News Releases

In an effort to empower the men of Philadelphia and the surrounding region, the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania is offering free prostate cancer screening, Saturday, March 1st, from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the First District Plaza, next to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, 3801 Market Street, Philadelphia. Screenings consist of a physical exam and a prostate-specific antigen - or PSA - blood test, provided free of charge.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered that introns, or junk DNA to some, associated with RNA are an important molecular guide to making nerve-cell electrical channels. Senior author James Eberwine, PhD, Elmer Bobst Professor of Pharmacology, and lead authors Kevin Miyashiro, and Thomas J. Bell, PhD, both in Eberwine’s lab, report their findings in this week's early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Minority and low-income patients are less likely than those who are white or more well off to agree to post-surgery epidural pain relief, according to new research from physicians at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

The US Senate Special Committee on Aging held a hearing in Washington, DC, this morning on older Americans and the significant barriers they face in exercising their right to vote.

Emerging subtypes of influenza A virus hold the potential to initiate a world-wide epidemic in the next few years, according to World Health Organization officials. However, almost all type A influenza viral strains have become resistant to amantadine and rimantadine, two drugs that make up one of only two classes used to treat the flu.

The region's only cyclotron will complete its 3,700 mile transatlantic journey from Belgium by arriving with a police escort from the Port Authority of Philadelphia to the Roberts Proton Therapy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

The entire January 2008 issue of the Journal NeuroSignals is devoted to describing neurodegenerative disease research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Health System

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine discovered that proteins carrying chemical cargo in nerve cells react differently when exposed to the tau protein, which plays an important role in Alzheimer's disease.

"Anyone can save a life." That's the message from physicians at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Benjamin S. Abella, MD, MPhil, Clinical Research Director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science and Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, says bystanders can play a critical role in saving lives by performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation during the 150,000 cardiac arrests that occur each year outside of hospitals in the United States.

University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers have answered long-running questions about the way that anesthetics act on the body, by showing that the cellular pathway for emerging from anesthesia is different from the one that drugs take to put patients to sleep during operations. The findings are published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.