Perelman School of Medicine

PHILADELPHIA – Dorothy Roberts will deliver the keynote speech on “The Racial Geography of Child Welfare” at the Field Center for Children’s Policy, Practice & Research Winter 2012 Community Symposium at the University of Pennsylvan

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 — Several fatal brain disorders, including Parkinson's disease, are connected by the misfolding of specific proteins into disordered clumps and stable, insoluble fibrils called amyloid. Amyloid fibrils are hard to break up due to their stable, ordered structure. For example, a-synuclein forms amyloid fibrils that accumulate in Lewy Bodies in Parkinson's disease.

PHILADELPHIA — Just north of Philadelphia, the communities of West and South Ambler are working to recover from the ramifications of their town’s long-closed asbestos factory.

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.

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 — As researchers work on reconfiguring cells to take on new regenerative properties, a new review from Penn Medicine plastic surgeons sheds additional light on the potential power of adipose-derived stem cells - or adult stem cells harvested from fatty tissue - in reconstructive and regenerative medicine.