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OyaGen, a small medical research firm off Jefferson Road in Henrietta, has used federal grants for its HIV drug discovery programs with the goal of finding a cure. Dr. Harold Smith, Professor of Biochemistry & Biophysics at the University of Rochester, and the company's founder, president and CEO got his start as a molecular biologist studying heart disease.

"It became clear to me that the things we were doing to study heart disease and find out why things were happening translated directly into the HIV research arena," Smith said.

By 2010, things kicked into high gear. Advanced robotics were added allowing scientists to work with advanced chemistries. They've now identified a weak point in the HIV virus that's never been exploited before. Vif is a viral defense HIV releases into cells it infects. It destroys the body's natural defense against infections. OyaGen discovered a way to defeat HIV by disabling Vif.

"If we can proceed along track, we will be looking at entering clinical trials within a completely different way of approaching the virus and the disease within three years," Smith said.

Research performed by Associate Professor Alan Grossfield and colleagues into how a new class of drugs fights bacterial infections was highlighted in a recent Cosmos Magazine article. Dr. Grossfield's research was also recently highlighted in EurekaAlert!, an online magazine run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

It is with much sadness that we inform everyone of the passing of Rose Burgholzer, after a long and courageous battle with cancer. Rose worked at the University for 40 years, almost half of that as an administrator in our department. She was a dear friend and colleague and will be greatly missed. Many former students remember Rose fondly and have communicated with her during her illness, and she graciously received a steady stream of visiting faculty and staff in her home these past few years.

A Funeral Mass was held Wednesday, June 17, at St. Kateri at St. Margaret Mary Church in Rochester, with entombment at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. Memorials may be directed to a charity of your choice. View her obituary and a slideshow from Rose's family.

A University of Rochester team found a way to make chemotherapy more effective, by stopping a cellular quality-control mechanism, according to a study published today in Nature Communications.

The mechanism is known as NMD (nonsense-mediated mRNA decay), and scientists found that exposing breast cancer cells to a molecule that inhibits NMD prior to treatment with doxorubicin, a drug used to treat leukemia, breast, bone, lung and other cancers, hastens cell death.

The research team, led by Lynne E. Maquat, Ph.D., director of the Center for RNA Biology at the University of Rochester, acknowledges that the work is in the early stages and a long way from being applied in humans. But, they believe their data provide insights that could lead to new treatment strategies for cancer patients in the future.