But with the right kind of manipulation, they can be changed — a skin cell can turn into a liver cell or even a pulsing heart cell, Nobel laureate Sir John Gurdon told a crowd of students, faculty and staff at a talk on May 16 in Aresty Auditorium.

“The process of cell differentiation is remarkably stable,” Gurdon said. “Very rarely do cells of one kind switch into another kind. We don’t have skin in our brain or liver in our muscles. Nevertheless, it can happen.”

Making it happen is what earned Gurdon the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. In the early 1960s, he was able to replace the immature nucleus in a frog egg cell with the nucleus from a mature intestinal cell. The modified egg developed into a normal frog with the DNA of the mature cells.

In his talk, “Nuclear Transplantation to Prospects of Cell Replacement,” Gurdon talked about advances made in the areas of cloning and nuclear transplantation since his discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to develop into different kinds of tissue.

His pioneering work continues to reverberate in the world of science. Though he didn’t mention it, Gurdon’s talk came the day after scientists announced that for the first time they were able to transform human skin cells into embryonic stem cells — a breakthrough that links directly back to Gurdon’s original experiments.

Gurdon was introduced by Andrew McMahon, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, who called him a “scientist’s scientist.”

Gurdon touched on another milestone in the history of cloning — Dolly the sheep, which in 1996 became the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell using Gurdon’s nuclear transfer process. That it took more than 30 years to accomplish indicates the groundbreaking nature of Gurdon’s efforts.

Though Dolly died at about half the age of an average sheep, Gurdon called the cloning a success. He blamed the animal’s early death on it not being allowed outdoors to prevent it from being stolen.

“It lived for six years,” he said. “It was so precious they had to keep it indoors.”

As for the next breakthrough, Gurdon said he anticipates a therapeutic use to treat age-related macular degeneration.

“An eye could be easier to restore than other organs like the heart or liver because it needs relatively few cells — about 10,000 — compared to millions,” he said.

“This is remarkably reversible,” he said of the leading cause of blindness in older people. But there are still hurdles to be cleared. Much of the process of how and why cells can transform remains mysterious even while progress is being made.

“Our aim was and still is how this rejuvenated programming is happening,” he said.

The day after his speech, Gurdon received an honorary degree from USC during commencement.

The talk was sponsored by USC Stem Cell, the Eli and Edythe Broad Center, and the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

But thanks to her own determination and a new program that offers students real-life hospital training, Bodden is on her way to a fulfilling career in health care.

The program is called the USC Family of Schools Concurrent Enrollment Initiative, and it is an offshoot of the Neighborhood Academic Initiative. Targeted to low-income, disadvantaged, first-generation students, the program gives high-achieving students the chance to learn valuable skills in a real-world setting at Keck Medical Center of USC. Bodden was in the first class of students to participate.

While the students at Foshay Learning Center — one of the university’s Family of Schools — took their regular classes during the week, they also had intensive learning sessions every Saturday and Sunday at Los Angeles City College.

In March, five of the students moved on to receive some training at Keck Medical Center of USC, with Bodden working in cardiology. They worked 20 hours a week for three months and were also enrolled at college.

And it’s all 100 percent free — not bad when similar courses can cost thousands of dollars. While it was anything but easy, the allure of a free education made it all worthwhile.

“I didn’t have to pay for anything — shoes, books,” Bodden said. “They even provide transportation.”

The program became a reality last year when Theda Douglas, USC associate vice president for government partnerships and programs, applied for a grant from USC Neighborhood Outreach, which is funded by the annual Good Neighbors Campaign.

“We took high school students who are very serious about their career and wanted to be in the profession,” Douglas said. “It took them 16 weeks, every Saturday and Sunday. Their parents had to have them here at 6 a.m. We are thrilled to see the dedication of both parents and students in this endeavor. It is programs like this that provide a meaningful career path and give students a glimpse of what they can become.”

The Community Benefit and Outreach Department at Keck Medical Center was instrumental in bringing the program to the Health Sciences Campus. Providing medical education to minority students is one of the department’s focused outreach initiatives, according to Sevanne Sarkis, administrative director of community benefit and outreach.

