for physicians – a new system using electronic health records that alerts doctors during an exam when a patient’s care is amiss.
After one year, the software program significantly improved primary care physicians’ performance and the health care of patients with such chronic conditions as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The program, a new comprehensive approach tied to a doctor’s performance review, also boosted preventive care in vaccinations and cancer and osteoporosis screenings.
The study, done with 40 Northwestern Medicine primary care physicians, will be published Dec. 21 online in the journal Medical Care and in the February print issue.
“It helps us find needles in the haystack and focus on patients who really have outstanding needs that may have slipped between the cracks,” said lead author Stephen Persell, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
“Quality health care is not just about having good doctors and nurses taking care of you,” said Persell, a researcher in the division of general internal medicine. “It’s having systems in place that make it easier for them to do their jobs and insure that patients get what they need.”
In the new system, an unobtrusive yellow light on the side of a doctor’s computer alerts him or her to a message that something is awry with Mr. Jones’ care. When the doctor clicks on the light, she may learn Mr. Jones, who has congestive heart failure, hasn’t gotten his recommended pneumonia vaccine. Or, perhaps he was taken off his beta-blockers during a recent hospitalization and needs to start them again.
“The pieces of this system aren’t new, but putting them together in a comprehensive way is new,” Persell noted. “If you put these things together in a smart way, then electronic health records are powerful tools for quality of care.”
Electronic health records alone have not been shown to improve quality of care.
“What matters is how you use the electronic health records, so they make your job easier rather than act as a source of constant annoyance and false alarms,” Persell said. “By showing only things that appear to be out of order, we are trying not to overwhelm the physician. If doctors get inaccurate alerts saying do this, do that, then they will ignore them.”
Essential to the success of the program: it doesn’t waste the doctor’s time, is tied to performance reviews and isn’t annoying.
“You can’t shove it in doctors’ faces, or they walk away from it,” Persell noted. “We used reminders that were not intrusive, but were still effective because doctors had faith that the data was accurate and they could enter data to make it more accurate.”
David Baker, M.D., senior author and chief of Northwestern Medicine’s general internal medicine divison, added, “We wanted physicians to feel ownership of this. For this to work well, they have to view the alerts and reporting system as their personal quality improvement tools.”
Doctors’ interactions with the reminders were tied to quarterly performance reports based on their treatment of chronic disease and preventive care quality measures. They were willing to use the electronic tools, Persell believes, because they were regularly being reminded of their performance, and the tools were helping them improve it.
To create the program, researchers used existing tools already available in a commercial electronic health records system. They integrated the health records with performance reports and paid close attention to the quality of information fed to physicians.
When a recommended treatment is not the medically right choice for a patient, the doctor is able to enter that information. Thus, he is not needlessly reminded that the patient isn’t getting a certain drug and won’t be penalized in performance reports for not prescribing it.
Among the improvements: heart disease patients getting cholesterol lowering medication rose from 87 to 93 percent, pneumonia vaccinations from 80 to 90 percent and colon cancer screenings from 57 to 62 percent.
“The gains are modest,” Persell said, “but if you are already at 90 percent and go to 94 percent, that’s important.”
The research was supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
- Marla Paul
]]>Researchers at Northwestern University have made an exciting development into the understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and found that certain drugs appear to prevent the disorder from developing.
PTSD is a debilitating mental illness that affects around 8 million Americans. Symptoms include depression, panic attacks, flashbacks and chronic fear and anxiety. After a traumatic event, the brain becomes over-stimulated and ongoing interactions between certain proteins continue even though they should stop. These interactions cause an exaggerated fear response in the individual who has experienced the trauma.
“People with this syndrome feel danger in everything that surrounds them,” said Dr. Jelena Radulovic, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern and lead researcher of the study. “They are permanently alert and aroused because they expect something bad to happen. They have insomnia; their social and family bonds are severed or strained. They avoid many situations because they are afraid something bad will happen. Even the smallest cues that resemble the traumatic event will trigger a full-blown panic attack.”
