This year's State Health Benefits Program (SHBP) and the State Employees’ Tax Savings Program are holding their Open Enrollment period for eligible employees from Oct.1 through Oct. 31, 2007. For detailed information and the Campus Benefits Fairs schedule, please refer to the Human Resources Website.
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UMDNJ-University Hospital in Newark has been designated a Comprehensive Stroke Center by the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services. To receive the designation, a hospital must provide complete and specialized care to patients who experience the most complex strokes, which require specialized testing, highly technical procedures and other interventions.
In addition, the centers provide education and guidance to affiliated primary stroke centers. University Hospital has partnered with the following primary stroke centers: Newark Beth Israel Medical Center; St. Michael's Medical Center, Newark; and Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, Englewood.
University Hospital/New Jersey Medical School's Stroke & Cerebrovascular Program is unique nationwide because of the organization of its stroke specialists into the Brain Attack Team (BATeam), which includes emergency department staff, neurologists, neurosurgeons, neuroradiologists, and endovascular and neuro-intensive care specialists, who are on duty 24/7.
Osteopontin (OPN), a protein molecule involved in a variety of cellular processes, contributes significantly to immune deficiency and lymphoid organ atrophy following prolonged physiological stress, according to studies conducted jointly by UMDNJ and Rutgers University researchers.
Dr. Yufang Shi, Professor of Molecular Genetics, Microbiology and Immunology at UMDNJ - Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and investigator on the National Space Biomedical Research Institute’s Radiation Effects Team, co-authored the paper with Dr. David T. Denhardt, one of the discoverers of OPN and Professor of Cell Biology and Neuroscience at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and Kathryn X. Wang, graduate student in the Rutgers Graduate Program in Cell and Developmental Biology.
Their research findings are discussed in an article, which appeared in the September 11 print issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
They found that OPN plays a key role in stress-induced loss of infection-fighting white blood cells, called lymphocytes, after extended periods of physical stress.
Dr. Gilla Kaplan, a researcher from UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School and a faculty partner at the Public Health Research Institute, was awarded $1.5 million from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a study aimed at improving TB treatment methods.
During the next two years, Dr. Kaplan, chief investigator, and her team of researchers and physicians will study the critical need to accelerate the development of new therapeutic treatment and drugs for TB, and investigate how to combat the potentially harmful response of a patient's immune system to antibiotics which renders the drugs ineffective in killing the tuberculosis bacteria.
