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Genetics

Why we have hair here, but not there
one-half of a child's face with a fake mustache

Why we have hair here, but not there

A new study answers a fundamental question in human evolution about how and where hair grows on the body, and reveals the existence of a naturally-occurring inhibitor to hair growth.

Penn Today Staff

Multidisciplinary team to develop stem cell-based approaches to restore vision
3-d-image-of-eyeball-anatomy

Multidisciplinary team to develop stem cell-based approaches to restore vision

Gene therapies have had success in treating blindness but can’t save areas of the retina where cells have already died. In a new effort, School of Veterinary Medicine scientists John Wolfe and William Beltran will attempt to develop a stem-cell-based approach that restores vision.

Katherine Unger Baillie

A study in prenatal gene editing with DNA in utero
dna

A study in prenatal gene editing with DNA in utero

A Penn Medicine and CHOP team shows the first example of using base-editing tools to treat a disease in animal models in utero.

Penn Today Staff

The next frontier of precision medicine: Parkinson’s disease
brain

The next frontier of precision medicine: Parkinson’s disease

The Molecular Integration in Neurological Diagnosis (MIND) Initiative is working to understand the nature of Parkinson's disease with molecular-level accuracy, so doctors can treat the root cause.

Penn Today Staff

Knockdown and replace: A gene therapy twofer to treat blindness
Beltran rhodopsin

Maps reflecting the thickness of a key layer of the retina show how a gene therapy treatment (right panels) protected against severe retinal degeneration.

Knockdown and replace: A gene therapy twofer to treat blindness

More than 150 different mutations in the light-sensing molecule rhodopsin can cause retinitis pigmentosa, characterized by a progressive loss of night and peripheral vision, and a team of researchers have developed a treatment for the condition. Successful results in dogs set the stage for testing in humans.