Radulovic’s group has developed a mouse model for PTSD, in which mice are exposed to a traumatic (but painless) event, and then exposed to a different event which measures their fear response. The mice maintain PTSD-like fear responses for up to a month.
The group not only identified the molecular cause of PTSD, but found that injecting the drugs MPEP and MTEP (developed by Novartis and Merck, respectively) directly into the hippocampus of these mice within 5 hours of a traumatic event prevented the development of exaggerated fear, and fear response returned to normal.
MPEP and MTEP are both drugs that prevent the uptake of glutamate in neurons. Glutamate is a neurotransmitter that is released after a stressful event and excites neurons. In PTSD patients, the neurons remain excited even when the glutamate has dissipated.
Researchers are excited about the potential of this new type of treatment after the response in the mice after drug treatment.
“The mice’s fear responses were completely normal,” Radulovic said. “Their memories of the stressful event didn’t trigger the extreme responses anymore. This means we could have a prevention approach for humans exposed to acute, severe stressful events.”
- Rebecca Hernandez
]]>Northwestern University, a leader in cancer nanotechnology research, has received a five-year, $12 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to leverage the advantages of nanotechnology to improve the way cancer is diagnosed and treated. Results will be disseminated to the wider research community for ultimate translation to the clinic.
The Northwestern University Center of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (NU-CCNE) will focus on developing nanomaterials and nanodevices primarily for application in brain, breast and pancreatic cancer diagnostics and therapeutics, with potential for use in other forms of cancer.
Northwestern is one of only nine institutions across the country, and the only one in the Midwest, to receive a CCNE award in this second funding phase of the NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer program. (Northwestern’s first CCNE received NCI support from 2005 to 2010.)
Augmenting the NCI CCNE grant, a $2.1 million award from the Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC) will establish a new facility enabling NU-CCNE discoveries to be shared with CBC-affiliated biology laboratories at no cost, broadening the impact of the center’s research.
“The support from the National Cancer Institute and the CBC will enable researchers to continue to make significant cancer-relevant discoveries that ultimately can be transferred to the clinic,” said Steven T. Rosen, co-director of the NU-CCNE, Genevieve Teuton Professor of Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine and director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.
The NU-CCNE combines the strengths and resources of the Lurie Cancer Center and Northwestern’s International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN). Nanoscientists, cancer biologists, engineers and clinicians from Northwestern will work together on five research projects making up the center. Many will collaborate with researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“Nanotechnology is a key driver of advances in cancer detection and treatment, and Northwestern has played a major role in developing this field,” said Chad A. Mirkin, co-director of the NU-CCNE, George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, member of the Lurie Cancer Center and IIN director.
In making the CCNE award, NCI cited Northwestern for the leadership and complementary expertise of Mirkin and Rosen, the impressive record of accomplishments developing nanotechnology-based therapeutics (including several novel technologies undergoing commercialization and clinical trials) and the highly significant basic science and clinical problems being pursued.
Each of the CCNE’s five research projects has the meaningful participation of an industry partner that is committed to facilitating rapid commercialization of clinical trial-ready technologies developed as part of the center.
A Nanoconstructs Core will provide a shared facility where new nanoplatforms can be developed and evaluated using a common set of cell and animal models, and researchers can definitively determine which new nanoplatforms should be pursued. The core also will allow for comparison of nanoplatforms developed by other researchers who are part of the NCI’s Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer.
Another core facility, the one funded by the CBC, will disseminate NU-CCNE approaches and technologies to researchers at all three CBC partner institutions: Northwestern, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Chicago. Only an acknowledgement, not authorship, on manuscripts resulting from use of the NU-CCNE tools will be required, essentially erasing barriers to adopting the new methods. (The CBC, funded by The Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust, is an initiative that fosters collaborative research and new partnerships in the biomedical sciences.)
In addition to research, the NU-CCNE is committed to educating and training scientists who can work at the interface of nanotechnology and cancer research; encouraging and supporting trans-alliance training opportunities and collaborations; and providing effective mechanisms to disseminate knowledge to the larger community.
