Many of his colleagues are focused on the instructions the factory has to follow. Chang-Jun Liu, however, is more concerned with the on and off switch. The factory, in this case, is a plant cell’s genes, and the on and off switch are the signals that indicate when to start and stop production of a class of chemicals called phenols that are used in everything from flavoring foods to promoting cardiovascular health.

Liu, a scientist in the Department of Biosciences at Brookhaven National Laboratory and an adjunct professor in biochemistry and cell biology at Stony Brook, looked at a process in which a key enzyme, called phenylalanine ammonia lyase, gets removed or broken down, slowing or even stopping the process of producing phenols. He and his research group are exploring ways to fine-tune the concentration and activity of PAL. With less PAL, plants, in this case an Arabidopsis plant that is widely found in backyards around Long Island, produces less phenol.

“You can enhance the final production or reduce the final production” depending on “the application” scientists or industry are seeking, Liu said. “We know how this process works. We can turn down those kinds of proteins, and prevent the degradation of a key enzyme or we can increase the activity.”

How much phenol scientists or businesses desire in plants depends on the application. Phenols are a part of a large class of compounds that are made of both small molecule chemicals and larger polymers. The smaller phenolics are used in foods, beverages and cosmetics, providing fragrances and flavors. The typical example of this is vanillin.

Most phenolics have antioxidant properties and can potentially prevent cardiovascular disease, treat cancer or prevent obesity, Liu said.

Other scientists praised Liu’s ability to apply his basic research into a range of other arenas. “What’s really remarkable about his work is he does a lot of things that have fundamental basic importance in science and takes them to translational situations,” said Brenda Winkel, professor and head of biological sciences at Virginia Tech. “He’s able to take [his research] and find the practical uses of these new insights. That is really unusual.”

Liu, who worked with postdoctoral research associates Xuebin Zhang and Mingyue Gou, said other researchers have exerted considerably more energy in developing a gene regulation approach. Liu, however, worked at the protein level, exploring how to use the cell’s own recycling system, either to keep a protein that encourages the production of phenols in place, or encouraging its removal, and decreasing the manufacture of phenols.

Plants use these phenols for a variety of purposes, most notably to react to changes in its environment, either from variation in its habitat or an attack by a fungus or bacteria. “If you manipulate those phenolic compounds” Liu said, “it will increase the resistance of a plant to environmental stress and therefore increase the ability of plants to live” in harsh conditions.

Liu’s next steps are to apply this understanding of how to alter phenol synthesis to other plants, including in horticulture. Increasing phenols can increase coloration intensity among different flowering plants, he said, which might be a desirable trait for people looking for a particular hue.

He also wants to expand his study to other crops like poplar trees. Taking lignin out of poplar trees to generate paper currently requires “harsh chemicals that are bad for the environment,” said Winkel.
Winkel said Liu’s work with biofuels is a crowded field and “big deal folks have been in it forever” but Liu is “right in there with the giants of the field, making unique contributions.”

A resident of Rocky Point, Liu lives with his wife, Yang Chen, a teacher’s aid at Rocky Point Middle School, and their two children, 14-year-old Allen and 12-year-old Bryant. Liu, who grew up in China, said he has gradually started to learn to ski.

He’s been to Blue Mountain and Shawnee in the last few years and calls himself “still a learner” on skis. “It is extremely exciting when you challenge yourself and do something a bit beyond your ability,” he said.
As for his work, Liu said he feels a satisfaction about his findings. “I’m pretty excited,” he said. “We continually want to look for more potential applications.”

Michael Villaran has been able to maintain his own energy levels while he’s running long distances. The 64-year-old electric power engineer and principal engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory has completed 10 marathons.

Villaran, who has been at BNL for 27 years, knows a thing or two about other forms of energy as well: the kind that heats houses and provides electricity.

He is a staff engineer in the Sustainable Energy Technology Department, a group that started in 2010. BNL created the group when the campus became a host site for the Long Island Solar Farm, which delivers about 32 megawatts of peak alternating-current power to the Long Island Power Authority substation.

Some of the research at the station has included looking at how changes in weather affect the plant. Additionally, researchers are exploring the long-term effects the area climate has on the plant parts and system.

As a part of the solar farm agreements, BNL is building the Northeast Solar Energy Research Center. Construction of the first portion of the NSERC is expected to be completed by the middle of this month. The NSERC will support research on grid integration, energy storage and distributed energy, among other areas.
For the Long Island Solar Farm, Villaran “came up with the concept of the electric power instrument monitoring system,” he said. He has also contributed to a design with the new research facility that uses a similar electric power instrument monitoring system.

