01/4.-1a.7kte, rkfle,i,cs/

at Kresge Eye Institute,
sight and insight go together

Jayne S. Weiss, MD walks fast and talks fast.
This is a woman with things to do.

Weiss, a Bloomfield resident, is busy
meeting with patients, conferring with
colleagues and instructing students. She
has to interrupt an interview to answer her
cell phone.

"I have a lot of interests," she says. "I'm
involved in too, too many things."

Her most recent achievement is cracking
the genetic code for a rare eye disease,
Schnyders' crystalline corneal dystrophy,
which causes vision loss and leads to
corneal transplant surgery in half of patients
more than 50 years of age. Supported
in part by a National Institutes of Health
grant, Weiss has followed 115 patients from
around the world since 1988, the longest-
running and largest patient study of the
disease. But it's just the latest in a lengthy
list of accomplishments that started when
she graduated summa cum laude from the
State University of New York-Buffalo.

The native New Yorker trained at the
prestigious Bascom Palmer Eye Institute,
Harvard Medical School and Emory
University. She was a Fulbright Scholar in
Zimbabwe and taught corneal surgery and
diseases to ophthalmologists in training
there.

The Kresge Eye Institute (KEI) recruited
her from the University of Massachusetts
Medical Center in 1995 and she began
at Wayne State University as principle
investigator in an FDA study on the excimer
laser, the device used in LASIK. Today she
runs the refractive surgery department at
KEI, still seeing patients and performing all

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of Wayne State's
LASIK surgery,
along with her
research and
scholarly pursuits.

Her discovery of
the gene that
causes Schnyder's
has implications
far beyond
ophthalmology. It
also may lead to a
treatment for high
cholesterol.

Dr. Jayne Weiss

performs a post-op assessment of a patient

As a member and past chair of the FDA

"Schnyder's is a disease in which abnormal
amounts of cholesterol are deposited
in the front of the eye, the cornea,"
Weiss explains. "The gene we found is
a cholesterol metabolism gene. It may
give us some insight to cholesterol
metabolism elsewhere and perhaps some
understanding, diagnostic treatment-wise,
of atherosclerosis and systemic cholesterol
abnormalities."

This past winter, Weiss published a
definitive thesis on the disease for the
American Ophthalmological Society. It
develops, for the first time, clear-cut criteria
for diagnosing Schnyder's and includes the
probability of a patient needing a corneal
transplant, information on how and why
vision is affected, and photos.

It's one of six articles she's published this
year. She also edited the first book on LASIK
and refractive surgery by the American
Academy of Ophthalmology, part of the
13-book Basic and Clinical Science Course,
which all ophthalmology residents use in
their training.

Ophthalmic Devices Panel, Weiss is involved
in a review of LASIK safety data. At an FDA
panel held in April on patient satisfaction
after LASIK, she spoke out against overly
aggressive marketing and inadequate
patient screening.

"LASIK is not a commodity. It's a surgical
procedure, but it is being sold as a
commodity," she was reported saying
by the Associated Press. The panel
recommended that the agency improve its
public guidance on risks involved with laser-
vision eye surgery.

Though Weiss admits she has little time
outside her professional life and being
a mom, she does manage to get away.
She loves adventure and traveling
independently to places off the beaten
track. Last year she and her teenage
daughter, Alana, visited Borneo looking for
orangutans and traveled to Cambodia and
Vietnam the year before.

"I usually go to places people might not
ordinarily like to go," she says, "but that's
fun to me. That's my summer vacation."

Warrior fencer is No. 1

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Sophomore Slava Zingerman of Ashkelon,
Israel, won his second consecutive national
fencing title by defeating Penn State's Arth
Urman 15-7 in the championship bout
at Ohio State University. Zingerman was
the No. 3 seed going into the finals. He is
the third WSU men's epeeist to win back-
to-back national titles and the first NCAA
epeeist to win back-to-back national titles in
19 years. Zingerman, an engineering major,
has been a member of the Coach's Honor
Roll.

Freshman Jakub Gibczynski placed 10th
to earn Honorable Mention All-America

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accolades in the men's sabre, and freshman
Karolina Budna earned First Team All-
America honors by placing fourth in the
sabre. In the women's epee, senior Justyna
Konczalska earned a place on the Second
Team All-America by placing seventh.

The ninth-place team finish marks the fifth
straight year that the Warriors landed in the
top 10 nationally. Zingerman's individual
national title was the fifth in the last five
years by a Wayne State fencer. Wayne State
is one of only two universities in the state
that sponsors a fencing program.

Slava Zingerman

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