“We have certain priorities we’re trying to meet in the community,” she said. “We’re trying to give them as much experience as possible.”

Bodden’s class was something of a test. If the students didn’t do well, the program would face an uncertain future. But Bodden is now tutoring the second group of students starting their studies.

The program makes the students more attractive when it comes time to enroll in college, said Alicia Syres, director of volunteer services at USC Norris Cancer Hospital.

“Grades are wonderful, but [colleges are] looking at the whole person now,” she said. “Have they gone out of their way to help someone else? They want more than numbers on paper. They want the whole package.”

Though she still has a way to go before reaching her ultimate goal of becoming a nurse practitioner, Bodden has already received vocational certification as a certified nursing assistant and a home health aide.

In fact, she already puts her skills to use. To make extra money, she spends weekends tending to an elderly woman with dementia.

So with classes, hospital training and tutoring, when does Bodden get a few free minutes for herself?

“Holidays,” she said with a laugh.

Type 2 diabetes is increasing in adults and young people. In people over age 65, combined prevalence of prediabetes and diabetes is greater than 50 percent. Although Type 2 diabetes had been rare in youth, the disease is becoming more common with the rise of childhood obesity.

“People with prediabetes, whose blood glucose levels are slightly above normal, and people with recently diagnosed diabetes all tend to get worse over time,” said Thomas Buchanan, chief of the Division of Endocrinology and Diabetes and associate dean for clinical research at the Keck School. “The main reason is that they make less and less insulin, which makes their blood glucose harder and harder to normalize.

“In the BetaFat Study,” he continued, “we’re comparing weight loss through gastric-banding surgery to standard treatment with the medication metformin to see which is better for preventing worsening of insulin levels over time.”

The trial, conducted at USC and Kaiser Permanente, aims to enroll 88 people in the Los Angeles area.

When Type 2 diabetes is diagnosed, the body is usually producing some insulin — a hormone that helps glucose, or sugar, get from food into cells — but it cannot use the insulin effectively, a condition called insulin resistance. Over time, insulin production decreases. Glucose, the body’s main source of fuel, builds up in the blood, and the body cannot make efficient use of glucose, often leading people with Type 2 diabetes to need to take insulin injections.

“By examining the effects of different treatments in people with prediabetes and early Type 2 diabetes who still produce substantial amounts of insulin, we hope to learn how to reverse or slow the progressive loss of insulin production that comes with increasing duration of the disease so that these people can stay healthier longer,” said Peter Savage, a project scientist and a senior adviser for clinical research at the NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK).

The NIH is supporting two other studies that use different interventions but have the same assessments as the BetaFat Study. The three studies are part of the Restoring Insulin Secretion (RISE) consortium.

The second adult trial will compare a placebo to three drug regimens, all approved to treat Type 2 diabetes by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration: metformin alone; metformin plus liraglutide, a drug that increases the amount of insulin released in response to nutrients; and glargine, a long-acting insulin that would be used for three months before switching to metformin.

The trial aims to enroll 255 people at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System and the University of Washington, both in Seattle, Indiana University and the University of Chicago.

A trial that aims to enroll 90 people from the ages of 10 to 19 will compare metformin alone to glargine, which would be used for three months before switching to metformin. The trial will be conducted at the Children’s Hospital Colorado and the University of Colorado, both in Aurora, Colo.; the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh; Yale University; and Indiana University.

“Along with comparing treatments in adults, the RISE studies will enable us to make direct comparisons between young people and adults with prediabetes and early Type 2 diabetes in terms of how their bodies respond to treatments,” said NIDDK Director Griffin Rodgers. “If successful, RISE studies will help to develop treatments that will slow the progression of prediabetes and diabetes.”

RISE is supported under the NIH (grant numbers U01DK94430, U01DK94431, U01DK94406, U01DK94438 and U01DK94467).

The study, which appeared in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that mice lost 85 percent of their hair if they received radiation therapy in the morning, compared to a 17-percent loss when treatment occurred in the evening.

Researchers from USC, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), worked out the precise timing of the hair circadian clock as well as uncovered the biology behind the clockwork — the molecules that tell hair when to grow and when to repair damage. The researchers then tested the clock using radiotherapy.

