Grand Rounds February
Shen Yun Performing Arts—Bringing to Life 5,000 Years of Chinese Culture
Shen Yun Performing Arts is a collaboration of leading Chinese artists and several performance arts company with one mission—to revive, restore and bring true Chinese culture to the world through classical Chinese dance and music. Since its inaugural 2006-2007 season, Shen Yun has performed in over 130 cities worldwide, and its audience has grown to over 800,000 each season.
It has graced some of the most prestigious stages in the world such as the Lincoln Center in New York, the Royal Festival Hall in London, and the Palais de Congrès in Paris. Shen Yun now tours over 20 countries every season, with more cities added each year. It is now considered the premier classical Chinese performing arts show in the world.
Shen Yun’s primary vehicle of expression is the richly expressive art form of classical Chinese dance. Being one of the most demanding art forms in the world to learn, it takes years of rigorous training to master the range of complex movements and intricacies of classical Chinese dance.
Shen Yun boasts a 40-plus member orchestra that presents a masterful fusion of Western classical and Chinese folk music. Traditional Western musical instruments are intricately blended with a variety of Chinese instruments that perfectly match each dance.
Clothing has always been an essential part of China’s 5000-year-old culture. Shen Yun brings this heritage to life on stage. Each costume is meticulously designed and hand sewn. The result is a visual feast. Breathtaking digital backdrops, using state-of-the-art technology, magically transport audience to faraway places and distant times.
Shen Yun Performing Arts comes to Raleigh Memorial Auditorium for 2 shows on February 7th and 8th, 2012. The 2011-2012 season promises all new numbers and music. For more information, visit www.NCDivineShow.com.
UNC HIV Prevention Research Named Scientific Breakthrough of the Year
The HIV Prevention Trials Network 052 study, led by Myron S. Cohen, MD of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been named the 2011 Breakthrough of the Year by the journal Science.
HPTN 052 evaluated whether antiretroviral drugs can prevent sexual transmission of HIV among couples in which one partner has HIV and the other does not. The research found that early treatment with antiretroviral therapy reduced HIV transmission in couples by at least 96 percent.
The study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.
The complete list of top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year was published online today.
The HPTN 052 study is proof of a concept more than 20 years in the making. From the time the first AIDS drugs were developed in the mid-1990s, the UNC team of virologists, pharmacologists, and physicians has been working on the idea that antiretrovirals might make people less contagious, said Cohen, who is Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Epidemiology at UNC. By 2000, the UNC study team thought the idea was strong enough to try to prove it. This idea eventually became HPTN 052, according to Ccohen.
It would be another five years before researchers from the HIV Prevention Trials Network started enrolling people in the study, eventually nearly 2000 couples at 13 sites in nine countries . In May of this year, four years before the study’s scheduled completion, an outside monitoring board requested that the results be released immediately, because they were so overwhelmingly positive.
Since their release, the study results have been reverberating throughout the policy community. U.S. and international organizations such as the World Health Organization, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, have incorporated or soon will incorporate “treatment as prevention”–the strategy proved by HPTN 052–into their policy guidelines for battling the AIDS epidemic.
The research was conducted by the HIV Prevention Trials Network, which is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases with additional funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health, both part of the National Institutes of Health. Additional support was provided by the NIAID-funded Adult AIDS Clinical Trials Group.
WakeMed Expands Access with Pulmonology Practice
WakeMed Health & Hospitals has added pulmonology to its wide range of specialty physician practices to fulfill unmet healthcare needs in the community.
The Wake Specialty Physicians – Pulmonology office is adjacent to WakeMed Cary Hospital and features two physicians: Sangeeta Joshi, MD, and Sanjay Patel, MD, MPH. The practice is committed to helping patients work through the diagnosis and treatment of medical problems related to the lungs and respiratory system.
Drs. Joshi and Patel are both board certified and specialize in managing chronic and acute respiratory conditions such as lung disease, emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), respiratory failure, allergies and asthma, lung injuries and more. Both physicians have critical care experience and also treat inpatients at Cary Hospital through the intensivist programd.
UNC Center Receives Grant
An $850,000, 3-year grant from The Duke Endowment will allow the UNC Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health to create a health home, integrating primary care into its mental health care programs for persons in Orange, Person and Chatham counties.
Individuals with severe mental illnesses have a high rate of chronic medical diseases and die 25 years sooner than the average person. More than 60 percent of the excess deaths are due to chronic medical conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes and infections.
There is a lack of primary care to identify and treat their physical diseases, and mental illness can diminish a person’s capacity to seek and manage their medical care according to John Gilmore, MD, director of the UNC Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health.
The integration of primary and psychiatric care has been recognized at national and state levels as a way to provide better quality of life for persons with severe mental illness as well as lower the cost of their overall health care.
Rex Healthcare Partners with the International Genomics Consortium
Rex Healthcare announced recently that it has agreed to collaborate with The International Genomics Consortium (IGC) in Phoenix, Ariz., to serve as a critical network Tissue Source Site (TSS) to provide cancer tissue samples for analysis in the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) historic project The Cancer Genome Atlas project (TCGA). Rex will provide cancer tissue samples under uniform and standardized conditions and also collect specific long-term clinical outcome data to facilitate research into the underlying cancer mechanisms.
IGC’s Expression Project for Oncology (expO) has combined its network and mission with TCGA to help create a comprehensive and coordinated effort to accelerate the understanding of the molecular basis of cancer through the application of genome analysis technologies, including large-scale genome sequencing.
TCGA is one of the largest initiatives to date to analyze such a wide array of cancers with so many different genomic analyses ranging from sequencing to methylation studies.
The genomic blueprints of each cancer will be available on the web for all scientists to have access to for translational discoveries. TCGA plans to analyze 500 tumors from each cancer type studied by the program and will provide the clinically annotated outcome data along with the complete genomic analysis on the web free of any intellectual property restrictions.
Additional information on TCGA may be found at http://cancergenome.nih.gov/.