Ritchie McKay leaves Virginia to return to Liberty as head basketball coach

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Ritchie McKay, the top assistant on the Virginia mens basketball staff, will return to Liberty as its head coach, Liberty announced on Wednesday afternoon.

McKay was the head coach of the Flames from 2007 to 2009 before resigning to join Cavaliers Coach Tony Bennetts staff.

At his introductory news conference, McKay said he loves Bennett to death, and his experience in Charlottesville made him a better coach and man. Bennetts wife was in attendance at the news conference.

I learned a ton from him, McKay said of Bennett. Not only the way he coaches his team, but the way he lives his life.

McKays departure is the first staff turnover for Bennett in his six-year tenure at Virginia. McKay, 49, had his best season at Liberty in 2008-09, when the Flames finished 23-12, tying a school record for wins in a Division I season, with star freshman Seth Curry. Shortly after Curry transferred to Duke and McKay left Liberty to become the associate head coach under Bennett. McKay, whose daughter is a student at Liberty, was crucial in the recruitment of forward Anthony Gill and point guard London Perrantes to Charlottesville.

Ive been a fan of Liberty since I left, McKay said.

Brad Soucie, Virginias director of player development, is expected to follow McKay back to Liberty. Stevens coached with McKay there and followed him to Virginia six years ago. He spent his first five seasons with the Cavaliers as the director of mens basketball operations.

After McKay resigned from Liberty in 2009, the schoolhired former McKay assistant Dale Layer, who was on Buzz Williamss staff at Marquette. Layer was fired in March after compiling an 82-113 record in his six seasons with the Flames, including an NCAA tournament appearance in 2013.

Liberty Athletics Director Jeff Barber said he talked with nine candidates over the three-week process. He touted how McKay had proven himself over the course of his career and at Liberty. Barber said McKay had been approached by other schools for head-coaching vacancies, but McKay told Barber he wouldnt talk to other schools until he was assured the Liberty job wasnt an option for him.

McKay said he didnt leave Liberty initially because it wasnt a good enough job for him, but because he wanted to help his friend, Bennett, at Virginia.

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Ritchie McKay leaves Virginia to return to Liberty as head basketball coach

Health Care Marketing Approaches For Olympia & Spokane Dentists From Another Way Marketing – Video

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Health Care Marketing Approaches For Olympia & Spokane Dentists From Another Way Marketing - Video

Health Care Lands in the Emergency Room

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Paul Wellman

Perspectives in Healthcare Phorum 2015

Doctor Panel Talks Fiscal Consequences of Obamacare, PhysicianShortage

About 30,000 people in Santa Barbara County are newly insured through Medi-Cal since the Affordable Care Act took effect, bringing the total number of recipients to about 106,000, or roughly one fourth of the county. In California, families of four living on $33,465 or less now qualify for the state health-care program, and the amount of people uninsured nationwide has droppedconsiderably.

But how will the government pay for such expanded access? That was one big unanswered question posed last week by a handful of area health officials during a Visiting Nurse & Hospice Care-sponsored forum at the DoubleTreeResort.

One purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to increase preventative treatment, freeing up emergency rooms that have long been bursting at the seams. Since 2012, however, Santa Barbara ER visits have increased by about 1,400 patients every year. Just last year, the ER in Goleta saw a 12-14 percent uptick, and Santa Ynezs hospital ER saw an 11 percenthike.

We are actually busier now than we have been in a long time, said Cottage Executive Vice President Steven Fellows. To accommodate the influx, the hospital took steps toward doubling the number of ER beds with the demolition of its central wing last week; along with other upgrades, the renovations will allow for more than 60,000 visits each year. Goleta and Santa Ynez will also double the size of theirERs.

PaulWellman

Sansum Clinic CEO KurtRansohoff

Despite the increased volume, wait times for the ER havent changed. On average, a Cottage patient waits 37 minutes to see a doctor (higher than the state and national average) and four hours and 18 minutes before being admitted to hospital (lower than the state and national average), according to ProPublica. Hospitals are required to evaluate everyone who arrives at an emergency room. At that point, we might as well just treat you, Fellowssaid.

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Health Care Lands in the Emergency Room

Panel: ACA heightens health care needs

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By Marija B. Vader

Also known as Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act will not go away.

So business owners should learn about the law, accept it and work with it or work outside traditional insurance, said three Colorado Springs professionals acutely in tune with the national health care law now in effect.

Dr. Mark Tomasulo, a primary care physician who launched PeakMed Primary Care last year, along with Southern Colorado Economic Forum Director Tatiana Bailey, who has a Ph.D. in public health, and Heidi Cottle, president of Benefit Services Group, owned by National Financial Services, spoke to the local Middle Market Entrepreneurs last week about the controversial law and the convoluted health care system in the U.S.

Tomasulo launched a practice that is more of a direct-pay service with a high-deductible, a monthly service fee, no co-pay and 24-hour access to a physician. He doesnt accept insurance and doesnt mark up the cost of medicine. He left traditional practice because were becoming factory workers, seeing dozens of patients daily without the ability to spend quality time with them, he said.

To have a relationship with our patients we really need to get back to that, Tomasulo said.