“These findings are particularly exciting because they present a significant step toward developing new radiation therapy protocols that include minimizing negative side effects on normal tissues, such as hair or bone marrow, while maintaining the desired effects on cancer cells,” said the study’s first author Maksim Plikus, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at USC and now an assistant professor of developmental and cell biology at UCI. “We will now apply our findings to design novel circadian rhythm-based approaches to cancer therapy.”

The scientists can’t say their findings will directly translate to human cancer therapy because they haven’t yet studied that possibility. But they say it is becoming increasingly clear that body organs and tissues have their own circadian clocks that, when understood, could be used to time drug therapy for maximum benefit.

“This suggests that delivering a drug to an organ while it is largely inactive is not a good idea. You could do more damage to the organ than when it is awake, repairing and restoring itself,” said the study’s co-lead investigator, Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in Salk’s Regulatory Biology Laboratory and an expert on circadian rhythm. “If you know when an organ is mending itself, you might be able to deliver more potent doses of a drug or therapy. That might offer a better outcome while minimizing side effects.”

Cheng-Ming Chuong, professor of pathology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the study’s co-lead investigator, and Plikus are experts on hair regeneration. Panda uses genetic, genomics and biochemical approaches to identify genes under circadian regulation in different organs and to understand the mechanism of such regulation. They teamed together to find and then take apart the mouse hair circadian clock. It was a long and difficult study, according to Chuong.

“Hair is a very complicated organ, featuring different types of cells going through different stages in the life cycle in a very tiny space,” he said. “We found that hair in mice grows fast in the morning and slows down at night, engaging a very powerful clock.”

Every time hair cells divide, they pick up DNA damage that needs to be repaired. The scientists discovered that mice hair cells repair the damage primarily in the evening.

Radiotherapy damages DNA in cells that divide rapidly, which is why it is used against growing cancer cells. That means DNA damage to hair cells from radiotherapy delivered in the morning is not repaired until the evening, leading to hair loss. Damage from radiotherapy at night, however, is minimized because hair cells, already in the process of repairing DNA, can quickly heal.

“While we don’t yet know if human hair follows that same clock we found in mice hair, it is true that facial hair in men grows during the day, resulting in the proverbial 5 o’clock shadow. There is no 5 a.m. shadow if you shave at night,” Panda said.

Scientists know for certain that other organs, such as the liver, use a circadian clock, and they suspect that all human tissue is similarly regulated, though the clocks may be timed differently. According to Chuong and colleagues, the clinical implications for these various internal clocks may go beyond timing of drug therapy.

“For example, some researchers suspect that obesity and diabetes occur when an organ or organs — perhaps the liver or stomach or pancreas — should be sleeping, but is awoken by food that needs to be processed,” Panda said.

Other contributing authors on the study were Damon de la Cruz from USC, Christopher Vollmers and Amandine Chaix from Salk, and Raul Ramos from UCI.

The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (grant numbers AR42177, AR47364, DK091618 and P30 CA014195), The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, The Charles A. Dana Foundation, the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research and the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Foundation.

Thanks to a lead gift by the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation for construction of the Norris Healthcare Consultation Center, patients like Kral will soon have even more options for personalized, compassionate care.

“I’ve learned on my journey that when a person is facing cancer, the experience and capability of the facility and its staff are of prime importance and next is the manner in which the patient is treated on a personal basis,” said Kral to an audience of donors, administrators and physicians at a groundbreaking ceremony held on May 2. “The loving care I receive at Norris is an extremely important part of my overall treatment.”

During the ceremony, Thomas E. Jackiewicz, senior vice president and CEO for USC Health, described the facility, which will include multidisciplinary clinics designed to facilitate interaction among teams, infusion therapy, an ambulatory surgery center and a women’s cancer program. The center will also feature patient- and family-centered amenities, such as a retail pharmacy and comfortable patient and family waiting areas.

“This new facility will be a model for ambulatory care in the future,” Jackiewicz said. “Today we celebrate one more opportunity to truly excel in our mission of quality health care that is personalized, compassionate and innovative.”

