Health Sciences

Three professors from the University of Pennsylvania have been elected members to the National Academy of Medicine, one of the nation's highest honors in biomedicine. NAM was originally the Institute of Medicine, which was established in 1970 under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences to advise the nation on medical and health issues.

More and more, scientists have realized that DNA is not the only way that a parent can pass on traits to their offspring. Events experienced by a parent over a lifetime can also have an impact.

Different treatments for Crohn's disease in children affects their gut microbes in distinct ways, which has implications for future development of microbial-targeted therapies for these patients, according to a study led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Epilepsy affects more than 65 million people worldwide. One-third of these patients have seizures that are not controlled by medications. In addition, one-third have brain lesions, the hallmark of the disease, which cannot be located by conventional imaging methods.

The National Institutes of Health have named Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, an assistant professor in the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Bioengineering, as a member of its

Being able to understand speech is essential to our evolution as humans. Hearing lets us perceive the same word even when spoken at different speeds or pitches, and also gives us extra sensitivity to unexpected sounds.

Growing insights about a significant, yet poorly understood, part of the genome – the “dark matter of DNA” -- have fundamentally changed the way scientists approach the study of diseases. The human genome contains about 20,000 protein-coding genes – less than 2 percent of the total – but 70 percent of the genome is made into non-coding RNA.

A surprising, paradoxical relationship between a tumor suppressor molecule and an oncogene may be the key to explaining and working around how breast cancer tumor cells become desensitized to a common cancer drug, found researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

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Stress during the first trimester of pregnancy alters the population of microbes living in a mother’s vagina. Those changes are passed on to newborns during birth and are associated with differences in their gut microbiome as well as their brain development, according to a study by Penn researchers.