School of Veterinary Medicine

Gene therapy holds promise for treating a variety of diseases, including some inherited blinding conditions. But for a gene therapy to be effective, one must know the precise gene responsible for a given individual’s disorder and develop a tailored treatment.

In a historic move, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today approved a gene therapy initially developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) for the treatment of a rare, inherited form of retinal blindness.

Four members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon members of AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society, by their peers.

A new study by University of Pennsylvania veterinary researchers has found that blood samples collected from an intravenous catheter using a special “mixing” technique are as accurate as those collected via venipuncture, in which a needle is used to access the vein directly.

By Erica AndersenCertain mosquitoes don’t get heartworm, and Barbara Biney was keen to find out why.

Cancer of the pancreas is rare, but deadly. Research from Penn Vet may slow its spread.

Cancer of the pancreas is a deadly disease, with a median survival time of less than six months. Only one in 20 people with pancreatic cancer survives five years past the diagnosis. The reason is the cancer’s insidiousness; tumor cells hide deep inside the body, betraying no symptoms until late in the disease, when the cancer has almost invariably spread to other organs.

Autoimmune diseases tend to strike women more than men and having multiple X chromosomes could be the main reason why. While a process called X chromosome inactivation serves to balance out gene dosage between males and females, some genes on the “inactive X” chromosome in immune cells can sometimes escape this process, giving women an extra dose of immunity-related gene expression.

Infections caused by viruses, such as respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, measles, parainfluenza and Ebola, are typically considered acute. These viruses cause disease quickly and live within a host for a limited time. But in some cases the effects of the infection, and presence of the virus itself, can persist.

The immune system is constantly performing surveillance to detect foreign organisms that might do harm. But pathogens, for their part, have evolved a number of strategies to evade this detection, such as secreting proteins that hinder a host’s ability to mount an immune response.