Winter 2018 - Penn Medicine

Painting of Pearl Basser with daughters Shari Potter, Faith Basser, and Mindy Gray

Faith, Fate, and Families

At the Basser Center for BRCA at Penn, a unique philanthropic investment is making rapid progress toward new horizons in preventing and treating heritable cancer.

The first-of-its-kind FDA approval of an immune cell therapy for cancer was big news on Penn’s campus. It marked the culmination of a chapter of discovery, collaboration, and spectacular feats of surviving once-deadly cancers. And it’s the start of much more.

Flu Forward 1918 | 2018

Penn medical students raced to treat a flu epidemic in 1918 with few resources. Today, researchers are finding new ways to battle an old illness—because the threat of another major global pandemic is not as far in the past as we might think.

A Vision, Realized

Gene therapy to reverse inherited blindness was an outlandish dream in the 1980s when Jean Bennett, MD, PhD, and Albert Maguire, MD, began their collaboration in life and work. Today, it is the first light in a new vista for genetic disease.

Care in the Combat Zone

The weary but steadfast hero hunkering down to pen a 1917 wartime diary entry was not always clad in olive drab, but sometimes in a starched white apron. Pennsylvania Hospital nurse Helen Grace McClelland was one of the most decorated women of World War I.
Family Matters

The stories in this issue of Penn Medicine invite you to widen your perspective to take on the family around each individual.
Penn Physicians Gain National and Donor Recognition for Innovation

Penn Medicine’s breakthrough immunotherapy success is celebrated at the Museum of the American Revolution, and Penn’s Trauma Center creates its first endowed professorship.
Policy, People, Podcasts, and Practice

Penn medical student Katie Magoon is combining a background in nursing and health policy with audio storytelling through an oral history project with women in medicine.
Tick, Tock, Track and Heal the Body ‘Round the Clock

Researchers from Penn Medicine and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have developed a powerful tool for detecting and characterizing the molecular rhythms of the body.
Vital Signs

Penn rises in the ranks of the world’s most innovative universities. Penn Medicine Princeton Health officially extends the health system’s regional footprint into central New Jersey. A touching viral moment with Joe Biden and Meghan McCain, faculty honors, and more.
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