The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy recently welcomed seven talented early career researchers in cancer immunotherapy to its network as part of the Parker Scholars, Parker Bridge Scholars and Parker Fellows programs. These researchers will receive a total of up to $3.1 million in funding and the opportunity to train with top scientists in the field, to support them as they embark…
When the US government was partially shut down for 35 days starting December 22, work at several government agencies ground to a halt, with a total of 800,000 federal employees furloughed. The National Science Foundation, one of the sidelined science agencies, is now addressing all that went undone during that time, NSF officials told reporters this morning (February 1). During…
Advances in stem cell research offer hope for treatments that could help patients regrow heart muscle tissue after heart attacks, a key to achieving more complete recovery. Scientists today report success in creating functional blood vessels in vitro for hearts of rats that had sustained a heart attack. The journal Nature Communications published the paper, whose lead authors are Ying Zheng and Charles Murry of the UW Medicine Institute…
In order to provide a comprehensive resource for human structural variants (SVs), we generated long-read sequence data and analyzed SVs for fifteen human genomes. We sequence resolved 99,604 insertions, deletions, and inversions including 2,238 (1.6 Mbp) that are shared among all discovery genomes with an additional 13,053 (6.9 Mbp) present in the majority, indicating minor alleles or errors in the…
Two ISCRM faculty members, Dr. Smita Yadav, Assistant Professor, Pharmacology and Dr. Ronald Kwon, Associate Professor, Orthopedics and Sports Medicine, have received prestigious awards from the John H. Tietze Foundation Trust that will help fuel promising research underway in their labs. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder that currently affects 1 in 59 children in the United…
Experimental gene therapy cassettes for Duchenne muscular dystrophy have been modified to deliver better performance. The cassettes, which carry the therapy into muscle cells, contain newer versions of a miniaturized treatment gene. The micro-dystrophin, as the treatment gene is called, has been restructured to enhance its functionality. The revamped versions were developed and tested at UW Medicine labs in animal…
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center computational and molecular biologist Dr. Arvind “Rasi” Subramaniam has received a five-year, $920,000 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to develop computational models of how cells cope with stalled protein synthesis. Cells rely on proteins for all their functions, and Subramaniam’s research will shed light on how protein synthesis goes awry in diseases such as cancer. CAREER Awards support early-career…
In a quiet Bothell business park far from booming South Lake Union, players in the Northwest’s “other” tech sector are coping with growing pains of their own. At Fujifilm SonoSite, a manufacturer of portable ultrasound devices, demand is growing so rapidly that it recently decided to add a 10-person weekend shift to its assembly line. Yet that modest objective proved…
Our publication in Nature Immunology revealed how a rare group of white blood cells called basophils play an important role in the immune response to a bacterial infection, preventing the development of sepsis.
Specifically, our studies showed that basophils were one of the first types of immune cell to appear at the sepsis infection site. The presence of basophils not only enhanced inflammation at the early stages of an immune response to infection and improved survival in mice, but did this in part by releasing an...
It was August 1972, and Dr. George McDonald was mystified. Just two months into his fellowship, the young physician was fielding consultation requests for patients with gastrointestinal and liver problems. But the phone call from Dr. Don Thomas was different. The future Nobel Prize winner, whom he’d never met, had mentioned bone marrow transplantation and a sick patient and something called “graft-vs.-host disease.”…
