News Releases

Six members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty, including three from the Perelman School of Medicine, have been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. They join more than 250 new members honored in 2021, recognized for their work to “help solve the world’s most urgent challenges, create meaning through art, and contribute to the common good.”

Art appreciation is considered essential to human experience. While taste in art varies depending on the individual, cognitive neuroscience can provide clues about how viewing art affects our neural systems, and evaluate how these systems inform our valuation of art.

When researchers from Penn Medicine found that many patients with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) treated with the investigational chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy targeting the CD22 antigen didn’t respond, they went back to the drawing board to determine why.

Piperlongumine, a chemical compound found in the Indian Long Pepper plant (Piper longum), is known to kill cancerous cells in many tumor types, including brain tumors. Now an international team including researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has illuminated one way in which the piperlongumine works in animal models — and has confirmed its strong activity against glioblastoma, one of the least treatable types of brain cancer.

Renter protection policies that have curbed mass evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic have played a key role in preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in U.S. cities, according to a new study published in Nature Communications.

Researchers at Penn Medicine have identified more genetic mutations that strongly predispose younger, otherwise healthy women to peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM), a rare condition characterized by weakness of the heart muscle that begins sometime during the final month of pregnancy through five months after delivery.

A retrospective study led by researchers from Penn Medicine found that with MitraClip for treatment of secondary mitral regurgitation (MR), a heart disease associated with problems in the left ventricle, there was no negative effect of having a slightly smaller mitral valve opening as long as there was good reduction of the mitral regurgitation.

A new gene therapy for one of the most common forms of congenital blindness was safe and improved patients’ vision, according to initial data from a clinical trial led by researchers at the Scheie Eye Institute in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Those who recovered from COVID-19 had a robust antibody response after a single vaccine shot, but little after the second, according to Penn Immunology studies.