Future medical researchers study data

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - Doctors and medical researchers of the future are spreading the message of health and wellness at the University at Buffalo.

At UB Medical School's Annual Research Day, students got together to present a wide variety of projects. UB Medical student Seth Gemme looked at data from almost 80,000 fatal accidents and made a fascinating discovery.

"If you're involved in a motor vehicle accident, what your BMI is, or how overweight you are, relates to your risk of mortality," said Gemme.

That's right. Very obese drivers were much more likely to die. That might be because safety features of cars are designed for thinner people.

Gemme said, "We suggest that companies or firms that are doing safety analysis, they should be doing it on dummies that are better representative of our American population. You need to reduce the weight of the American population or you need to start redesigning these vehicles."

UB Medical student Greg Kaufman studied a difficult treatment problem. Some lymphomas are resistant to Rituximab, the best drug currently available.

"What we found is that the cells that are resistant to Rituximab chemotherapy generally have a different balance of proteins that sort of make the cell harder to kill," said Kaufman.

So they tested some combinations that can overcome that.

Kaufman explained, "So, we're using drugs that have sort of a different mechanism of action that can change the protein levels within the cell to make it more susceptible to therapy."

UB Medical student Laura Hanrahan looked at diabetes during pregnancy. That's an old problem, but maybe it's changing because diabetes is affecting more people in general.

Hanrahan said, "And if that's true, we maybe want to look at the screening and see if screening measures should be changed."

That might result in better health for the mothers and the babies. We have to keep examining what we do.

"Medicine is constantly refining things, and its very necessary, it's necessary to look at these numbers and know every so often and see how are we, what are we doing, what can we do to improve these. Is this really the best protocol? And go from there," said Hanrahan.

The best part is their enthusiasm about going beyond what we already know. They're not just going to practice medicine; they're going to improve it.