News Releases

The biggest hurdle to finding effective therapies for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) – a life-threatening condition in which the lungs become scarred and breathing is increasingly difficult – has been the inability to fully model the disease in animals, limiting the ability to observe and understand the disease.

Three faculty members in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have been selected to receive awards from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the professional organization of all 151 accredited U.S. medical schools and nearly 400 major teaching hospitals and health systems nationwide.

Out of nearly 5,000 hospitals analyzed nationwide, Penn Medicine is among only 20 institutions to be named to the publication’s 2018-2019 Honor Roll. According to the magazine’s editors, Honor Roll hospitals each perform near the top of the rankings in at least half a dozen specialty areas.

Describing him as “one of the world’s foremost experts in bioethics and politics and bioethics in national security,” the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities has awarded Penn Medicine bioethicist Jonathan D. Moreno, PhD its 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award.

A class of cancer drugs called PARP inhibitors could be useful for treating and preventing brain disorders, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also called Lou Gehrig’s disease, and some forms of frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), by halting the  misplacement of specific proteins that affect nerve cells, according to a study published in Molecular Cell by researchers in the the School of Arts and Sciences and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. 

The research offers a paradigm-shifting picture of how cancers take a systemic approach to suppressing the immune system. In addition, it also points to a new way to predict which cancer patients will respond to anti-PD1 therapy that disrupts immune suppression to fight tumors and a means of tracking the effectiveness of such therapies.