Villaran’s colleagues appreciate his contribution. He is “absolutely essential in this capacity because he can manage from a business and engineering perspective simultaneously,” said Paul Giannotti, a senior electrical engineer at BNL.

Giannotti said he has been assisting Villaran in working on the NSERC, which is “a very exciting project because it will answer many questions on the future viability of solar power stations, especially in the more cloudy regions of the northeast.”

Electrical engineers often work closely with meteorologists, hoping to get a better read on when a significant change in the weather might knock out parts of the system. An upstate partner of BNL has successfully used historical data to predict the outcome of an approaching storm on their power grid.

When he worked for Lilco, Villaran said everyone needed to provide an emergency response, because “it’s not a question of are we going to have ice storms and hurricanes,” it’s a matter of when.

Indeed, recently, BNL organized a series of utility workshops, one of which focused on applying risk techniques to utility planning, which included weather effects. That was postponed twice, once for Hurricane Sandy and again for Winter Storm Nemo.

“By looking at historical data and where and when and how severely it affects the system, they can get resources in place that could minimize the number of outages,” he said.

Villaran said BNL is working with a partner to create a high-speed monitoring system for the grids that would come at a low price, which would greatly improve the operation of the system by telling utilities when the system is in trouble and by reducing inefficiencies.

Villaran and his wife, Denise, who works in the administrative office at the Rocky Point School District, live in Rocky Point. Villaran has three sons from a previous marriage: Michael, 35, Tim, 34, and Kevin, who will be 30 this year.

After his divorce from his first wife, Villaran had sole custody of his children for several years, which meant he “had to be a wiz at scheduling. There were some days when three people were playing in three different sports in three different locations.” One Saturday, he said, he was in and out of the car 30 times. He appreciates the support of his parents, who pitched in regularly.

Villaran has been an active participant since around 1999 in a mentoring program for the Longwood School District for children with various difficulties and hardships. “Now that I have no children around, it’s fun to work with these kids,” he said.

Villaran said his team, and utilities experts, are excited about the creation of the new NSERC. “Electric utilities are interested in trying out ideas for the operation of their distribution systems,” he said. “They’ll try some ideas in a setting like we’ll make available here, before deploying [them] in the field.”

They often refuse to stop, go away, or even shut down for long. That’s what makes them such powerful killers. Cancer has an ability to work around temporary solutions doctors and scientists discover, going with backup plans to take over cells and damage organs, systems and endanger lives.

Looking specifically to alter a group of receptors, which are like docking stations for cellular signals, Sabine Brouxhon, clinical associate professor of emergency medicine at Stony Brook, has found an antibody that doesn’t just knock out one route for the development and spread of cancer, but may disable several such options. At the same time, her approach causes cancer cells to die.

The antibody she’s working with targets a specific protein, called a shed protein, in the area around a tumor. The antibody causes growth factor receptors to become internalized in a cell, where they get degraded. “We have an antibody-based therapy that downregulates” these receptors, said Brouxhon.

The receptors she’s targeting are the ones that have become the site of several treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration and are involved in breast cancer, colorectal cancer, pancreatic cancer and skin cancer.

Four of the receptors are called human epidermal growth factor receptor and are abbreviated HER1 through 4. Her antibody also works to downregulate another receptor tyrosine kinase called the insulin-like growth factor receptor.

With some of the treatments that knock out one specific HER receptor, cancers sometimes develop resistance to that therapy, using another receptor to continue in its destructive path.

“Since her therapy down-regulates many of the resistance pathways used by cancer cells, this treatment could be useful [with] certain drug resistant cancers,” said Sean Boykevisch, senior licensing associate in the Office of Technology Licensing and Industry Relations.

By attaching to this shed protein, the antibody has become effective at killing cancer in lab dishes and in preclinical mouse models of some human diseases.

The next step for Brouxhon is converting the antibody into a version that will work for humans. She estimates the timetable for this process at about two years.

Brouxhon has presented her promising results to several possible funding partners, including venture capital firms and pharmaceutical companies. Once she creates a human form of the antibody, Brouxhon will look for a specific group or patients for whom this treatment might be effective.

“We need to find that patient population that is amenable to this treatment,” she said. A possibility, she added, is a population of patients who develop resistance to cancer treatment.

