FishingSportsGeneral hospital

Service

Our emergency room staff at General hospital have decades of experience in treating as a leading academic medical center Emergency Department. In fact, General hospital is the only center in the region to be verified by the College as a Level 1. You won’t find the same level of experience and expert care anywhere else in NY.

Each year we treat approximately over 100,000 patients. We offer:

• Life Flight air ambulance
• Emergency Medical Services (ambulance response)
• Trauma Center
• Cardiac Catheterization Lab
• Stroke Center
• Urgent Care
• Pediatric Emergency Medicine
• Emergency Mental Health Services

General hospital manages the 911 call center and many surrounding towns, making sure you get the care you need as quickly as possible. Our paramedics and emergency medical technicians are all trained in advanced life support and other critical care techniques.

Pediatric Emergency and Urgent Care

Children aren’t just small adults. They require staff and physicians with advanced training in the care of children with critical illnesses or injuries.

• Your child will be seen in one of our 13 private rooms where they will be treated in a warm, caring environment.
• Child life specialists are available to explain tests and procedures in a way that children understand.
• Our Hanover Insurance Group Children’s Waiting Area is a dedicated place just for children and families.

Urgent care for children and adolescents is provided in PediPlace, adjacent to the Pediatric Emergency Department. Your child will receive expert medical care when your pediatrician or family doctor is unavailable. Many area doctors regularly refer children to PediPlace for after-hours visits because they know the staff prides itself on quality care and attentive service.

Studies

Scientists have developed useful models of CF by engineering mice and other lab animals to have CFTR gene defects. However, to screen libraries of potential drug compounds to find any that work against CF, scientists typically need lab-dish (in vitro) models. The new in vitro model developed by Ribeiro and colleagues uses bronchial epithelial cells and mucopurulent materials from lungs that were removed from CF patients during lung transplants. The cells are exposed to a solution derived from the CF mucopurulent material, which contains bacterial factors and inflammatory factors secreted by airway epithelia and inflammatory cells that accumulate in CF lungs with frequent infections.

UNC research associate Lubna Abdullah, PhD, the first author of the study and Marsico member, found that long-term exposure to the infectious/inflammatory factors causes both CF and normal airway cells to boost their production of proteins known as mucins, the key gel-forming components of mucus.

Some previous research had suggested that CF airway cells, compared to healthy airway cells, overproduce or even underproduce mucins. However, Ribeiro said, “Our results show that the CF mucin response to infectious/inflammatory factors is really the same as that of normal airway cells.”

Pharmacy

The big difference in the cells’ responses has to do with fluid secretion: The normal cells secrete more fluid to keep the increased mucus thin and mobile, whereas the CF cells secrete hardly any fluid.

“We showed unequivocally with this model that the lack of CFTR function in the CF airway cells leads directly to the dehydrated mucus seen in the disease,” Ribeiro said.

She is now working with pharma companies to use the model to test prospective CF drugs. “This model has been very useful so far in our research, and I hope it will soon be useful more broadly for the CF research community,” she said.

The researchers then ran similar experiments using lysate made from two other cancers – breast cancer and a second form of melanoma with limited melanin. In both cases, the researchers added melanin to the lysate to make it more light absorbent. The results were similar to those from the first form of melanoma: patches used in conjunction with near infrared light got the most promising results.

“These results are encouraging, but we are in the early stages of development,” Gu said. “The next step would be a large animal study to further evaluate the safety and efficacy of the technique. And while it is much too early to estimate cost, we think that the treatment could be scaled up and would be affordable.”

The paper, “A melanin-mediated cancer immunotherapy patch,” is published in the journal Science Immunology. In addition to Gu and Ye, the paper was co-authored by Chao Wang, Xudong Zhang, Quanyin Hu, Yuqi Zhang, Qi Liu, Di Wen and Joshua Milligan of the Joint Biomedical Engineering Program; Adriano Bellotti, a former undergraduate in the biomedical engineering program and current MD/PhD student in the UNC School of Medicine; and Leaf Huang of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy.