Health Sciences

Tens of millions of people around the world have abnormal, leak-prone sproutings of blood vessels in the brain called cerebral cavernous malformations (CCMs). These abnormal growths can lead to seizures, strokes, hemorrhages, and other serious conditions, yet their precise molecular cause has never been determined. Now, cardiovascular scientists at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have studied this pathway in heart development to discover an important set of molecular signals, triggered by CCM-linked gene defects, that potentially could be targeted to treat the disorder.

Workhorse molecules called heat-shock proteins contribute to refolding proteins that were once misfolded and clumped, causing such disorders as Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and Alzheimer's disease. James Shorter, PhD, an associate professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been developing ways to "reprogram" one such protein – a yeast protein called Hsp104 -- to improve its therapeutic properties.

Twitter has broken news stories, launched and ended careers, started social movements and toppled governments, all by being an easy, direct and immediate way for people to share what’s on their minds.

The increase in Medicaid reimbursement for primary care providers, a key provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), was associated with a 7.7 percentage points increase in new patient appointment availability without longer wait times, according to results of a new 10-state study — co-authored by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Urban Institute, and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — published online-first by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Penn Medicine researchers, in a continuation of their groundbreaking work to better understand how anesthesia works in the body, have found the first new class of novel anesthetics since the 1970s. Their findings, published in February issue of Anesthesiology, detail the processes through which the group uncovered these compounds.

As the United States population has doubled since 1955, the number of inpatient psychiatric beds in the United States has been cut by nearly 95 percent to just 45,000, a wholly inadequate equation when considering that there are currently 10 million U.S. residents with serious mental illness.

To survive and fulfill their biological functions, cells need to take in material from their environment. In this process, proteins within the cell pull inward on its membrane, forming a pit that eventually encapsulates the material in a bubble called a vesicle.

One of the keys to Songtao Shi’s productive career in research came from a seemingly humble item: his daughter’s first baby tooth.

When retrievable inferior vena cava (IVC) filters were approved for use in the United States in 2003 to prevent pulmonary embolism among patients unable to receive the standard blood thinner treatment, many experts anticipated most of them would be removed when no longer needed and IVC filter complications would decrease.