Brouxhon has been at Stony Brook for five years. Previously, she had worked at the University of Rochester. She believes the support she received at Stony Brook has enabled her to advance her research. “There’s a lot of interest” in her research and she “couldn’t ask to be so lucky,” she said.

Some of Brouxhon’s colleagues praised her work and her approach. She is “charting new ground with her recent discoveries,” said Boykevisch, whose office is working with her to find a partner to take this innovation to the marketplace. She said her pursuit of a treatment for cancers is professional and personal. Her grandfather died of pancreatic cancer and that “hit home” with her.

When she was growing up, Brouxhon traveled all over the world with her family, living in New Guinea, Belgium, Australia, South Africa and Brazil, as her father worked for the United Nations and as an independent consultant. She used to hate all of the travel, but when she grew up, she realized her father “gave me a lot. I got to see a lot of different cultures. That made me stronger.”

Brouxhon and her husband, Stephanos Kyrkanides, the chair of the Department of Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry at Stony Brook, live in East Setauket with their 15-year-old son, James, and their 12-year-old daughter, Nicole.

They met in Rochester when she was working for Dave Felten and Kyrkanides was working for Felten’s wife, Susan. Kyrkanides had asked Brouxhon for help with an experiment.

Brouxhon puts many hours into her work. Boykevisch described her as “one of the most driven people I know.

As a scientist and medical doctor, she is eager to see her discoveries help the lives of those afflicted with cancer.”

The work “requires a lot of time,” she said. “I really want to see this go forward.”

A man walked into the emergency room at Stony Brook recently with chest pain. At first, the doctors thought he might have a pulmonary embolism, or a blockage of the main artery in the lungs. It could also have been heart disease.

Unsure of the diagnosis from his symptoms, the doctors performed a procedure called coronary computed tomography angiography. Quickly, they realized the man had 90 percent obstruction of the coronary artery.
“He had a stent put in and he was fixed,” said Mark Henry, a professor and chairman of the Emergency Medicine Department at Stony Brook.

The CCTA test allowed the doctors to perform a procedure that likely kept him from having a heat attack that might have killed him.

Michael Poon, a professor of radiology, medicine and emergency medicine and director of advanced cardiovascular imaging at Stony Brook, helps make this test available seven days a week at the school.

“Dr. Poon deserves a lot of credit,” Henry said. “We’re really happy to be able to offer that to our population.”
Henry estimates that Stony Brook does more CCTAs than any other hospital in the country. Poon advanced the state of the art at the school in terms of imaging, Henry said, while also reducing the amount of radiation exposure to “the lowest possible level.”

Poon published a paper in 2013 showing that this technique saves money and cuts down on time in the emergency room.

“Nine out of 10 times, [chest pain] is a false alarm,” Poon said. “We didn’t have an accurate test to screen out that one out of 10. We ended up admitting everybody because we can’t afford to miss one.”

This test cuts down the length of stay in the ER dramatically, Poon said. Once patients get a clear diagnosis, they don’t tend to return with the same uncertainty to the ER with the same symptoms, Poon said.

Poon’s paper on this method recently won a Minnies award for Scientific Paper of the Year. The Minnies awards provide a way for radiology experts to recognize the contributions of their peers in medical imaging. Poon said he was honored to receive the recognition.

In 2002, Poon became intrigued by the possibilities of this imaging technique when he was at Mount Sinai Hospital. He was involved with research into noninvasive imaging of the coronary artery, the tube that supplies blood to the heart.

“When I saw the early images from Germany using CCTA, I said ‘I have to learn this,’” Poon recalled. He invited the University of Munich team to spend a year with him, during which he learned about the procedure.

The beauty of this test, Poon said, is that it gives a clear diagnosis with the highest negative predictive value among all noninvasive tests. This method is also a way of detecting plaque in the heart, which can be an early indication of heart disease.

In addition to conducting research, Poon sees patients three days a week. “I’m constantly looking for newer and better ways of doing things,” Poon said.

One of the areas he’s currently working on is called enhanced external counter pulsation. He calls the system “exercising without exercising.” It makes it easier to pump blood through the body at the same time that it sends blood back to the heart while it’s resting. “It’s all done automatically,” he said. “You lay there on the bed and the machine does all the work for you.”

This treatment is approved for angina and heart failure, but Poon believes it could improve the health of people who aren’t in cardiac stress. He uses it himself once or twice a week.

