IRP Study Suggests Immune System Changes Hinder Healing in Adults
With all the hijinks that young children and teenagers get up to, it’s a good thing they heal so quickly from a broken leg or arm. Unfortunately, this ability begins to diminish within a few years of graduating high school. Now, new IRP research is showing that changes in the immune system underlie the difficulties older individuals have with repairing their bones.
IRP Program Enhances Research Capabilities of Talented Doctors
Just like many important scientific breakthroughs require the expertise of scientists specializing in multiple disciplines, developing new medical treatments requires both laboratory-based investigations into the nitty-gritty details of biology and clinical studies involving patients. In recognition of that fact, the IRP’s Lasker Clinical Research Scholars Program provides incredible support and resources to researchers who conduct both types of studies.
Over the past year, two more doctors have joined the prestigious pantheon of Lasker Scholars at NIH: one pursuing treatments for patients struck by potentially lethal infections and the other aiming to head off dangerous skin cancers before they become life-threatening. Read on to learn about the important research they are pursuing with the winds of the Lasker Program at their backs.
IRP Study Shows Potential of Machine Learning Algorithms in Personalized Medicine
Despite the potential drawbacks of time travel demonstrated in countless sci-fi movies, most people wouldn’t mind some advice from their future self. What they might not think about is how useful their doppelganger’s knowledge of the future could be to their doctor. IRP researchers hope an AI-powered computer model they’ve developed could provide those kinds of predictive medical insights for people recovering after donating a portion of their liver to someone in need of a transplant.
IRP Research Demonstrates the Perks of Overlooked Immune System Molecules
Countless Hollywood romances rely on the trope that, every so often, it turns out the thing you’ve been searching for has been right in front of you all along. Thanks to new IRP research, a molecule long-studied for its role in directing immune cells’ movement around the body is being seen in a new light as a potentially important player in medicine’s life-or-death struggle against antibiotic-resistant infections.
Annual Competition Tests Researchers’ Communication Skills
Everyone recognizes that science can’t just stay in the lab — it can only do good if it finds applications out in the wider world, whether that’s in the form of new technologies, new medical treatments, or a change in public policy. However, the importance of getting scientists out of the lab to engage with the public has been emphasized much less until recently. One of NIH’s approaches to solving that problem is its annual Three-Minute Talks (TmT) competition, which encourages NIH postbaccalaureate fellows, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows to figure out a way to succinctly explain their research to people who may know nothing at all about what they do.
Every physician spends years in school getting trained to provide healthcare to patients with a wide array of health conditions, but not all of them know much about how the tools they use and the treatments they offer make it from the lab to the clinic. For the past year, 42 medical students took time off from their studies to fill in that gap first-hand by working in IRP labs as part of NIH’s Medical Research Scholars Program. As their stints at NIH wind down, each of them will return to medical school with valuable scientific training that will surely enhance their ability to help patients in the future. Keep reading to see how the MRSP has given a leg up to three of these bright future doctors.
Study Points to Potential Way to Improve Physical Therapy Interventions for Movement Disorder
It’s easy to take everyday activities like walking and typing for granted, but for people with cerebral palsy, any movement can be a struggle. Intensive physical therapy, starting at a young age, has long helped those individuals move more easily. Now, recent IRP research could provide a way to track how those and other treatments affect communication within the brain during movement, providing a tool that could help researchers more quickly evaluate which treatments work and which don’t.
IRP Research Suggests Older Adults May Benefit From Severely Limiting Alcohol Consumption
It seems like every news report touting the health benefits of a daily glass of wine is soon followed by another that claims consuming any amount of alcohol harms health. While the jury is still out on this issue for younger individuals, a recent IRP study suggests that alcohol consumption may accelerate the typical age-related erosion of the cardiovascular system.
Many scientific studies have established the myriad ways that aging and alcohol independently diminish the capacity of the heart and blood vessels to effectively move blood — and the vital oxygen and nutrients it carries — around the body. However, the effects of those two forces in combination remains an outstanding question with potentially significant implications for health and public policy.
NIH AI Symposium Highlights IRP Efforts to Harness Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is permeating seemingly every aspect of society — it’s even the villain in the latest Mission Impossible movie. Biomedical research is no exception to this trend, as showcased at this year’s NIH AI Symposium. The day-long event on May 16 showcased the many ways IRP researchers are harnessing the ever-growing learning capabilities of computers to explore how our bodies work and improve our health.
In between fascinating lectures by IRP senior investigators and visiting scholars from Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a handful of IRP postbaccalaureate fellows, graduate students, and postdocs also gave short talks about how their labs are utilizing AI and machine learning in their research. Read on to learn about how four of these efforts could one day help speed up therapeutic development for cancer and rare diseases, reveal the relationship between brain activity and behavior, and identify patients with sickle cell disease who would benefit the most from high-risk, intensive treatments.
IRP’s Dr. Adam Sowalsky Looks to Tumors’ Origins to Predict Outcomes
"Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been." — hockey great Wayne Gretzky
Imagine two men, both diagnosed with prostate cancer. For one, the disease will remain a quiet shadow, never seriously threatening his life. For the other, it will become an aggressive adversary, resisting treatments and altering his future. This June, as Men's Health Month brings such realities into focus, a critical question echoes in clinics and labs: how can we identify early on which cancer will turn dangerous, and how can we use that knowledge to change a patient's outcome for the better?
IRP senior investigator Adam G. Sowalsky, Ph.D., believes the answer lies not just in how cancer adapts during treatment, but in the evolutionary traits it already possesses when it first emerges.
This page was last updated on Friday, January 14, 2022
