Health Sciences

Each year, about 2 million people contract leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease transmitted by the bite of a sand fly. The cutaneous form of the disease results in disfiguring skin ulcers that may take months or years to heal and in rare cases can become metastatic, causing major tissue damage.

Teenagers who self-report feeling drowsy mid-afternoon also tend to exhibit more anti-social behavior such as lying, cheating, stealing and fighting.

Midwives have been around since Moses. In the Book of Exodus, it was written that the pharaoh of Egypt, terrified of the multiplying and flourishing Israelis, ordered the murder of all newborn Hebrew sons, “but the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive.”

If you’ve ever wondered how a vaccine given decades ago can still protect against infection, you have your plasma cells to thank. Plasma cells are long-lived B cells that reside in the bone marrow and churn out antibodies against previously encountered vaccines or pathogens.

A weapon, whether a body part such as hands, fists and feet or an external instrument like a gun, often accompanies intimate-partner violence. Susan B.

Casting one of the largest genomic nets to date for the rare tumors of the autonomic nervous system known as pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma (PCC/PGL) captured several new mutations driving the disease that could serve as potential drug targets, researchers from Penn Medicine and other institutions reported in 

Penn Medicine’s Orphan Disease Center (ODC) announces a new partnership with the Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics or FAST to study gene therapy approaches to treat Angelman syndrome (AS).

People with hemophilia require regular infusions of clotting factor to prevent them from experiencing uncontrolled bleeding. But a significant fraction develop antibodies against the clotting factor, essentially experiencing an allergic reaction to the very treatment that can prolong their lives.

Critically ill infants and children do not gain extra benefit from lower blood-sugar levels, compared to higher levels within the usual care range, according to research from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania

A new therapeutic agent tested in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis (MS) produced anti-inflammatory activity and prevented loss of cells in the optic nerve, according to a new study by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, with Pittsburgh-based Noveome Biotherapeutics.