Poon suggests that this system enables blood to flow to other areas farther from the heart more easily.
Poon, who maintains an active lifestyle that includes snowboarding, lives in Harrington Park, N.J., with his wife, Mei. The couple have four children, who range in age from 16 to 27. Poon spends four days a week at university housing.

Poon said he believes a combination of early diagnosis, with tools like CCTA, and early intervention is the best way to help his patients.

“Making early diagnosis without offering some help is not that useful,” he said. “Using pills isn’t ideal, either. The best way is lifestyle modification. We can use really good science to do it.”

While wines are his passion, it was the martinis that changed James Muckerman’s life. Ten years ago, the senior chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory attended a memorial symposium for the former chairman in his department, Richard Dodson.

Muckerman was at a table with Cal Tech’s Harry Gray, who was the keynote speaker. The waiters had mixed up some of the water pitchers with the martinis, a favorite drink of the late chemistry chairman. As Muckerman described it, a “well-lubricated (Gray) explained the plan to sell the Bush administration on the importance of solar energy.” Gray suggested that everyone in the scientific community ought to get behind this effort.

“By the time he was finished,” Muckerman recalled, “I was ready to sign on the dotted line.”

Muckerman said he didn’t want to continue to burn hydrocarbon reserves, adding to the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A goal of artificial photosynthesis that appealed to him was that it recycles the greenhouse gas.

Muckerman and his colleagues investigate new basic photo- and electrochemistry for carrying out the various steps in artificial photosynthesis, which include light absorption, charge separation, water oxidation, hydrogen production and carbon dioxide reduction.

The change in career direction had its risks. Muckerman had become an expert in his field and already had a regular stream of funding for his studies. It was as if he had a long-running show on television and he had to go back to the pilot stage, waiting to see if the early results merited more money.

Fortunately, following his passion and interest in this new area worked out for Muckerman, who dedicates his professional energy to working on artificial photosynthesis as a theoretical chemist.

That means he uses quantum chemistry to figure out the critical but often unknown intermediate steps in between the beginning and end of a chemical reaction.

He works in close collaboration with others in the department who do hands-on laboratory research, including Etsuko Fujita, who is the leader of the artificial photosynthesis group.

The connection between the theoretical and the practical chemistry has “a history of using basic understanding of how chemistry processes work to design better molecules for artificial photosynthesis,” said Alex Harris, the chairman of the chemistry department.

Muckerman and Fujita aren’t just scientific collaborators, but are also partners in life.

Harris said Muckerman and Fujita have an “extremely productive collaboration.” Muckerman developed theories to help explain her results, while also predicting ways to improve her performance. He also was able to learn a new field by working closely with an established experimentalist, Harris added.

Wei-Fu Chen, a research associate at BNL who has worked with both of them, described the team as “solid and highly united and has become the most pioneering in the field of artificial photosynthesis.” On top of that, Chen felt the tandem served as “wonderful supervisors and friends.”

The couple, who live in Port Jefferson, have been together since 1985. Each of them have children from previous marriages, which means all the children “regard us as their parents,” he said. Muckerman said the two of them have an unofficial game of chicken, where the first to leave the lab has to cook dinner.

“I always lose,” Muckerman laughed, although Fujita does the cooking on the weekends.

Muckerman said the couple, whose work travels have allowed them to pursue their shared interest in wine tasting (his favorite is a red burgundy, while she expressed a preference for champagne and Japanese sake), complement each other’s professional interests.

Muckerman praised Fujita’s work ethic. That incredible focus enabled Fujita to earn her doctorate from Georgia Tech in an astoundingly quick two-year period.

In addition to contributing his theoretical chemistry and weekday culinary skills to their partnership, Muckerman also offers editing advice to Fujita and the rest of the artificial intelligence group. “I’ve been correcting the same mistakes in (Fujita’s) English for 30 years,” he said.

Fujita and Muckerman realize what’s at stake in the work they’re doing. Alternative energy, including the use of artificial photosynthesis, is an area that has to succeed, Muckerman said.

“The energy problem,” offered Fujita, who has worked on artificial photosynthesis for 25 years, “is the most important issue in this century.”

Muckerman shared similar sentiments. “I firmly believe that our survival depends on developing new ways to harness clean energy,” he said, “but it’s not going to be easy.”

Frustration was mounting as the rejections poured in. His finding could potentially force a rewriting of textbooks and a rethinking of conventional wisdom on something near and dear to people: human evolution.

