Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools are looking for wonderful employees in all areas. They need teachers, specialists, child nutrition team members, social workers, counselors, bus drivers, maintenance, therapists, sign language professionals, custodial services, and much more for the upcoming school year.

The WS/FCS Recruitment Fair is one stop shopping for anyone interested in working with the WSFCS system. The fair will feature representatives from all schools and all departments. Candidates can meet with district administrators and other leaders, fill out applications, learn about the benefits, even be offered employment on the spot. This is also the place for current employees to learn about transfer opportunities and meet with recruiters from nearby graduate programs to learn more about advancing their degree.

The WS/FCS recruitment fair will be held Saturday, May 6, 9 A.M. – 12 P.M.  at the LJVM Coliseum.

Area job seekers are also invited to attend a job fair sponsored by Forsyth Tech, Winston-Salem Urban League and Goodwill Industries of Northwest North Carolina, which will be held in Goodwill on University and will include representatives from more than 10 local employers.

This job fair will be held on May 9, 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. at 2701 University Parkway, Employers scheduled to attend include: Astistree, Ashley Furniture, ComforCare Home Care, Herbalife, Salem Bakery Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office, UNC Chapel Hill and Truliant Federal Credit Union and Novant Health to name a few.

Job applicants should come dressed for an interview and bring copies of their resumes. For more information, contact Goodwill Career Connections at 336-724-3625.

cover image from https://studentedge.org/

By WFU

Using a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer, regenerative medicine scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have proved that it is feasible to print living tissue structures to replace injured or diseased tissue in patients.

Reporting in Nature Biotechnology, the scientists said they printed ear, bone and muscle structures. When implanted in animals, the structures matured into functional tissue and developed a system of blood vessels. Most importantly, these early results indicate that the structures have the right size, strength and function for use in humans.

“This novel tissue and organ printer is an important advance in our quest to make replacement tissue for patients,” said Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and senior author on the study. “It can fabricate stable, human-scale tissue of any shape. With further development, this technology could potentially be used to print living tissue and organ structures for surgical implantation.”

With funding from the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a federally funded effort to apply regenerative medicine to battlefield injuries, Atala’s team aims to implant bioprinted muscle, cartilage and bone in patients in the future.

Tissue engineering is a science that aims to grow replacement tissues and organs in the laboratory to help solve the shortage of donated tissue available for transplants. The precision of 3D printing makes it a promising method for replicating the body’s complex tissues and organs. However, current printers based on jetting, extrusion and laser-induced forward transfer cannot produce structures with sufficient size or strength to implant in the body.

The Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing System (ITOP), developed over a 10-year period by scientists at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, overcomes these challenges. The system deposits both bio-degradable, plastic-like materials to form the tissue “shape” and water-based gels that contain the cells. In addition, a strong, temporary outer structure is formed. The printing process does not harm the cells.

A major challenge of tissue engineering is ensuring that implanted structures live long enough to integrate with the body. The Wake Forest Baptist scientists addressed this in two ways. They optimized the water-based “ink” that holds the cells so that it promotes cell health and growth and they printed a lattice of micro-channels throughout the structures. These channels allow nutrients and oxygen from the body to diffuse into the structures and keep them live while they develop a system of blood vessels.

It has been previously shown that tissue structures without ready-made blood vessels must be smaller than 200 microns (0.007 inches) for cells to survive. In these studies, a baby-sized ear structure (1.5 inches) survived and showed signs of vascularization at one and two months after implantation.

“Our results indicate that the bio-ink combination we used, combined with the micro-channels, provides the right environment to keep the cells alive and to support cell and tissue growth,” said Atala.

Another advantage of the ITOP system is its ability to use data from CT and MRI scans to “tailor-make” tissue for patients. For a patient missing an ear, for example, the system could print a matching structure.

Several proof-of-concept experiments demonstrated the capabilities of ITOP. To show that ITOP can generate complex 3D structures, printed, human-sized external ears were implanted under the skin of mice. Two months later, the shape of the implanted ear was well-maintained and cartilage tissue and blood vessels had formed.

To demonstrate the ITOP can generate organized soft tissue structures, printed muscle tissue was implanted in rats. After two weeks, tests confirmed that the muscle was robust enough to maintain its structural characteristics, become vascularized and induce nerve formation.