Some of the strategies to achieve these goals include support for trans-alliance research and pilot projects, integrative training in nanotechnology and cancer, an intramural seminar series, Medical Student Summer Fellowships in Nanotechnology and summer research programs for undergraduates.
For more information about the Northwestern University Center of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, visit http://www.ccne.northwestern.edu/.
Another NCI grant
As part of the NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer program, Northwestern also has received a Cancer Nanotechnology Partnership Platform (CNPP) grant of $1.9 million over five years for a project focused on the treatment of metastatic breast and ovarian cancer. This work was initiated in the University’s first CCNE program.
The CNPP grant will support a project titled “Tumor Targeted Nanobins for the Treatment of Metastatic Breast and Ovarian Cancer” led by Thomas O’Halloran and Vincent Cryns, M.D. This work involves researchers from the Lurie Cancer Center and the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute (CLP). O’Halloran is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry and director of the CLP, and Cryns is associate professor of medicine at Feinberg.
- Megan Fellman
]]>Optical technology shows potential for prescreening patients at high risk for the disease
Researchers from Northwestern University and NorthShore University HealthSystem (NorthShore) have developed a method to detect early signs of lung cancer by examining cheek cells in humans using pioneering biophotonics technology.
“By examining the lining of the cheek with this optical technology, we have the potential to prescreen patients at high risk for lung cancer, such as those who smoke, and identify the individuals who would likely benefit from more invasive and expensive tests versus those who don’t need additional tests,” said Hemant K. Roy, M.D., director of gastroenterology research at NorthShore.
The optical technique is called partial wave spectroscopic (PWS) microscopy and was developed by Vadim Backman, professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern’sMcCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. Backman and Roy earlier used PWS to assess the risk of colon and pancreatic cancers, also with promising results.
The lung cancer findings are published online today (Oct. 5) by the journal Cancer Research. The paper will appear in print in the Oct. 15 issue.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Survival rates are high with surgical resection (removal of the tumor) but only if detected at an early stage. Currently there are no recommended tests for large population screening to detect lung cancer early. The disease is already advanced by the time most lung cancer patients develop symptoms. The five-year survival rate for lung cancer patients is only 15 percent.
PWS can detect cell features as small as 20 nanometers, uncovering differences in cells that appear normal using standard microscopy techniques. The PWS-based test makes use of the “field effect,” a biological phenomenon in which cells located some distance from the malignant or pre-malignant tumor undergo molecular and other changes.
“Despite the fact that these cells appear to be normal using standard microscopy, which images micron-scale cell architecture, there are actually profound changes in the nanoscale architecture of the cell,” Backman said. “PWS measures the disorder strength of the nanoscale organization of the cell, which we have determined to be one of the earliest signs of carcinogenesis and a strong marker for the presence of cancer in the organ.”
“PWS is a paradigm shift, in that we don’t need to examine the tumor itself to determine the presence of cancer,” added Hariharan Subramanian, a research associate in Backman’s lab who played a central role in the development of the technology.
After testing the technology in a small-scale trial, Roy and Backman focused the study on smokers, since smoking is the major risk factor related to 90 percent of lung cancer patients. “The basic idea is that smoking not only affects the lungs but the entire airway tract,” Roy said.
The study was comprised of 135 participants including 63 smokers with lung cancer and control groups of 37 smokers with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), 13 smokers without COPD and 22 non-smokers. The research was not confounded by the participants’ demographic factors such as amount of smoking, age or gender. Importantly, the test was equally sensitive to cancers of all stages, including early curable cancers.
The researchers swabbed the inside of patients’ mouths, and then the cheek cells were applied to a slide, fixed in ethanol and optically scanned using PWS to measure the disorder strength of cell nanoarchitecture. Results were markedly elevated (greater than 50 percent) in patients with lung cancer compared to cancer-free smokers.
A further assessment of the performance characteristics of the “disorder strength” (as a biomarker) showed greater than 80 percent accuracy in discriminating cancer patients from individuals in the three control groups.
