HealthTech Connect is advancing health technology in Arizona by generating collaboration and elevating Phoenix as an emerging hub for biomedical innovation.

A new University of Arizona Health Sciences Workforce Education and Training Program has been designed to help people impacted by opioid and substance use disorders. In the state of Arizona, 31 out of every 1,000 children are affected by the opioid crisis that is ravaging the nation. A new training program, known as PeerWORKS, hopes to change that.

There is widespread agreement about the importance of improving fitness levels for the management of obesity, as advocated by the fat-but-fit approach. However, there are concerns among the scientific and medical community about the degree of emphasis on weight loss and other factors associated with obesity. “It is important to recognize obesity is a multidimensional health issue with multifactorial contributors. Thus, being physically active is not a license to maintain a poor diet or to ignore other contributors to obesity. Other contributors to obesity may include issues with sleep, certain medications, the microbiome, and many more,” said Jennifer Bea, PhD, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Arizona Health Sciences.

Research led by the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy shows how chronic arsenic exposure disrupts the body’s natural antioxidant defenses, which may contribute to the development of diseases such as Type 2 diabetes.

“This winter might mark a different turning point,” said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist and adjunct professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. Instead of the end of the pandemic and the start of an endemic, this winter might introduce us to a different, and unsettling, stage. One where we are no longer in lockdown but learning to treat a deadly virus as a normal part of our lives.

Over a dozen College of Medicine – Phoenix students are going to be taking a very close two-year look at community needs in Tonto Basin. Judith Hunt, MD, site director for the College of Medicine – Phoenix program in Rim Country, has been practicing medicine and training medical students and residents in the rural community of Payson, Arizona, for nearly 22 years. Her classroom is 100 miles north of the downtown Phoenix. “The best part of rural medicine is the care of the community. There is nothing that I would trade for being able to see a baby that I helped care for throughout the years, now married with their own children. It’s just amazing to be a part of that young person’s life all the way through.”

Health professionals say our indoor-dominant lives are costing us, and are prescribing time in contact with natural elements to offset this deficit. “The power of nature is being used widely in the integrative medicine community both through activity, diet, surroundings as well as herbal medicine,” said Ann Marie Chiasson, MD, MPH, CCFP, associate professor of clinical medicine at the College of Medicine – Tucson and fellowship director with the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine.

The third annual Drug Discovery and Development Summit aims to foster private-public collaboration and commercialization of new discoveries against diseases most burdensome to Arizonans.