Medicine with staying power
Drug manufacturers often face the challenge of getting medications to stay where they belong for extended periods of time. The task is even greater when a drug's target is the mouth, eye or another place in the body where it can be naturally washed away. Joseph Robinson, a pharmaceutics professor at the School of Pharmacy, has developed a water-soluble, bioadhesive gel that remains in place while it steadily dispenses a drug locally or throughout the body. Robinson's non-toxic compound has been used commercially for long-lasting contraceptives, enduring eye drops and mouth medications with staying power of up to 18 hours.

Getting smart about cancer diagnosis
A UW-Madison computer program may help doctors more accurately diagnose breast cancer. Computer scientist Olvi Mangasarian and surgeon William Wolberg teamed to refine the program, which uses artificial intelligence to develop a more precise diagnosis. The procedure uses just a tiny sample of cells, eliminating the need for a surgical biopsy. A patient's cell samples are compared against a base of hundreds of known cases stored in the computer. In 128 cases, the program diagnosed whether a mass was benign or malignant with 100 percent accuracy. It also holds promise for more accurate predictions of whether - and when - the cancer might recur.

A heart disease caught on the fly
What can we possibly learn about the human heart from fruit flies? Thanks to the insects, UW Medical School's Gail Robertson is hot on the trail of potential new treatments for cardiac arrhythmias, heartbeat irregularities that kill 250,000 Americans yearly. Robertson's work at the Cardiovascular Research Center stems from earlier studies on flies with nerve cell electrical abnormalities caused by a mutated gene. The human equivalent causes "long-QT syndrome,"a form of heart arrhythmia. She recently showed that the gene makes a particular ion channel, a structure that regulates the heart's rhythm by controlling the flow of charged particles in and out of cells. Knowing that the mutations causing long-QT syndrome disrupt the channels, she hopes her studies of how the channels work will lend insights to the disease. Robertson, assistant professor of physiology, expects her investigations will also improve understanding of other ion channels, some of which may underlie other unresolved human diseases such as epilepsy.