Curated News: Grant Funded News

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Van Andel Research Institute (VARI), in collaboration with Cedars-Sinai, has received a $2.5 million, five-year grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, that will fuel efforts by investigators to uncover the underpinnings of cancer, ultimately helping scientists develop better diagnostic and treatment strategies for a class of diseases that claim more than eight million lives each year worldwide.

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When microbes inside the digestive system don’t get the natural fiber that they rely on for food, they begin to munch on the natural layer of mucus that lines the gut, eroding it to the point where dangerous invading bacteria can infect the colon wall, new research in mice shows.

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As part of a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, Indiana University has received over $670,000 to establish "HomeSHARE," the first networked system of smart homes designed to advance research on older adults.

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In new findings that could have an impact the development of therapies for a number of currently untreatable brain disorders such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found for the first time that a specific signaling circuit in the brain is deeply involved in motor activity.

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A new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) describes an unexpected role for proteins involved with our daily “circadian” clocks in influencing cancer growth.

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Living cells respond to biochemical signals by moving toward those at higher concentration, a process carefully mapped out by biologists over the past several decades. But cells also move in response to mechanical forces, such as bumping up against other objects -- although the details of that action have been poorly understood.

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Wayne State University’s Math Corps recently received a nearly $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop and study the replication of its award-winning mathematics enrichment and mentoring program, which operates during summers and on Saturdays.

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An experimental cancer imaging tool that makes tumors glow brightly during surgery has shown promise again in a new Penn Medicine clinical study, this time in patients with brain cancer. The fluorescent dye technique, originally developed by surgeons at the Penn Center for Precision Surgery to treat lung cancer, illuminated brain tumors in real-time during surgery, helping physicians distinguish between healthy and cancerous tissue

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A new animal model developed at Penn Medicine using tau tangles isolated from the brains of Alzheimer’s patients rather than synthetic tau tangles paints a closer picture of the tau pathology in the AD brain

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In October, we mourned those who died of breast cancer and celebrated all of the women (and men) who have survived. What many of those survivors worry about, though, is that their breast cancer may come back. It has puzzled scientists and health care providers that cancer can suddenly reappear, often with a vengeance, months or years after treatment is over.

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Bacteria in your intestines may play an important role in determining if you will develop blinding wet Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD).

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In 1952 a killer fog covered London for five days, causing breathing problems and killing thousands of residents. The exact cause and nature of the fog has remained mostly unknown for decades, but an international team of scientists believes that the mystery has been solved.

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Biologists demonstrate the workings of a biochemical pathway that helps control glucose in the bloodstream, a development that could potentially lead to treatments for diabetes.

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An Indiana University physicist and neuroscientist who studies how physical movement can be used to detect autism in children and adults has received support from the National Science Foundation. The $750,000 NSF grant to IU scientist Jorge V. José and collaborators will be used to apply analytical methods pioneered at IU and Rutgers University toward diagnosing, and possibly treating, a wider range of learning disabilities.

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A study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), in collaboration with scientists at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), Janssen Vaccines & Prevention B.V., one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson and Gilead Sciences, Inc., has demonstrated that combining an experimental vaccine with an innate immune stimulant may help lead to viral remission in people living with HIV. In animal trials, the combination decreased levels of viral DNA in peripheral blood and lymph nodes, and improved viral suppression and delayed viral rebound following discontinuation of anti-retroviral therapy (ART). The research team’s findings appeared online today in the journal Nature.

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New research from the University of Chicago Medicine shows a program that uses electronic medical records to connect Chicagoans with health resources in their community could be a model for other efforts nationally.

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Researchers at Johns Hopkins report they have laid the foundation to develop novel antibiotics that work against incurable, antibiotic-resistant bacteria like tuberculosis by targeting an enzyme essential to the production and integrity of bacterial cell walls.

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Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have now for the first time identified a sub-region in the brain that works to form a particular kind of memory: fear-associated with a specific environmental cue or “contextual fear memory.”

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EL PASO, Texas — Co-principal investigators Richard McCallum, M.D., and Irene Sarosiek, M.D., have received a five-year, $1.8 million grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). The funds will support basic research and clinical trials on patients living with a digestive disorder named gastroparesis.

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Immunotherapy has revolutionized treatment options in oncology, neurology, and many infectious diseases and now there is fresh hope that the same method could be used to treat or even functionally cure HIV, according to two related studies from Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Libraries are uniquely positioned to address public health needs in underserved populations, according to findings from a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Free Library of Philadelphia in this month’s issue of Health Affairs. The research team then took these findings a step further, developing a pilot program to train library staff into “community health specialists.”

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Researchers at the Texas A&M College of Medicine, the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and the Omni-Net Birth Defects Prevention Program in Ukraine have identified a blood test that may help predict how severely a baby will be affected by alcohol exposure during pregnancy.

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A new study finds that heart surgery patients’ chances of survival depends in part on the overall previous level of teamwork among all the physicians who cared for them across their surgery preparation, operation, hospitalization and recuperation.

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Physicists at PPPL have developed a diagnostic that provides crucial real-time information about the ultrahot plasma swirling within doughnut-shaped fusion machines known as tokamaks.

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The University of Arkansas is helping lead an effort to develop a bioscience network of scientists in the United States and Southeast Asia.

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More than 90 percent of ivory in large seized shipments came from elephants that died less than three years before, according to a new University of Utah study.

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Scientists at Duke Health and Zhejiang Chinese Medical University have developed a strategy to stop the uncontrollable itch caused by urushiol, the oily sap common to poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak and even mango trees. The team found that by blocking an immune system protein in the skin with an antibody, they could halt the processes that tell the brain the skin is itchy.

