"It turns out that not all hypothyroid patients are the same." - Dr. Antonio Bianco
(Chicago, IL) -- Antonio Bianco, MD, a leading expert on the thyroid gland, came to Rush University Medical Center two years ago to lead the creation of a comprehensive destination thyroid program combining top clinical and basic research with diagnostic, medical and surgical capabilities. (Photo Courtesy Rush University Medical Center)
You could say he hit the ground running. In the past couple of years, Bianco has relocated his laboratory from Miami, published a number of influential studies and co-chaired an American Thyroid Association task force that created new guidelines for the treatment of hypothyroidism.
His work touches many. Roughly 10 million …show more content…
More recently, patients themselves, and their advocates, "put pressure on the medical community to recognize the issue and study new, better treatments."
A tale of two hormones
Bianco has helped produce the knowledge that could lead to such improved treatments. He and his team at Rush have led an international effort that provides a better understanding of what happens when hypothyroid patients are treated with levothyroxine, a synthetic version of the thyroid hormone thyroxine, which also is known as L-T4.
Using hypothyroid rats, the team observed that normalization of thyroid action in the parts of the body where it is especially important -- the brain, the liver and the skeletal muscles -- occurred only when treatment with L-T4 was combined with another thyroid hormone, triiodothyronine, or L-T3. Normal individuals can transform T4 into the more active hormone T3 on their own, but patients treated with levothyroxine alone may not produce enough T3 to function well. Bianco's team concluded that this deficiency is the likely cause of those residual symptoms in some …show more content…
"My interest in thyroid research started in medical school," he says. "I shadowed a graduate student working on the thyroid with laboratory rats. I started looking at how different types of nutrients affect the thyroid, and I never stopped."
Bianco moved to the United States about 16 years ago. "As a scientist, you have to go where the science is," he says, and he had found himself traveling more and more while he lived in Brazil.
He has served as chief of the Thyroid Section at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, and chief of the Division of Endocrinology at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. Now he serves as Rush Medical College's vice dean for clinical affairs and president of Rush University Medical Group, a multidisciplinary group of more than 500 physicians.
His lab has been federally funded for thyroid studies during his entire career, and he has a distinguished service record with the American Thyroid Association. Bianco chaired and participated in major task-force and program organizing committees before ultimately being elected the association's president for
(Chicago, IL) -- Antonio Bianco, MD, a leading expert on the thyroid gland, came to Rush University Medical Center two years ago to lead the creation of a comprehensive destination thyroid program combining top clinical and basic research with diagnostic, medical and surgical capabilities. (Photo Courtesy Rush University Medical Center)
You could say he hit the ground running. In the past couple of years, Bianco has relocated his laboratory from Miami, published a number of influential studies and co-chaired an American Thyroid Association task force that created new guidelines for the treatment of hypothyroidism.
His work touches many. Roughly 10 million …show more content…
More recently, patients themselves, and their advocates, "put pressure on the medical community to recognize the issue and study new, better treatments."
A tale of two hormones
Bianco has helped produce the knowledge that could lead to such improved treatments. He and his team at Rush have led an international effort that provides a better understanding of what happens when hypothyroid patients are treated with levothyroxine, a synthetic version of the thyroid hormone thyroxine, which also is known as L-T4.
Using hypothyroid rats, the team observed that normalization of thyroid action in the parts of the body where it is especially important -- the brain, the liver and the skeletal muscles -- occurred only when treatment with L-T4 was combined with another thyroid hormone, triiodothyronine, or L-T3. Normal individuals can transform T4 into the more active hormone T3 on their own, but patients treated with levothyroxine alone may not produce enough T3 to function well. Bianco's team concluded that this deficiency is the likely cause of those residual symptoms in some …show more content…
"My interest in thyroid research started in medical school," he says. "I shadowed a graduate student working on the thyroid with laboratory rats. I started looking at how different types of nutrients affect the thyroid, and I never stopped."
Bianco moved to the United States about 16 years ago. "As a scientist, you have to go where the science is," he says, and he had found himself traveling more and more while he lived in Brazil.
He has served as chief of the Thyroid Section at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, and chief of the Division of Endocrinology at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. Now he serves as Rush Medical College's vice dean for clinical affairs and president of Rush University Medical Group, a multidisciplinary group of more than 500 physicians.
His lab has been federally funded for thyroid studies during his entire career, and he has a distinguished service record with the American Thyroid Association. Bianco chaired and participated in major task-force and program organizing committees before ultimately being elected the association's president for