Sergio Almécija, a researcher in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook Medical School, had used state-of-the-art three-dimensional imaging to look at the femur (the thick thigh bone) of so-called Millennial Man, a fossil that was discovered in 2000. His finding was sufficiently different from what other scientists believed that some of them probably figured he was wrong, he said.

The bone was from an ape that lived about six million years ago, during the end of the Miocene period. These extinct apes haven’t exactly commanded the spotlight, especially in human evolution. Chimpanzees, who are the most closely linked to humans in DNA resemblance, are considered the most likely human cousins.

An analysis of this femur, however, suggests that human ancestors may have looked less like an earlier version of chimpanzees and more like a version of a fossil ape that doesn’t exist today.

Millennial Man, who was bipedal, is widely accepted as an early member of the human lineage, Almécija said. In the past, it was considered human-like in this femur bone. It has also been considered more similar to Australopithicus, like Lucy, and in between living apes and modern humans.

This study, however, shows that the femur is intermediate in time and shape between Lucy and previous apes that lived in the Miocene period, but not to chimpanzees.

“Our study shows that we should focus more attention on and understand those ancient fossil apes,” Almécija said.

He compared the femur of Millennial Man, known by its scientific name as Orrorin tugenensis, to all the living apes — gibbons, siamangs, orangutans, gorillas and chimps, as well as to modern humans, fossil humans and fossil apes. “I believe Orrorin represents a very good model of how the earliest bipeds would look,” he said.

The research paper has been translated into several languages, with people from the United States, Spain and France contacting the Stony Brook professor to discuss the implications of his finding.

Almécija came up with this idea about the apes back in 2010, but it took almost three years to find a publication that would share his work. “We tried to publish this in other journals, but some wouldn’t even allow us to share this with reviewers,” he said.

In some ways, what didn’t kill the idea made it stronger, Almécija suggested. Each rejection created an opportunity to improve the work and clarify the message. The paper has evolved and the researchers have learned a great deal along the way, he said.

Almécija received the support of department chair William Jungers, a distinguished teaching professor in Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook Medical School. Jungers discussed the results and encouraged Almécija to continue to move forward, despite the roadblocks.
Calling Almécija’s data, methods and results “novel, refreshing and profound,” Jungers said he “offered encouragement and some suggestions to improve his message because I was confident that reason and good science would ultimately prevail. And it did.”

Jungers suggested that textbooks will need to move away from the idea that living apes are the best window into early human evolution. Living apes, he continued, are specialized because they’ve been evolving for millions of years.

The chimpanzee is not a time machine that allows humans to look at a living ancestor. Miocene apes are much better candidates for what human ancestors likely looked like, Jungers said.

When the paper finally moved closer to publication, Almécija celebrated with members of his department, including his girlfriend Ashley Hammond, who is a research instructor. “She knows how hard it was for me to get this thing through,” Almécija said of Hammond, who lives with him in Port Jefferson. When the couple met two years ago while they were both working at the American Museum of Natural History, Almécija was already conducting an analysis of the femur.

The couple, who enjoy the beaches and being close to water, is thrilled to be a part of the Anatomical Sciences Department at Stony Brook, which Almécija described as the “top department in the world in functional morphology and human evolution.”

As for the next step with his research, Almécija said he wants to “understand the evolutionary changes in the skeleton of fossil apes and early hominins. Connecting the dots between a chimp and a human is not going to tell us most of the story, but only the last chapter of the book.”

They both compete in triathlons. They live three blocks from each other in Poquott and work at Stony Brook University. And thanks to a chance meeting in a park near their home, they have worked together to gather information about a medical problem that is likely to become more common as the baby boomer generation ages: Alzheimer’s disease.

A professor in the departments of neurosurgery and medicine at Stony Brook Medical School, William Van Nostrand created a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. Realizing, however, that he needed someone with an expertise in behavior, he turned to his longtime collaborator John Robinson, a professor in integrative neuroscience in the psychology department at Stony Brook.

Recently, the physically fit tandem showed how the collection of a protein called amyloid beta around small capillaries in their model of Alzheimer’s results in signs of the disease, even before the typical collection of amyloid plaques in the brain resulted in the cognitive decline associated with the disease.

The study shows, Van Nostrand said, that a small amount of amyloid buildup in the blood vessels is “very potent at driving impairment.” That could be a result of inflammation or inflammatory pathways or changes in the blood flow, he speculated.

While scientists and doctors had known about the build up of amyloid proteins in the vessels and in plaques, they hadn’t compared the changes in the affected region in a side-by-side way while monitoring a deterioration in behavior.

