graft-vs-host

Understanding the Foundations of Immune Defenses

IRP’s Mary Carrington Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for Insights Into Immune System Variations

Dr. Mary Carrington

Some people never seem to get sick, while others catch a new bug of some sort every other week. Humans are immensely variable both in their capacity to shrug off illness and in the ways their bodies respond to medical treatments. IRP senior investigator Mary Carrington, Ph.D., has spent her entire career exploring the biological roots of these differences, and the discoveries she has made earned her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences earlier this year.

Older Cells Make for Riskier Transplants

Examining Molecular Markers of Aging Could Improve Patient Outcomes

old clock

In 2003, 92-year-old Fauja Singh ran the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in slightly under six hours, a feat that many people decades younger could not accomplish. Such examples reveal the problems with making assumptions about a person’s health based solely on age. Similarly, new IRP research suggests that assessing cellular characteristics associated with aging, rather than a person’s chronologic age in years, could improve outcomes for the more than 20,000 patients who receive bone marrow or blood stem cell transplants each year.