The surprising results of an animal study are raising hopes for a far simpler treatment regimen for people infected with the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Currently, HIV-infected individuals can live a near normal life span if, every day, they take a complex combination of drugs called antiretroviral therapy (ART). The bad news is if they stop ART, the small amounts of HIV that still lurk in their bodies can bounce back and infect key immune cells, called CD4 T cells, resulting in life-threatening suppression of their immune systems.
If you were going to train an artificial intelligence (AI) system to understand and accurately diagnose medical images, what kind of information do you think would be most effective: lots of general image data, or small amounts of specific data?
This year, members of the National Academy of Medicine elected four NIH Intramural researchers to their ranks, one of the highest honors in science. Learn a bit about each of their research and follow the links to their IRP profiles for more information.
Dr. Hong Xu's team’s expertise in mitochondrial DNA genetics, along with a strong mitochondrial biology research group in the IRP, allowed them to solve the fundamental biological question of how organisms are able to stop the accumulation of mitochondrial DNA mutations from being passed on to future generations.
During the first trimester of pregnancy, many women experience what’s commonly known as “morning sickness.” As distressing as this nausea and vomiting can be, a team of NIH researchers has gathered some of the most convincing evidence to date that such symptoms may actually be a sign of something very positive: a lower risk of miscarriage.
What if we could diagnose risk for Alzheimer’s before symptoms appeared? To address the challenge, in the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the IRP, Dr. Maja Mustapic searches for Alzheimer’s biomarkers using liquid biopsies.
“The goal of my project is to study these earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease by constructing a timeline of changes in brain imaging and cognitive measures related to Alzheimer’s in a group of cognitively normal individuals,” postdoc Murat Bilgel explains.
Given that Alzheimer’s is such a complex disease with many causes and pathways, it is not surprising that the search for effective treatments has proven difficult. So I spoke with Drs. Yujun Hou and Hyundong Song, postdoctoral fellows in the IRP’s Laboratory of Molecular Gerontology at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to learn more about their approaches to meeting the challenge.
Inspired by September’s World Alzheimer's Awareness Month and driven by my interest in cognitive aging and dementia, I'm asking my fellow IRP postdoctoral researchers about which approaches they believe hold promise for advancing our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease.
By testing 6,000 FDA-approved drugs and experimental chemical compounds on Zika-infected human cells in the lab, a team that includes IRP scientists has shown that some existing drugs might be repurposed to fight Zika infection and prevent the virus from harming the developing brain.
This page was last updated on Friday, January 14, 2022
