Karen Kreeger

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.

PHILADELPHIA — The cancer-causing form of the gene Myc alters the metabolism of mitochondria, the cell’s powerhouse, making it dependent on the amino acid glutamine for survival. In fact, 40 percent of all “hard-to-treat” cancers have a mutation in the Myc gene.

PHILADELPHIA — Fat cells store excess energy and signal these levels to the brain.

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 — Six professors from the University of Pennsylvania, representing four schools, have been elected members of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), one of the nation's highest honors in biomedicine.

PHILADELPHIA — The hormone prolactin is produced by the pituitary gland in the brain and then travels via the bloodstream to cells throughout the body, where it exerts multiple reproductive and metabolic effects, most notably on the breast where it is the master regulator of lactation.

PHILADELPHIA — We often hear that “knowledge is power.” But, that isn’t always the case, especially when the knowledge pertains to the health of an unborn child, with murky implications, at best.

Yvonne Paterson, PhD, professor of Microbiology, at the Perelman School of Medicine, and professor and associate dean, at the School of Nursing, has been awarded an almost $5 million renewal by the National Institute for General Medical Sciences for the U

Bioengineered replacements for tendons, ligaments, the meniscus of the knee, and other tissues require re-creation of the exquisite architecture of these tissues in three dimensions. These fibrous, collagen-based tissues located throughout the body have an ordered structure that gives them their robust ability to bear extreme mechanical loading.

PHILADELPHIA — The National Institutes of Health's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) awarded $18.5 million to establish the Personalized NSAID Therapeutics Consortium (PENTACON), an international group of scientists led by Garret A.