Van Nostrand was cautious about extending the results of this study to humans. He suggested that this result might be “an earlier indicator” or even a “potential contributor” to the disease and impairment later on.
“A lot more work needs to be done in looking at how this translates into humans,” Van Nostrand said.

Additionally, the amyloid accumulation is not the whole story, as defects in tau proteins, which are responsible for stabilizing polymers that contribute to maintaining cell structure, also play a role in Alzheimer’s symptoms. Most recent work, Van Nostrand explained, suggests that amyloid is likely an important initiator of other problems.

A complex disease, Alzheimer’s can vary from patient to patient. Indeed, there are people who show no signs of any deterioration in their intellectual abilities who have “lots of pathology, but they haven’t hit that tipping point yet,” where the disease progresses from the physical stage to mental impairment, Van Nostrand said.

As for what’s next for the productive collaboration, Robinson suggested they are interested in how lifestyle factors, such as diet, exercise and lifelong learning, help or hurt the chances of developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

The two scientist/athletes recognize, Robinson said, that their own athletic pursuits may help their health over the longer term, although the connection with Alzheimer’s or any other disease is difficult to make.

“If you ask Bill and me, ‘Do you think we’ll live longer because of this?’ We’d both say, yes. That’s a bias we recognize,” Robinson said. Robinson said he has collaborated with many researchers since he started working at Stony Brook in 1994 and called the connection with Van Nostrand one of his longest standing scientific partnerships.

As for their athletic training, the duo have traveled together to triathlons in Montauk and in New Jersey. Van Nostrand often competes in longer races (like Ironman competitions).

The two sometimes compete in the same triathlon, where Robinson sees his colleague’s feet amid the churned bubbles at the beginning of a race, while Van Nostrand listens over his shoulder for Robinson during the run.

While Van Nostrand has had a successful collaboration with Robinson, he has another collaboration even closer to home. His wife, Judianne Davis, who has been working with him for over 20 years, is his lab manager.

A swimmer, Davis has an interest in her family that is unique: she enters sheepherding competitions with her border collie. Van Nostrand has two sons from a previous marriage (26-year-old Joffrey and 21-year-old Kellen). The couple has an eight-year-old daughter, Waela, who is also a swimmer.

Robinson met his wife, Alice Cialella, a group leader of the Scientific Information Systems Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, on a college track team and the couple still trains together. The Poquott pair have a 16-year-old daughter Zoe, who, naturally, runs cross country and track at Ward Melville High School.

One of Davis’ dogs helped facilitate a meeting between the two researchers. Davis was walking her dog in a park near their homes when she met Robinson.

It’s a “strong collaboration,” Van Nostrand said, and has “worked out really well.”

Some Chinese herbal remedies have had it right for many years, even if no one could point to a specific reason. Now, however, researchers at Stony Brook have figured out why some remedies taken as a tea for arthritis and pain work.

A chemical in the brain, and elsewhere, can send a signal that relieves pain, inflammation and stress. The reason pain sometimes continues, causing ongoing aches and discomfort, is that the body also has a system for breaking down or putting away its own pain-easing solution.

The Chinese remedy has an active chemical in the herb that is a truxillic acid compound. This is similar to a chemical Stony Brook scientists found that allows a pain relieving neurotransmitter, called endocannabinoid anandamide (or AEA) to remain active.

The body has a “natural marijuana system,” explained Dale Deutsch, a professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook. Deutsch has locked onto one of the key players in the breakdown of that system.

Deutsch recently received a $3.8 million, five-year grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop new drugs for pain, inflammation, and drug addiction. The research involves scientists from the Biochemistry and Cell Biology departments, Chemistry, Applied Mathematics and Anesthesiology. The research also involves the Institute for Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery, and the Laufer Center for Physical Biology.

Deutsch and his team are looking to block a protein called fatty acid binding protein. The scientists are trying to figure out if preventing these FABPs from becoming active allows AEA to continue to provide pain relief.

In drug addiction, interfering with these FABPs might reduce the pain and perhaps cravings associated with removing drugs, Deutsch said.

“In theory, if you can increase the AEA when people are coming off drugs, you may be able to help them with withdrawal, and diminish drug-seeking behavior,” Deutsch said.

The drug addiction component to this system is still at the early stages, cautioned Deutsch.

Martin Kaczocha, who identified the FABP’s role with AEA as a graduate student in Deutsch’s lab and is now an assistant professor in the Anesthesiology Department, is studying how the neurotransmitter reduces pain.

