Tulane School of Medicine opened the Clinical Neuroscience Research Center, a new center aimed at improving care for patients with neurological diseases. Dr. Gregory Bix is the center’s director, and Dr. Xiaoying Wang is the center’s program director of brain injury and research. Bix’s goal is to build on the university’s existing stroke research and expand efforts in traumatic brain injury, aging and dementia.

Howard Mielke, pharmacology research professor at the School of Medicine, found that long-term changes in soil lead levels in New Orleans have a corresponding impact on blood levels in children. Mielke’s research team collected rounds of soil samplings in the city over several years and compared them to children’s blood level data, which revealed decreasing lead in topsoil played a key factor in the children’s declining blood lead levels.

The Tulane Professional Athlete Care Team had its most successful year in 2018-19, completing more than 600 patient screenings, including a record 139 former players at Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta. Tulane’s School of Medicine began providing medical services to former professional athletes in 2013. In 2015, a partnership with the NFL Player Care Foundation Healthy Body and Mind Screening program and PACT was formed.

Researchers from Tulane School of Medicine authored a study in the Journal of Cell Biology that suggests some cancer cells survive chemotherapy by eating their neighboring tumor cells. The study suggests the act of cannibalism provides the treated cancer cells with energy to stay alive and initiate tumor relapse after the course of treatment is complete.

“I remember Katrina, we did not have enough psychiatrists and people to provide mental health care.” DR. ANAND IRIMPEN, professor of medicine at Tulane, said in an American Heart Association News article about hurricane preparedness and the toll a hurricane can have on one’s health.

James Zadina, professor of medicine, and other researchers have developed a new kind of opioid, called ZH853, that accelerates the recovery time from pain and does not have the side effects morphine does.