“The results are similar to other successful cancer screening techniques, such as the pap smear,” Backman said. “Our goal is to develop a technique that can improve the detection of other cancers in order to provide early treatments, much as the pap smear has drastically improved survival rates for cervical cancer.”
Additional large-scale validation trials are necessary for PWS. If it continues to prove effective in clinical trials at detecting cancer early, Backman and Roy believe PWS has the potential to be used as a prescreening method, identifying patients at highest risk who are likely to benefit from more comprehensive testing such as bronchoscopy or low-dose CT scans.
The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health supported the research.
The paper is titled “Optical Detection of Buccal Epithelial Nanoarchitectural Alterations in Patients Harboring Lung Cancer: Implications for Screening.” In addition to Roy, Backman and Subramanian, other authors of the paper are Dhwanil Damania, Thomas A. Hensing, William N. Rom, Harvey I. Pass, Daniel Ray, Jeremy D. Rogers, Andrej Bogojevic, Maitri Shah, Tomasz Kuzniar and Prabhakar Pradhan.
- Megan Fellman
]]>Dale T. Mortensen, the Ida C. Cook Professor of Economics at Northwestern University’s Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics.
He won the prize with Peter Diamond, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Christopher Pissarides, London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom.
2010 Nobel Prize for Economics recipient Dale Mortensen
The three economists will share a total prize of $1.5 million.
The prize recognized “their analysis of markets with search frictions,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. The three developed a framework that seeks to explain why there are so many people unemployed at the same time as there are a large number of job openings.Their model helps explain the ways in which unemployment, job vacancies and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy and can also be applied to other areas, including the housing market.
“This is a great honor for Professor Mortensen and for Northwestern and a recognition of the important research that is being done at the University. On behalf of the entire Northwestern community, I extend my congratulations to Professor Mortensen,” said Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro.
Mortensen pioneered the theory of job search and search unemployment and extended it to study labor turnover, research and development, personal relationships and labor reallocation. His insight, that friction is equivalent to the random arrival of trading partners, has become the leading technique for analysis of labor markets and the effects of labor market policy. The development of equilibrium dynamic models designed to account for wage dispersion, the time series behavior of job and worker flows, and the role of reallocation in the determination of aggregate growth and productivity are the principal topics of his current research. His publications include more than 50 scientific articles. His book, “Wage Dispersion: Why Are Similar Workers Paid Differently?,” was published by MIT Press in 2003.
One of Mortensen’s co-winners, Peter Diamond, was the winner of the first Edwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics, which is awarded annually by Northwestern University to a leading figure in economics. Diamond received the Nemmers Prize in 1994. Diamond is the fourth recipient of the Nemmers Prize to subsequently be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Mortensen is the second current or former faculty member of Northwestern to receive a Nobel Prize in Economics. Roger B. Myerson, who received a Nobel in economics in 2007 while a professor at the University of Chicago, was a member of the faculty in the Kellogg School of Management from 1976 to 2001. It was during that time that much of his Nobel-winning research was conducted.
The Nobel Prize in Economics was established by Sweden’s Riksbank in 1968 to mark the central bank’s 300th anniversary. The prize is awarded annually for “work of outstanding importance” in the field of economic science, and the winners are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Other comments about Professor Dale Mortensen:
“All of us at Northwestern University are thrilled that Professor Dale Mortensen, a member of our faculty in the Department of Economics since 1965, has received this year’s Nobel Prize,” said Northwestern University Provost Daniel Linzer. “Dale’s many contributions in his scholarship are matched by his long record of excellence in teaching and service at Northwestern. We extend our congratulations to Dale, and to his colleagues and students.”
“As an economist, I’ve always felt that Dale was the most intuitive and smartest guy in the department,” said Joel Mokyr, Robert Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. “He is a wonderful colleague and a great human being, and his work has been absolutely pathbreaking. He explains a great deal about why at any given point in time there are a lot of people who are not working, and he gives a very rich and extremely useful theory of unemployment that’s very different from our normal ideas of unemployment.”
- Alan K. Cubbage
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