Health Sciences

New Year’s weight loss resolutions are in full swing, but despite all the hype about the latest wearable tracking devices, there’s little evidence that this technology alone can change behavior and improve health for those that need it most, according to a new online-first viewpoint piece in JAMA.

“In today’s world, the stereotype of the nerdy scientist, by himself, looking at a microscope, is no longer accurate and no longer useful,” says Gabriel Innes, a third-year student in the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

Adding radiation treatment to hormone therapy saves more lives among older men with locally advanced prostate therapy than hormone therapy alone, according to a new study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology this week from Penn Medicine researchers.

Many patients with type 2 diabetes in the United States may be discouraged from taking metformin—a proven, oral diabetes medicine—because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inappropriately labels the drug unsafe for some patients also suffering from kidney problems, researchers from Penn Medicine and Weill Cornel Medical College report this week in a research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

When the human genome was first sequenced, experts predicted they would find about 100,000 genes. The actual number has turned out to be closer to 20,000, just a few thousand more than fruit flies have. The question logically arose: how can a relatively small number of genes lay the blueprint for the complexities of the human body?

The Community Engagement and Research (CEAR) Core of the UPenn CTSA is pleased to announce the first awards for the Community Scholars-in-Residence Program. 

Interdisciplinary research at the University of Pennsylvania is showing how cells interact over long distances within fibrous tissue, like that associated with many diseases of the liver, lungs and other organs.

At the turn of the millennium, the cost to sequence a single human genome exceeded $50 million, and the process took a decade to complete. Microbes have genomes, too, and the first reference genome for a malaria parasite was completed in 2002 at a cost of roughly $15 million. But today researchers can sequence a genome in a single afternoon for just a few thousand dollars.

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) patients who have developed low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) as a complication of insulin treatments over time are able to regain normal internal recognition of the condition after receiving pancreatic islet cell transplantation, according to a new study led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at th

Jason H. Moore, PhD, has been named the first permanent director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI), at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. His appointment starts March 1, 2015.