News Releases

When patients’ hip or knee replacements were delayed in response to COVID-19 surges, chatbots delivering encouraging messages not only benefited the mental health of patients – they also experienced boosts to their physical health, too.

Impaired and inefficient muscle tissue regeneration appears to open the door for unwanted bone to form in areas where new muscle should occur after injuries. This discovery opens up the possibility of pursuing new therapies for fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva and was published in NPJ Regenerative Medicine.

Researchers at Penn Medicine have discovered a new, more effective method of preventing the body’s own proteins from treating nanomedicines like foreign invaders, by covering the nanoparticles with a coating to suppress the immune response that dampens the therapy’s effectiveness.

Preliminary findings from an ongoing first-in-human clinical trial examining the safety and feasibility of chimeric antigen receptor macrophage (CAR-M) has helped to establish the viability of this innovative immunotherapy for solid cancer tumors.

An experimental immunotherapy can temporarily reprogram patients’ immune cells to attack a specific target via only a single injection of messenger RNA (mRNA), according to a new study from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine.

With an $8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the next stage of the THINKER project — called THINKER-NEXT — will aim to provide a comprehensive view of the risks and benefits of transplanting HCV-infected kidneys into non-infected patients.

“While one in three adults in the United States have prediabetes, we lack a way to identify in real-time if a patient is progressing toward or moving away from developing diabetes,” said lead author Mitesh Patel, MD, MBA, an associate professor of Medicine at Penn and vice president for Clinical Transformation at Ascension.

“We want to utilize the existing function of neutrophils that identifies and eliminates invaders to inform how to design a ‘Trojan horse’ nanoparticle that overactive neutrophils will intake and deliver treatment to alleviate ALI and ARDS,” said study lead author Jacob Myerson, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics.