Experimental Treatment Curbs Autoimmune Eye Disease in Mice
By Brandon Levy
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Our cells produce a wide range of chemicals necessary for good health, but when they cannot manufacture enough of these substances, scientists can use cells cultivated in their labs to pick up the slack. In a promising example of this approach, IRP scientists stimulated lab-grown immune cells to produce tiny bundles of an important anti-inflammatory molecule and used those packages to successfully treat a potentially blinding autoimmune disease in mice.
Annual Event Shares Research by IRP’s Summer Interns
By Brandon Levy
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
NIH’s Natcher Conference Center was packed once again last Thursday for the annual Summer Poster Day. This year, more than 1,200 college and high school students spent their summer performing research in an IRP lab through the NIH’s Summer Internship Program.
I navigated through the more than 900 posters presented this year to get a taste of the impressive work done by these young men and women in less than three months. If they can make these kinds of discoveries in just one summer, imagine what they might one day accomplish as full-time scientists and clinicians!
Drug Candidate Calms Overzealous Immune Response in the Eye
By Brandon Levy
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Our immune cells don’t like strangers and attack many organisms and substances that they have never seen before, including harmless ones. In autoimmune diseases, this reaction gets out of hand and our own cells are caught in the crossfire. IRP scientists have found that a new therapeutic compound can curb this sort of autoimmune carnage in the eye.
By Brandon Levy
Thursday, February 28, 2019
The NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, Maryland, may have the look and feel of a university campus, but the world-renowned research institution does not grant credentials like an M.D. or Ph.D. Instead, the Graduate Partnerships Program offers graduate students from schools around the world the opportunity to complete research for their Ph.D. dissertations in IRP labs while pursuing advanced degrees from their ‘host’ institutions.
By Mohor Sengupta
Monday, July 23, 2018
I knew very little about neuroscience before beginning my graduate studies, but the topic of neurodegeneration looked very interesting. Having applied to several labs, I landed a Ph.D. student position in a neuroscience lab at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, a government research institute in India, that would propel me on my way to the NIH IRP. In the first year of my Ph.D. program, I learned several things about the central nervous system (CNS), but what intrigued me the most was its lack of ability to regenerate after injury.
By Michael Gottesman
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Last month we lost a remarkable investigator, Robert Nussenblatt, M.D., M.P.H., chief of the Laboratory of Immunology at the National Eye Institute (NEI). Bob was a world-renowned expert in uveitis, an inflammatory eye disease and a leading cause of blindness in younger people. He was instrumental in establishing the pathology of and treatment for uveitis. Bob was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer just a few months ago. He remained characteristically optimistic even as his prognosis rapidly grew worse. He died on April 17, 2016, at age 67 with his family by his side. The NIH staff just devastated to hear the news of his death, because so few knew Bob was ill.