USC President C. L. Max Nikias thanked the members of the Norris family and Norris Foundation for their support, congratulating them on the foundation’s 50th anniversary as he presented renderings of the Norris Healthcare Consultation Center to Harlyne J. Norris, a trustee of USC and the Norris Foundation, and Lisa Hansen, chair of the board of trustees for the Norris Foundation.

“Thanks to the cutting-edge technologies and pioneering therapies that will be available at the Norris Healthcare Consultation Center, we will do an even better job of turning cancer patients into cancer survivors,” Nikias said. “We will have a world-class facility to help us provide world-class care to all of our patients, allowing us to reach Kenneth Norris’ goal of ‘making cancer a disease of the past.’ ”

During her remarks, Harlyne Norris gave a recap of the foundation’s history with USC.

“I’ve enjoyed watching USC Norris grow, and my late husband was very proud of his involvement,” she said. “The research held his interest, and he would be amazed how far we have come to answering his goal.”

The Norris Foundation’s relationship with the Norris cancer center goes back to a lead gift that made groundbreaking possible for the center in 1979.

Hansen cited the most recent gift of $15 million as evidence of the continued commitment of Norris Foundation trustees to the work being done at USC Norris.

“It is our privilege to be a part of this latest project,” she said. “As funders, we know this is a sound investment; as people who have been touched by cancer, we know the funds are in good hands.”

The gift will be augmented by additional philanthropic support of $40 million that will be raised as part of the $1.5 billion Keck Medicine Initiative of The Campaign for the University of Southern California, a multiyear effort to secure $6 billion or more in private philanthropy to advance USC’s academic priorities and expand its positive impact on the community and world.

The celebration continued at a luncheon, with a program introduced by Keck School of Medicine of USC Dean Carmen A. Puliafito, who thanked the members of the Norris Foundation and introduced USC Norris Director Stephen Gruber.

“He understands the mission of cancer centers, the integration of research and clinical care, and he’s always thinking about how to advance the fight against cancer at USC,” Puliafito said.

Gruber described the advances being made at the cancer center.

“We are already expanding the universe of precision cancer care right here at USC Norris, taking strides to cure cancers that were once thought untreatable and bringing discoveries from research benches to our patients’ bedsides,” he said. “Today we’re breaking ground on the building that will help turn our goal of making cancer a disease of the past into a reality.”

Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge also made a quick visit to express his thanks for USC Norris’ continued service to Los Angeles.

“This is a very important place,” he told the audience. “There’s no place in our county that does so much for so many as USC.”

“It was the third day of school and I was in class, touching my neck,” recalled Caryn Roach, a student in the entry-level professional program of the USC Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy. “And I felt a big lump.”

When you’re a thirtysomething student enrolled in the nation’s top-ranked occupational therapy graduate educational program with a bright career ahead of you in a workforce market booming with employer demand, “lump” is the last word you expect to hear, let alone feel.

But as a budding occupational therapist (OT), Roach is naturally attuned to the ways health conditions can variously impact everyday activities and lifestyle. Rather than shrug off those first suspicions, as she might have when she was working in the real estate industry prior to coming to USC, red flags were raised immediately.

After class was dismissed, Roach walked to Eric Cohen Student Health Services to begin a diagnostic workup. After being referred to radiology for further testing, less than two weeks after feeling that fateful lump, Roach received her diagnosis: Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“It was a shock because I’m not someone who gets sick,” she said. “I’m one of those people that are like, ‘I have such a good immune system that I don’t get sick.’ So no one, no one, expected that I would get cancer.”

At the Health Sciences Campus, occupational therapy classes convene in the Center for Health Professions, a building across the street from the USC Norris Cancer Hospital, one of a few Southern California facilities exclusively dedicated to cancer research and care. It was there in early September where she began treatments under the watchful eyes of Keck School of Medicine of USC faculty oncologists.

Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a type of blood cancer originating from white blood cells known as lymphocytes. While its cause is unknown, Hodgkin’s lymphoma is thankfully considered one of the most curable forms of cancer when detected early enough in its progression. Patients can be effectively treated with radiation therapy or chemotherapy, and because five-year survival rates exceed 90 percent, many young patients often live 40 or more years after treatment. Regardless of the relatively optimistic prognosis, nobody expects or wants cancer.