Theres a lot of reasons health care is in trouble, said Bailey. One factor is an aging population, she said.

Most 85 percent of the money spent on health care is spent toward the end of life, Bailey said. Health care is not a normal good [like a TV or a phone] from an economic perspective, but we keep treating it that way.

Also, 20 percent of the $3 trillion Americans spend on health care is the administrative cost associated with transmitting payment through insurance companies, Bailey said. The 50 million uninsured people in this country receive health care paid for by people who have insurance.

For their 2015 taxes, some business owners will be required to prove to the Internal Revenue Service that they provide health insurance to their employees, and those employees will have to prove coverage themselves, said Cottle.

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Panel: ACA heightens health care needs

Scientists drill down to genetic root of prostate tumor development

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IMAGE:This infographic shows how prostate cancer spreads. view more

Credit: Cancer Research UK

Scientists have revealed the root of prostate cancers in individual men, discovering that despite huge genetic variety between tumours they also share common gene faults - insight that could offer new treatment hopes, according to research published in Nature today (Wednesday).

In a landmark paper, Cancer Research UK funded scientists alongside an international team of researchers read all of the DNA in tumour samples from 10 men with prostate cancer. This allowed them to map a 'family tree' of the changes happening at a genetic level as the disease spreads, forms new tumours, and becomes resistant to treatment.

They also revealed more detail about how prostate cancer spreads, showing that the group of cells that first spread from the prostate carry on travelling around the body, forming more secondary tumours.

The research is part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) - a global project using the latest gene-sequencing technology to reveal the genetic changes driving the disease.

The ICGC Prostate Cancer UK group - funded by Cancer Research UK, the Dallaglio Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the Academy of Finland and others - is examining how the disease evolves in patients to help develop approaches for personalised medicine, tailored to the genetic makeup of each person's cancer.

The team has already revealed a huge amount of genetic diversity between cancer cells taken from different sites within each man's prostate.

And this new study shows that, despite the diversity, prostate cancer cells that break free from the tumour and spread share common genetic faults unique to the individual patient.

Study author Ros Eeles, professor of oncogenetics at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and honorary consultant at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said: "We gained a much broader view of prostate cancer by studying both the original cancer and the cells that had spread to other parts of the body in these men. And we found that all of the cells that had broken free shared a common ancestor cell in the prostate.

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Scientists drill down to genetic root of prostate tumor development

Mini enzyme moves gene editing closer to the clinic

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SPL

The bacterium Staphylococcus aureus is host to a smaller version of the enzyme used in the CRISPR technique for gene editing.

A tweak to a technique that edits DNA with pinpoint precision has boosted its ability to correct defective genes in people. Called CRISPR, the method is already used in the lab to insert and remove genome defects in animal embryos. But the genetic instructions for the machinery on which CRISPR relies a gene-editing enzyme called Cas9 and RNA molecules that guide it to its target are simply too large to be efficiently ferried into most of the human bodys cells.

This week, researchers report a possible way around that obstacle: a Cas9 enzyme that is encoded by a gene about three-quarters the size of the one currently used. The finding, published on 1April in Nature, could open the door to new treatments for a host of genetic maladies (F. A. Ran etal. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14299; 2015).

There are thousands of diseases in humans associated with specific genetic changes, says David Liu, a chemical biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the latest study. A fairly large fraction of those have the potential to be addressed using genome editing.

Genome editing has generated controversy, with unconfirmed reports of its use in human embryos. Some scientists have expressed concern that the technique might be used by fertility doctors to edit the genes of human embryos before its safety is established (see also E.Lanphier et al. Nature 519, 410411; 2015). That concern is exacerbated by the fact that changes made by the procedure in embryos would be passed to all subsequent generations without giving anyone affected the opportunity to consent (see Nature 519, 272; 2015). But in the non-reproductive cells of children and adults, where intergenerational issues are not a concern, researchers and companies are already racing to develop CRISPR as a clinical tool.

The ethics of that pursuit may be more straightforward, but its execution can be harder than using CRISPR in embryos. An embryo consists of a small number of cells that give rise to a human. To edit the genome at that stage is simply a matter of injecting the necessary CRISPR components into a few cells. An adult human, however, is a mix of trillions of cells assembled into many different tissues. Researchers fret over how to target the CRISPR machinery to the specific cells where defective genes are disrupting physiological processes.

You can have the most optimal gene-editing system in the world, but if you cant deliver it to the proper cell type, its irrelevant, says Nessan Bermingham, chief executive of Intellia Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which aims to bring genome editing to the clinic. Were spending a tremendous amount of time working on it.

Gene-therapy researchers often harness a virus called AAV to shuttle foreign genes into mature human cells. However, most laboratories use a gene encoding the Cas9 protein that is too large to fit in the snug confines of the AAV genome alongside the extra sequences necessary for Cas9 function.

Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues decided to raid bacterial genomes for a solution, because the CRISPR system is derived from a process that bacteria use to snip unwanted DNA sequences out of their genomes. Zhangs team analysed genes encoding more than 600 Cas9 enzymes from hundreds of bacteria in search of a smaller version that could be packaged in AAV and delivered to mature cells.

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Mini enzyme moves gene editing closer to the clinic