Advancing Medical Research

Designing transformational medicines for patients requires them to be efficacious and safe.  Sometimes, drug molecules have the desired effect in the organ of treatment and undesired effects in other organs, meaning one way to achieve a safer medicine is through directing the drug molecule to the place it is needed and minimizing exposure in the rest of the body. When you take a medicine, how does it…

After earning her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2010, Megan Kaneda was looking for a lab to do post-doc research. Her graduate studies focused primarily on nanoparticle drug delivery. But after reading a paper on the recruitment of immune cells into tumors by Judith Varner…

Soldiers, firefighters and police officers likely come to mind when you think of professions that require a good amount of courage.

But Iona Munjal, a physician and pediatric infectious disease specialist who helps design and oversee vaccine clinical trials for Pfizer, argues scientists should be counted among this group, too. “You have to be brave in research,” she says. “When you’re out there pushing the…

Shoh Asano’s grandfather first taught him how to use a microscope as a child. He’d pull the antique instrument from its wooden box to examine leaves and other specimens gathered outdoors. “I’ve always been interested in looking deeper into the natural world to visualize life directly as it’s happening,” says Asano, who grew up in Germany.

Three decades later, Asano is among a group of researchers recognized…

You could say the instinct to protect a baby starts when it’s in the womb.

Starting in the second trimester of pregnancy, a pregnant woman passes important disease-fighting molecules called immunoglobulin G, or IgG, through the placenta to her fetus. As the pregnancy continues, this sharing of immune protection gets further ramped up. The “stockpile” of protection is critical for helping newborns…

Like a skipping record, our genetic code has thousands of regions known as microsatellites where short combinations of base pairs — adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T) — repeat. For the most part, these repetitions are harmless. But in recent years, scientists have made…

Cells have a variety of ways of communicating with one another, cytokines and neurotransmitters being two such methods.

But a growing body of science now points to another key mechanism for cells to send signals over long distances. All cells produce extracellular vesicles (EVs), tiny membrane-…