Yet with cheery optimism characteristic of many occupational therapists, Roach focused on the positive aspects of her circumstances.

“It’s not perfect,” she said, “but if I were still working in real estate and this happened, it could’ve been really, really bad. I’m here at USC, and I automatically get a good doctor. My mom’s like, ‘You’re getting your tuition’s worth.’ It’s been the best experience for what it could have been.”

Roach also exemplified the spirit of occupational therapy in the way she chose to continue living life to its fullest rather than retreating into her diagnosis.

As health care providers, occupational therapists provide clinical interventions designed to help their patients perform meaningful activities, no matter the obstacles posed by extenuating health conditions or life circumstances. For Roach, that outlook meant she would not be taking a leave of absence. Throughout the fall 2012 semester, she continued to keep pace with course lectures and assignments while also undergoing treatment.

“It wasn’t really ever a question of ‘Am I going to keep going to school?’ Yeah, I’m going to try because what else am I going to do?” she said. “That’s the foundation of occupational therapy — meaningful activities.

“Sometimes people think living is the most important thing. I know this, but I still am the same person I was before,” she said, laughing with her trademark megawatt smile. “I want to get A’s.”

Roach also has a second family — the Trojan Family — that will soon be supporting her.

“I’m not lucky that I got cancer, but I think I’m very lucky with the timing of getting cancer,” she said. “I’m at USC. I’m in occupational therapy. I’m surrounded by very caring and supportive people, my classmates and all of the faculty.”

In late November, those caring classmates rallied around their friend and colleague. Because hair loss is perhaps the most obvious side effect of cancer treatments, Roach decided to just go ahead with shaving her hair and began wearing a decorative scarf on her head.

In a touching display of solidarity, the entire second-year master’s class organized “Scarf and Hat Day” in response. More than 100 students arrived at school wearing some form of headdress, including beanies and ball caps. Together they posed for a group picture at the Harry and Celesta Pappas Quad in the heart of the Health Sciences Campus. Front and center was Roach, flexing her biceps and smiling widely.

“The Scarf and Hat Day that we had says a lot about our program and the people who are in it,” Roach said. “I thought there would be like 20 people, maybe. But it was everyone. People that I’ve never even spoken to. It was everyone.”

According to Roach, that emotional support was not only a gesture to her but a broader reflection of the empathy at the heart of USC occupational therapists, present and future.

“It makes me feel good, and I know that it makes other people feel proud to be a part of this group. Knowing that we’re going to go out, and we’re going to go be OTs, and we’re going to help people make their lives better,” she said. “It just feels good to be a part of that. I don’t know where else you can find a group of that many people that are so caring and so supportive in one place.”

In January, with treatment well under way, Roach successfully walked the Tinker Bell Half Marathon at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. With the help of Team in Training, a fundraising program of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, she used her walk as an opportunity to raise money for improving treatments of leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma. Not only did she finish the race — her 10th half-marathon and first with cancer — she was also the top fundraiser in the entire nation, raising more than $11,000.

In March, Roach finished her last scheduled treatment. With more surveillance testing ahead of her, she is technically not yet in remission. But she is already looking forward to ways of leveraging her experience to benefit others in need.

“I’ve realized that I can do more if I work in oncology,” she said. “Going through this myself, going to a few support groups and hearing how other people are dealing with things, you can see that they need occupational therapy.

“A lot of people aren’t able to work anymore — they get diagnosed and they get treatment, and they can’t work; they have to quit their jobs or go on disability because they’ll be in chemo for three days straight,” she continued. “They don’t have the energy, they can’t do the things they used to do and their whole schedule shifts. Everything changes.”

Roach also recently decided to pursue her Doctorate of Occupational Therapy, accepting a clinical residency position at the Keck Medical Center of USC with the hopes of working one-on-one with people with cancer.

“I don’t think a lot of people are getting occupational therapy, who have cancer. This is somewhere I can give my input, and it means something. I am here. I’m living it right now,” she said. “I feel like a cliché, but I think that’s where I need to be because that’s where I can really help people.”

Recent findings by Provost Professor Andrew McMahon, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, and Qilong Ying, associate professor of cell and neurobiology, underscore the essential role of basic science in paving the way for future medical breakthroughs.

