News Releases

Specially engineered immune cells called CAR T cells have proven themselves to be a powerful weapon against blood cancers, but against solid tumors they are much less effective, due in part to a process called T-cell exhaustion. Now researchers at Penn Medicine have illuminated key molecular details of this exhaustion process that point to a specific strategy for overcoming it.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today approved an imaging drug known as Cytalux (pafolacianine), which is attracted to ovarian cancer tissue and illuminates it when exposed to fluorescent light, allowing surgeons to more easily find and more precisely remove the cancer.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) and Independence Blue Cross (Independence) will continue their transformative work together to improve health care quality and delivery through a new long-term renewal of their contract.

About 12 percent of patients who receive implantable cardiac devices such as a pacemaker or defibrillator and fill an opioid prescription after surgery will consistently use the pain medication in the months afterward.

Thanks to a generous $10 million gift from Stewart and Judy Colton, the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania will continue to be on the leading edge of autoimmune research and care with the launch of the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Penn.

Two genetic risk variants that are carried by nearly 40 percent of Black individuals may exacerbate the severity of both sepsis and COVID-19, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine have found.

A life was saved twice a week by an automated text messaging system during the fraught early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and, overall, the patients who enrolled in that system were 68 percent less likely to die than those not using it.

Good news for pregnant coffee lovers: Consuming a low amount of caffeine during pregnancy could help to reduce gestational diabetes risk, according to researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the National Institutes of Health. The findings were published Monday in JAMA Network Open.

Cancer patients who are ineligible for clinical trials receive immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) at greater rates than patients who are trial eligible despite no survival benefit, according to a new study by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.