Health Sciences

Whether it is playing a piano sonata or acing a tennis serve, the brain needs to orchestrate precise, coordinated control over the body’s many muscles. Moreover, there needs to be some kind of feedback from the senses should any of those movements go wrong.

In the fight against a nationwide prescription opioid abuse epidemic, Penn Medicine researchers are using storytelling to help doctors recall important, potentially lifesaving national guidelines on how to prescribe these medications. 

A University of Pennsylvania research team has defined a possible new way to fight a disease that is currently treatable only with the most expensive drug available for sale in the United States.

Adult stem cells and cancer cells have many things in common, including an ability to migrate through tiny gaps in tissue. Both types of cells also experience a trade-off when it comes to this ability; having a flexible nucleus makes migration easier but is worse at protecting the nucleus’ DNA compared to a stiffer nucleus.

Half of melanoma patients with the BRAF mutation have a positive response to treatment with BRAF inhibitors, but nearly all of those patients develop resistance to the drugs and experience disease progression.

An international team of scientists has traced the origin of Plasmodium vivax, the second-worst malaria parasite of humans, to Africa, according to a study published this week in Nature Communications.

Steven Joffe, MD, MPH, and Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD, have been named Vice Chair of Medical Ethics and Vice Chair of Health Policy, respectively, in the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Pulling an “all-nighter” before a big test is practically a rite of passage in college. Usually, it’s no problem: You stay up all night, take the test, and then crash, rapidly catching up on lost sleep. But as we age, sleep patterns change, and our ability to recoup lost sleep diminishes.

Each year trauma injuries account for 42 million emergency department visits and 2 million hospital admissions across the nation. Timely care in a designated trauma center has been shown to reduce mortality by up to 25 percent. However many patients are not transferred to trauma centers if they are first seen in a non-trauma center facility.

A newly developed, more specific approach to classifying tumors by molecular type can help cancer researchers to determine tumor characteristics and guide treatment strategies.