McMahon and Ying are in pursuit of the ways in which the intricate regulatory circuit balances two qualities of stem cells: pluripotency (the capacity to develop into any type of cell) and differentiation (the process of becoming different types of cells). The scientists are particularly interested in signaling pathways — important routes for intracellular communication.

Left to their own devices, ESCs rapidly progress to the next step and become specific types of cells.

“We want to freeze the cells at that normally transient stage so they are more compatible for use in any clinical situation,“ said McMahon, who holds the W.M. Keck Professorship in Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the Keck School.

In a recent study published in Stem Cells, McMahon’s team focused on the Wnt signaling pathway, one of the first pathways activated in human development. This network of proteins helps determine what a cell will become; it also is over-stimulated in colon cancer and other tumors.

Intriguingly, the Wnt pathway is linked to maintenance and differentiation of ESCs — to both stalling their evolution and encouraging it — what McMahon called “paradoxical actions.” His team’s findings zeroed in on one component in that process: transcription factor T-cell factor-3, or Tcf-3. Transcription factors are proteins that bind to DNA and control the flow of genetic information.

Working in the lab with mouse ESCs and complex bioinformatics, investigators found Tcf-3 was instrumental in destabilizing the stem cells. Equally important, beta-catenin — a multifunctional protein that activates Wnt target genes in the cell nucleus — can block Tcf-3’s ability to short-circuit the stem cells.

McMahon’s experiments rely on research by Ying, which was published in Nature in 2008. The research showed that ESCs could be cultured in the lab indefinitely and kept from differentiating, provided that two molecules were added to the cocktail in which the cells were kept.

Ying also has built on his 2008 study. In research published in the March 1 issue of Journal of Cell Science, Ying and his team analyzed another signaling pathway — LIF/STAT3 (leukemia inhibitory factor) — in the maintenance of stem cells. The researchers screened 19 genes and identified an important downstream target, a protein called Gbx2, which shows capabilities of supporting stem cell self-renewal.

What remains is a sort of genetic jigsaw puzzle.

“We have another missing piece, but we know there are many more to come,” Ying said.

The clinical applications of such investigations may not be far behind. At USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, a clinical trial is now under way to study the first drug designed to specifically target and inhibit the Wnt signaling pathway. The goal is to impede the growth of cancer cells.

“This is a strong example of how basic work in stem cell biology can lead to new thinking in how to treat patients,” McMahon said.

“I was very pleased to present on our 2012 study on the prevalence and risk factors of elder abuse among low-income Latino elders,” DeLiema said. “The topic of elder abuse prevalence in the low-income immigrant Latino community is particularly important to senior service providers in the Central Valley, where, for example, the population of Fresno County is 51 percent Latino compared to 38 percent statewide.”

Other speakers for the all-day event included Jill McCarthy from Hinds Hospice, who discussed “Hospice and Palliative Care: Preventing End-of-Life Abuse” and Prescott Cole, the senior staff attorney for the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, who covered “Facility Abuse and Veterans Aid and Attendance Fraud.”

Hosted by Castle Keep Elder Abuse Prevention and Central California Legal Services, the event drew nearly 200 attendees, many of them professionals from the disciplines of nursing, innovative aging technology, home health, hospice, criminal justice and adult protection.

“Our hope is that our research will guide health care and legal professionals in responding to neglect and abuse in immigrant communities,” DeLiema said. “It was so inspiring to hear from fellow professionals and community members and to see how interested they were in learning more about all the research we’re doing at USC Davis.”

For the first time, a global team of researchers led by USC Professor Cheng-Ming Chuong has uncovered unique cellular and molecular mechanisms behind tooth renewal in American alligators. Their study appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Humans naturally only have two sets of teeth — baby teeth and adult teeth,” Chuong said. “Ultimately, we want to identify stem cells that can be used as a resource to stimulate tooth renewal in adult humans who have lost teeth. But to do that, we must first understand how they renew in other animals and why they stop in people.”

Whereas most vertebrates can replace teeth throughout their lives, human teeth are naturally replaced only once, despite the lingering presence of a band of epithelial tissue called the dental lamina, which is crucial to tooth development. Because alligators have well-organized teeth with similar form and structure as mammalian teeth and are capable of lifelong tooth renewal, the authors reasoned that they might serve as models for mammalian tooth replacement.

