A team led by Henry Daniell of the School of Dental Medicine used modified lettuce plants to produce a chewing gum that can trap the COVID-19 virus, preventing it from infecting cells in the mouth.
A team led by Drew Weissman of the Perelman School of Medicine is working to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine. "There have been three epidemics with coronavirus in the past 20 years. The problem with chasing variants is by the time you've made a vaccine the variant is gone and a new variant appears," he said.
Bill Ludwig, left, was the first patient to receive CAR T cells as part of clinical trials at Abramson Cancer Center. Carl June, right, has played a pioneering roll in the therapeutic use of CAR T cells. (Image: Penn Medicine)
James Wilson of the Perelman School of Medicine has signed a deal on behalf of his gene therapy lab to license its manufacturing process to the Center for Breakthrough Medicines in King of Prussia.
The Perelman School of Medicine’s Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó’s contributions to the development of mRNA vaccine technology were highlighted.
Janos L. Tanyi of the Perelman School of Medicine spoke about a large-scale trial of Cytalux, which makes cancer cells glow during surgery, being conducted at the Abramson Cancer Center. “Those patients who have all the visible cancerous lesions removed have the best survival rates,” he said.
Homepage image: No one type of medical imaging can capture every relevant piece of information about a patient at once. Digital twins, or multiscale, physics-based simulations of biological systems, would allow clinicians to accurately infer more vital statistics from fewer data points.
Today, Weissman and colleagues are working to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine capable of protecting the population against SARS, MERS, SARS-CoV-2, and more. At BioNTech, Karikó is overseeing parallel but distinct research on a range of diseases in which patients receive mRNA encoding therapeutic proteins. (Image: Peggy Peterson)
