Advancing Medical Research

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-…

Proteins are the stuff of life. They comprise the hormones, enzymes and many other molecules that are essential to our body’s functioning. But sometimes these loyal workhorses can go rogue, leading to cancer, autoimmune diseases and a variety of neurological conditions.

Over the past two decades, gene therapy has been incubating at a very small scale in academic research labs. Like a chef fine-tuning a new recipe, scientists have been working in single batches that would only be sufficient to treat one or two patients at a time. 

But now, as these …

In 1987, scientists first uncovered the gene that is the target of mutations that causes Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a lethal muscle-wasting disease that affects about one in every 5,000 newborn boys. While the discovery of the dystrophin gene sparked hope that scientists could someday replace the mutated gene with a…

Clinical trials continue to be the gold standard for studying the safety and efficacy of a new medicine. They are designed to take place in very controlled environments, in a well-defined population, to understand the effects of a medicine on the specific patients; however, these experimental conditions don’t always…