The potential upside to finding inhibitors that block the breakdown of AEA is that they work off the body’s own systems and may not have the same negative side effects as the drugs currently on the market, like NSAIDs, which, while effective can also cause stomach problems.

Tapping into this natural pain-relieving system may enable patients to feel the kind of physical relief from neuropathic pain that they might get from marijuana, without having the same psychotropic effects of the drug, he explained.

Deutsch has been studying AEA for over 20 years. In fact, towards the beginning of his work with the neurotransmitter, he discovered an enzyme that is involved in breaking down AEA. Some companies are working on drugs even now that are moving into Phase 2 trials that inhibit that enzyme, Deutsch said.

What excites Deutsch about this new FABP target, however, is that it is organ specific. That means that the transporters in the brain are different from those in the liver or other areas of the body.

The studies with the enzyme, while effective, may wind up inhibiting AEA breakdown throughout the body.

With this grant, Deutsch and colleagues, including Iwao Ojima, distinguished professor of Chemistry, Kaczocha and Robert Rizzo, associate professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and a member of the Laufer Center, can screen for additional compounds that might work on FABPs. So far, they’ve looked through a million possible options and expect to screen for an additional four to five million compounds within the next few years to get more potent inhibitors of the FABPs.

Deutsch credited the work of undergraduate student Brian Ralph, graduate students Bill Berger and Trent Balius and research assistant Liqun Wang as providing instrumental contributions.

Within the next few years, Deutsch and his team hope to partner with pharmaceutical companies that may develop drugs with them.

A resident of Stony Brook, Deutsch lives with his wife Lou Charnon Deutsch, an author and professor of Hispanic languages and literature at Stony Brook. Deutsch has been sailing for 20 years and especially enjoys heading to the Great South Bay.

Deutsch became fascinated with science when he received a chemistry set from his mother when he was 12.

As for his most recent efforts with FABP inhibitors, Deutsch said it “works in animals,” so he “knows we’re on the right track.”

Worms are fine. Mice and rats? Sure. Dogs and monkeys also have their value, especially to basic research. But what really interests Gholson Lyon are people. “I study humans because that’s what I’m interested in,” said Lyon, a child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist and researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “Humans are an incredibly complex species.”

An assistant professor at CSHL since March 2012, Lyon is establishing connections with Stony Brook as he builds a research and clinical team that benefits from an understanding of human genetics. “Part of the reason to partner with Stony Brook is that it’d be nice to work with clinicians who have done a lot of work with families,” he said.

Indeed, Lyon worked closely with a close-knit family in Utah in which some of their sons were born with unusual symptoms and died at young ages. Starting in 1979, five boys that were born in that family over a three-decade period got some aspect of the disease.

Looking closely at the family’s genes, Lyon found a mutation that, as he put it, has a “high expression.” He named the disorder Ogden Syndrome, after the town where the first family lives. While it would be hard to develop a treatment for Ogden Syndrome, “It’s about knowledge,” Lyon said. “Giving the family knowledge that it has this mutation helps to bring awareness.”

Indeed, knowing that a child is born with this genetic change can help alert parents to find ways to avoid various symptoms for their children.

In Ogden Syndrome, boys sometimes have trouble when food goes down the wrong tube, causing lung infections. In the future, with the family more aware of this problem, parents can work with doctors to prevent sending food to the lungs with the type of food choices or with earlier placement of a feeding tube, he said.

Lyon’s medical mission is to provide and encourage other doctors to offer individualized care. “There are lots of people who want to develop drugs,” he said. “I firmly believe that identifying illness before it begins and then working to prevent or decrease the severity of the illness is far easier than trying to fix a full-blown illness with drugs after the fact.”

He said he understood actress Angelina Jolie’s informed decision to have a double mastectomy based on her genetic predisposition to breast cancer.

“Every individual has their own risk-benefit analysis,” Lyon said. Lyon derives considerable satisfaction from working with the family with Ogden Syndrome. He found it similarly rewarding to work with someone who had such a severe obsessive compulsive disorder that he struggled to function.

For many months, Lyon treated this patient with Prozac, without any effect. After doing a full genetic analysis of his patient, he realized his patient had a gene that affects the metabolism of fluoxetine, the ingredient in Prozac. If he had known that upfront, he would have chosen a different drug.

Lyon used deep brain stimulation with this patient. The effort completely changed his life, enabling him to function at a higher level and even to date. His patient got married this past summer.

