Health Sciences

Gene therapy for Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), an inherited disorder that causes loss of night- and day-vision starting in childhood, improved patients’ eyesight within weeks of treatment in a clinical trial of 15 children and adults at the Scheie Eye Institute at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine and the Penn Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) have been awarded $7.5 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health to initiate a multi-project HIV study investigating a new gene therapy approach to render immune cells of HIV positive patients resistant to the virus.

By Madeleine Stone  @themadstone        (This is the fifth and last in a series of features introducing the inaugural Penn President’s Engagement Prize winners.)  

The National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has renewed its funding to the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET), at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, for the next five years.

For more than 100 years, exposing students to basic and clinical research has been an essential component of a medical school education in the United States. However, today, new models of medical education in which research plays a minimal role are likely to create a two-tiered system of education, decrease the physician-scientist pipeline and diminish the application of scientific advances to patient care.

Like a beloved pair of jeans, human DNA accumulates damage over time, and older people’s bodies can’t repair it as well. Many scientists believe a build up of damage can cause cells to enter an irreversible dormant state known as senescence.

The brain is a privileged organ in the body. So vital to life, the brain is protected from alterations elsewhere in the body by a highly regulated gateway known as the blood-brain barrier, which allows only selected molecules to pass through.

In the first major study to examine the use of a computer-assisted, photo-driven differential diagnosis generator for skin conditions, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found physicians routinely used the tool, without an increase in calling for inpatient dermato

Two researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have been elected as new members to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research.

President Barack Obama launched the "Precision Medicine Initiative” this past winter during the State of the Union address, and politicians on both sides of the aisle applauded the announcement. Broadly, precision medicine is meant to help diagnose individuals more accurately and better tailor treatment according to their physiology.