Health Sciences

PHILADELPHIA — L. Scott Levin, MD, FACS, was recently elected to the American College of Surgeons’ (ACS) Board of Regents.

PHILADELPHIA — Periodontitis, a form of chronic gum disease that affects nearly half of the U.S. adult population, results when the bacterial community in the mouth becomes unbalanced, leading to inflammation and eventually bone loss. In its most severe form, which affects 8.5 percent of U.S. adults, periodontitis can impact systemic health.

PHILADELPHIA — Transplant surgeons at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have successfully used a new technique that repairs damaged donated lungs that would have been unusable, allowing for successful transplantation of the reconditioned lungs into a patient.

PHILADELPHIA — Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the program, Penn Medicine physicians have completed their 1000th lifesaving heart transplant at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP). The 1000th patient was transplanted on Sunday, December 2, 2012 and is doing well.

PHILADELPHIA – New research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia VA Medical Center indicates that the implementation of protected sleep periods for residents who are assigned to overnight shifts in a hospital represent a viable tool in preventing fatigue and alleviating the physiological and behavior

PHILADELPHIA – Five faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Two are from Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, two are from its School of Arts and Sciences

PHILADELPHIA — H. Lee Sweeney, Ph.D., the William Maul Measey Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, has been named the inaugural director of Penn’s Center for Orphan Disease Research and Therapy.

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.