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For the first time, scientists have prevented urinary tract infections in mice by vaccinating them with tiny molecules that UTI bacteria usually use to grab iron from their host and fuel the growth of bacteria in the bladder.

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A new technique to cheaply and rapidly create sets of DNA fragments that include all possible genetic variants will help scientists distinguish between genetic variants linked to disease and those that are innocuous.

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A multi-institution academic-industrial partnership of researchers led by Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine has developed a new method to broadly assess cell communication networks and identify disease-specific network anomalies.

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Houston Methodist researchers have discovered a set of immune proteins that facilitate long-lasting immunity against malaria. In a study recently published in Immunity (online Oct. 25), researchers reported that elevated production of specific proteins regulating the immune system within 24 hours of infection was required for a resilient and sustained anti-malaria immunity in mice.

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Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine have identified a human antibody that prevents, in pregnant mice, the fetus from infection and the placenta from damage. The antibody also protects adult mice from Zika disease.

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New research may hold a clue to curtailing the feared side effect of cancer patients receiving radiation therapy being at high risk of losing bone density and suffering from broken bones within the radiation field during their lifetimes. Suppressing a bone specific protein via its neutralizing antibody alleviates radiation-induced bone loss in an animal model.

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Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine have identified several new biological markers to measure the progression of the inherited neurodegenerative disorder Huntington’s disease. Their findings, which will be published online November 7 ahead of issue in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, could benefit clinical trials that test new treatments for the disease.

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Researchers achieved an unexpected eye-popping reduction of ovarian cancer during a successful test of targeted nanohydrogel delivery in vivo in mice. Adding cisplatin eliminated or starkly diminished tumors.

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For millennia, philosophers have struggled to define human consciousness. Now, a team of researchers led by neurologists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has pinpointed the regions of the brain that may play a role maintaining it. Their findings, which have already garnered multiple awards from the American Academy of Neurology, were published today in that society’s journal, Neurology.

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Researchers found that rodents that had been exposed to stress had a weakened alcohol-induced dopamine response and voluntarily drank more alcohol compared to controls. The blunted dopamine signaling to ethanol arose due to changes in the circuitry in the ventral tegmental area, the heart of the brain's reward system.

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Zinc is essential for wound healing, for vision, for DNA creation, for our senses of taste and smell, even for sexual health. But despite its importance, scientists have never fully understood the mechanism that moves the mineral through the body – until now. Researchers have, for the first time, created detailed blueprints of the molecular moving vans that ferry this important mineral everywhere it’s needed through the blood.

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Hip fractures are a common and disabling condition that occurs more than 300,000 times each year in the United States in those 65 and older—1.6 million times worldwide. A new study from Penn Medicine, which compared outcome variations in acute and post-acute care facilities, suggests that for older adults hospitalized with hip fracture, the quality of the post-acute care they receive has a greater impact on long-term recovery than the care they received at the hospital. This study was published today online ahead of print in Medical Care, a journal of the American Public Health Association.

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Using prominent, graphic pictures on cigarette packs warning against smoking could avert more than 652,000 deaths, up to 92,000 low birth weight infants, up to 145,000 preterm births, and about 1,000 cases of sudden infant deaths in the U.S. over the next 50 years, say researchers from Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.

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By removing the protein galectin-3 (Gal3), a team of investigators led by University of California School of Medicine researchers were able to reverse diabetic insulin resistance and glucose intolerance in mouse models of obesity and diabetes.

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A new study co-led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) suggests that Ebola virus gained a genetic mutation during the 2013–16 epidemic that appears to have helped it better target human cells.

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Scientists at the Wayne State University School of Medicine’s Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics have shown for the first time the extent by which interactions between environmental exposures and genetic variation across individuals have a significant impact on human traits and diseases like diabetes, heart disease and obesity, strengthening the case for precision medicine initiatives.

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The latest developments in prenatal technology conceived by scientists at the Wayne State University School of Medicine that make it possible to test for genetic disorders a little more than one month into pregnancy were revealed this week in Science Translational Medicine, a journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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An entire class of proteins called transcription factors has largely been ignored by the pharmaceutical industry because it’s difficult to design and screen drugs against them. But a new study from scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute suggests that a key group of transcription factors are in fact ‘druggable,’ including several that could be targeted to treat cancer, metabolic disease, or autoimmune conditions. The paper, published in eLIFE, shows that at least seven bHLH-PAS proteins have pockets where drugs would fit and remain tightly bound.

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NIH-funded scientists have developed a new diagnostic test for cystic fibrosis. The new device provides a cheaper, easier way to detect levels of chloride in sweat, which are elevated in cystic fibrosis patients.

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While schizophrenia is best known for episodes of psychosis – a break with reality during which an individual may experience delusions and hallucinations – it is also marked by chronic neurocognitive deficits, such as problems with memory and attention. A multi-site cognition study led by psychologists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) found that these neurocognitive symptoms are evident prior to the onset of psychosis in a high-risk stage of the disorder called the prodromal phase. The findings suggest that these impairments may serve as early warning signs of schizophrenia, as well as potential targets for intervention that could mitigate the onset of the psychotic disorder and significantly improve cognitive function.

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A research team led by University of Washington biology professor Tom Daniel has teased out how hawkmoths integrate signals from two sensory systems: vision and touch.

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Women experience a notable decline in sexual function approximately 20 months before and one year after their last menstrual period, and that decrease continues, though at a somewhat slower rate, over the following five years, according to a study led by a researcher at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.

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Researchers have developed a chemical compound that detects the Alzheimer’s protein amyloid beta better than current FDA-approved agents. The compound potentially could be used in brain scans to identify the signs of Alzheimer’s early, or to monitor response to treatment.