News Releases

New findings from a team led by University of Pennsylvania vision scientists, who have in the past taken gene therapies into clinical trials, are proving successful, this time treating a form of retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that progressively robs people of their night and peripheral vision before blindness develops.

Reed Pyeritz, MD, PhD, the William Smilow Professor in the Division of Translational Medicine and Human Genetics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been given the 2018 Hero with Heart Award by the Marfan Foundation.

Jamie Shuda, EdD, a prominent K-12 educator and researcher at Penn Medicine, has been named co-recipient of the 2018 Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence by the Genetics Society of America (GSA) for “extraordinary contributions to genetics education.”

Newly described stretches of super-silenced DNA reveal a fresh approach to reprogram cell identity to use in regenerative medicine studies and one day in the clinic, according to a study in Molecular Cell last week by investigators from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

A new study from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that the ability of a stem cell to differentiate into cardiac muscle (and by extension other cell types) depends on what portions of the genome are available for activation, which is controlled by the location of DNA in a cell’s nucleus.