“Alligator teeth are implanted in sockets of the dental bone, like human teeth,” said Ping Wu, assistant professor of pathology at the Keck School and first author of the study. “They have 80 teeth, each of which can be replaced up to 50 times over their lifetime, making them the ideal model for comparison to human teeth.”

Using microscopic imaging techniques, the researchers found that each alligator tooth is a complex unit of three components — a functional tooth, a replacement tooth and the dental lamina — in different developmental stages. The tooth units are structured to enable a smooth transition from dislodgement of the functional, mature tooth to replacement with the new tooth. Identifying three developmental phases for each tooth unit, the researchers concluded that the alligator dental laminae contain what appear to be stem cells from which new replacement teeth develop.

“Stem cells divide more slowly than other cells,” said co-author Randall Widelitz, associate professor of pathology at the Keck School. “The cells in the alligator’s dental lamina behaved like we would expect stem cells to behave. In the future, we hope to isolate those cells from the dental lamina to see whether we can use them to regenerate teeth in the lab.”

The researchers also intend to learn what molecular networks are involved in repetitive renewal and hope to apply the principles to regenerative medicine in the future.

The authors also reported novel cellular mechanisms by which the tooth unit develops in the embryo and molecular signaling that speeds growth of replacement teeth when functional teeth are lost prematurely.

Co-authors included colleagues from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, University of Georgia, National Cheng Kung University, National Taiwan University and Xiangya Hospital in China.

The research was supported by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (grant numbers 5R01AR042177-19, 5R01AR060306-03 and 2R01AR047364-11A1).

Unusual, yes, but certainly appropriate. Quagliozzi made the art while recovering from an acute exacerbation episode of his cystic fibrosis (CF), a genetic condition that lands him in the hospital two or three times a year.

Quagliozzi channeled his illness through his art, giving viewers a chance to see what cystic fibrosis looks like — at least through the eyes of a trained artist.

In all, he made 20 paintings that reflected the pain and loneliness he felt during his 11-day hospital stay. An additional image was projected on a bathroom wall.

The subject matter ranged from his interpretation of the hives he developed during an allergic reaction to abstract drawings of faces that represented the hospital staff.

“When the doctors come into the room, they wear gowns and facemasks to protect me,” said the 30-year-old Burbank resident, who has a degree in fine art. “I made abstract paintings of that sensation of having all these people come in and observe me and take care of me, but I never see their faces.”

Others showed what Quagliozzi called “base human functions,” paintings of him relieving himself, for example.

“My work is basically all centered around the body, health, fitness and how society reacts to that,” he said.

The rest of the 11-by-15-inch pieces represented how he dealt with his situation.

“There are emotions about being alone in the hospital — isolation, alienation, separation anxiety,” he said. “These things that come up when you’re in the hospital for an extended period alone.”

With local artists expanding the idea of what a gallery can be, Quagliozzi had the idea of showing his paintings right there in his room.

“The CF team heard about it,” he said. “They contacted the hospital administration. They were really supportive of having the show.”

In fact, the hospital catered the event with cookies and drinks in April.

“Being in a hospital for two weeks can be really hard,” he said. “It really meant a lot to me. Having drinks and cookies really made the guests appreciate what was going on.”

Debbie Benitez, nurse coordinator for the CF program at Keck Hospital of USC, said the hospital encourages patients to find fulfilling activities during their stay.

“We want to support our patients and their dreams,” she said. “It was really amazing. You were just looking through the eyes of a CF patient.”

When guests arrived, they had to navigate around Quagliozzi’s bed and his IV pole. He didn’t want them to forget where they were.

“I was interested in the dynamic of people coming to a hospital room to observe not only a patient but the periphery,” he said.

Quagliozzi hopes his art teaches others that having an illness isn’t something to hide.

“Sometimes I have a group show and I’ll just project one of my X-rays,” he said. “It’s a prompt to make it OK for people to feel comfortable enough to share their personal health stories.”

To see more of Quagliozzi’s artwork, visit artistdominic.com