And, to show that construction of a human-sized bone structure, jaw bone fragments were printed using human stem cells. The fragments were the size and shape needed for facial reconstruction in humans. To study the maturation of bioprinted bone in the body, printed segments of skull bone were implanted in rats. After five months, the bioprinted structures had formed vascularized bone tissue.

Ongoing studies will measure longer-term outcomes.

The research was supported, in part, by grants from the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (W81XWH-08-2-0032), the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command (W81XWH-07-1-0718) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (N66001-13-C-2027).

Co-authors are: Hyun-Wook Kang, Ph.D., Sang Jin Lee, Ph.D., Carlos Kengla, B.S., and James Yoo, M.D., Ph.D., Wake Forest Baptist.

By Staff

Last week Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center performed their first kidney transplant. According to the hospital, 54 year-old Keith Overcash is feeling better than good these days.

“I feel wonderful, especially considering where I was just three months ago,” said Overcash, a 54-year-old Denton resident who in early September underwent the first heart and kidney transplant performed at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.

In a procedure that spanned more than 18 hours, Overcash received both organs from the same donor. The heart transplant was done first, by Edward Kincaid, associate professor of cardiothoracic surgery. After that was judged successful, the kidney operation was performed by Jeffrey Rogers, professor of surgery.

Overcash underwent the combined transplant approximately a year after being referred to Wake Forest Baptist’s Heart and Vascular Center by a cardiologist at the regional hospital in Salisbury.

“When he first came here he was in cardiogenic shock, which is essentially life-threatening heart failure,” said Barbara Pisani, D.O., professor of cardiology at Wake Forest Baptist, who has directed Overcash’s care at the Medical Center in conjunction with Ebere O. Chukwu, M.B.B.S., assistant professor of cardiology.

Overcash was first diagnosed with heart failure – the condition when the heart is unable to pump sufficient blood to the body’s organs – in 1995 when he was in the Army. He remained on active duty until 2006, when he retired as a command sergeant major after 26 years in uniform. He then went to work for the Department of Veteran Affairs but his heart condition and related health issues forced him to leave that job in February 2012, and he spent most of the next two and a half years bedridden and in and out of the hospital.

“There was no doubt in my mind that I was dying,” Overcash said of that time.

When Overcash was admitted to Wake Forest Baptist in late September 2014 he was first treated with a temporary ventricular assist device, a mechanical pump that provides short-term circulatory support of the heart’s pumping function. He then had a more durable VAD implanted because he was too ill to survive to a heart transplant without mechanical support. Once his health improved, he was evaluated for the transplant.

“But he had severe kidney damage and it was feared that even if he got a heart transplant his kidney function would continue to deteriorate, and he would require dialysis,” explained Betty Crandall, R.N., administrative director of transplant services at Wake Forest Baptist. “And outcomes for heart transplant recipients on dialysis are less than optimal.”

Overcash was then evaluated for a heart-kidney transplant and it was determined that he was a candidate. He was listed for the combined transplant with the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit organization that manages the nation’s organ transplant system, in the spring of 2015. Suitable donor organs became available in less than six months, and Overcash underwent the combined procedure on Sept. 1.

Was he worried about being Wake Forest Baptist’s first heart-kidney transplant patient?

“I was more excited than anything else,” Overcash said. “From the very first day I met the team there I was impressed with the dedication they showed and very confident in their ability.”

Overcash is now living at home but returns to Wake Forest Baptist three days a week for exercise therapy. A licensed Pentecostal Holiness minister, he is preaching occasionally and has applied to be a volunteer at the Medical Center.

“I’m probably doing better than anybody expected,” he said. “And I want to do whatever I can to help other people.”

While the first combined heart-kidney transplant in the United States was performed in 1989, the procedure is still uncommon, with fewer than 100 done in the country each year.

Pisani said Overcash’s combined transplant illustrates the high level of care provided at Wake Forest Baptist.

“You can get very sophisticated care right here in Winston-Salem,” she said. “You don’t have to leave the area to have access to advanced therapy for heart failure, kidney disease or other life-threatening conditions.”