Deep brain stimulation is not the current standard of care, has potential side effects and is a more expensive treatment, costing tens of thousands of dollars. Lyon, however, believes the technique — in which a machine sends regular, controlled electrical signals into the brain — will prove useful for other patients.

It shows promise not only for treating severe obsessive compulsive disorder, but also for helping with other illnesses like Tourette Syndrome.

“Now is the time to be putting a lot of effort into advancing deep brain and precision medicine,” Lyon said.

The Cold Spring Harbor researcher said he has had patients for whom even individualized approaches haven’t improved the quality of life. “Medical doctors try their best to provide individualized care to each person,” he explained. “I have certainly had many times in which I could not help certain people due to the severity of their illness and the limited resource at hand.”

Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and the chief academic officer at Scripps Health, called Lyon a “rising star” who is not afraid to “tell it like it is.” He said Lyon, whom he asked to give a talk on the future of genomic medicine last year, is making “major contributions to get the field moving forward.”

Many expectant parents live their lives somewhere between hope and prayer. The big question, and fear, often isn’t whether the child will be a boy or girl, but whether he or she will develop in a healthy way.

The agony and ecstasy of the process was exponentially more dramatic for Gerald Thomsen and his wife Julia Todorov-Thomsen during three pregnancies that produced healthy children. Scientists who met at Stony Brook, the couple knew each phase of development for the skin, muscles, heart, brain, and everything in between.

“I tried to push out of my mind all the scenarios where things could go wrong,” Thomsen said. “There are so many complicated circuits and events.”

Indeed, Thomsen has considerably more than textbook knowledge about development, albeit with other organisms. The Stony Brook professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology has dedicated much of the last 20 years to understanding some of the signals and processes that help animals, in his case, mostly frogs, develop.

The big picture question he explores in his lab is, “How does an embryo put itself together? How do cells with different specialties — nerve cells, skin cells — emerge from a single egg cell?”

Thomsen is interested in exploring this question at the whole animal, cellular and molecular level. In his lab, he is studying a process called induction, in which cells respond to signals from neighboring cells.

When a signal, often in the form of a protein or polypeptide, binds to a cell, it often sends a signal from the cell membrane to the nucleus, where it might start or stop a genetic process.

He’s currently working on how an understudied gene, which seems to regulate cell differentiation, might affect growth. When this gene is taken away, the frog embryo doesn’t develop tissues and organs critical for its survival.

Thomsen said many scientists in the world of developmental biology look specifically at what is new about a cell as it moves from one state to another. They want to know what genes are turning on or off. To explore that, the researchers often block them or make those genes more active, to see how that influences what a cell does.

In the late 1990s, Thomsen and a student of his, Haitao Zhu, observed a protein that interacts with a set of signals that go from the cell membrane to the nucleus, where the frog’s genetic machinery resides. When Thomsen and Zhu put the gene for that protein into the frog embryo, it generated another backbone and nervous system.

“It was really dramatic,” Thomsen recalled. The gene turned out to be a key regulator in a signaling pathway, called TGF beta.

Thomsen’s work in this arena is “a major contribution to our understanding of how embryos develop,” said Amy Sater, a professor at the University of Houston in the Biology and Biochemistry Department. “It’s had applicability across all vertebrate systems.”

Sater and Thomsen have taught the Cell and Developmental Biology of Xenopus course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for the last three years. Sater has appreciated Thomsen’s sense of humor and said, “The community has a lot of confidence in [his] work.”

Thomsen has a grant right now from the Stony Brook Medical School to look at a protein to see whether it might be operating in breast or other cancers. His lab, which includes eight people, is also focused on understanding the signals that lead to regeneration. In this arena, he is studying frog and sea anemone embryos.

Adult anemones can regenerate a complex body part from a stump of tissue, he said, the same way starfish can. Frogs have a limited ability to regenerate, so he could potentially test the lab’s findings with sea anemones in frogs.

A resident of Port Jefferson, Thomsen brings special guests to his children’s classes, introducing them to adult frogs, embryos and tadpoles. His children are Liam, 7, Isabella, 5, and Luca, who is almost 3.

Initially interested in oceanography, a specialty his wife pursued, Thomsen was fascinated by biochemistry and gene regulation in the context of differentiating cells. His particular field “always has something new.”

As he felt when his children were developing, Thomsen said the process is “amazing. Even though we know a lot of detail, we also appreciate that we know these details in a spotty way.”