Karen Kreeger

PHILADELPHIA — Epigenetics - the science of how gene activity can be altered without changes in the genetic code - plays a critical role in every aspect of life, from the differentiation of stem cells to the regulation of metabolism and growth of cancer cells.

PHILADELPHIA — Calpain, a calcium-regulated enzyme, is essential to a host of cellular processes, but can cause severe problems in its overactivated state. It has been implicated as a factor in muscular dystrophy, AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, and  cancer.  As such, finding and exploiting calpain inhibitors is an important area of research. 

PHILADELPHIA — One of the world's most devastating diseases is malaria, responsible for at least a million deaths annually, despite global efforts to combat it.  Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, working with collaborators from Drexel University, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and Johns Hop

PHILADELPHIA — The protein kinase Akt is a key regulator of cell growth, proliferation, metabolism, survival, and death.

PHILADELPHIA – Five faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Two are from Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, two are from its School of Arts and Sciences

PHILADELPHIA — H. Lee Sweeney, Ph.D., the William Maul Measey Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, has been named the inaugural director of Penn’s Center for Orphan Disease Research and Therapy.

PHILADELPHIA — Most healthy cells rely on a complicated process to produce the fuel ATP. Knowing how ATP is produced by the cell’s energy storehouse – the mitochondria -- is important for understanding a cell’s normal state, as well as what happens when things go wrong, for example in cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, and many rare disorders of the mitochondria.

PHILADELPHIA — A pathway called the “Unfolded Protein Response,” or UPR, a cell’s way of responding to unfolded and misfolded proteins, helps tumor cells escape programmed cell death during the development of lymphoma.

PHILADELPHIA — Fifty years ago, UK researcher John Gurdon demonstrated that genetic material from non-reproductive cells could be reprogrammed into an embryonic state when transferred into an egg.

PHILADELPHIA — Understanding how any disease progresses is one of the first and most important steps towards finding treatments to stop it. This has been the case for such brain-degenerating conditions as Alzheimer's disease.