Penn Medicine News Blog Archive: Neurodegenerative Diseases

Penn Medicine faculty, staff, and students shared their love and knowledge of biomedical science with families, students, and the general public at a dozen events during the 2013 Philadelphia Science Festival.

In an update to recent research, Todd Cohen, Virginia Lee, and the Penn CNDR team have found an unusual behavior in the protein tau. It is literally its own worst enemy - tau is actually an enzyme that adds an acetyl group to itself, a process called autoacetylation.

This year the Center for Brain Injury and Repair is reaching audiences of all stripes at the Philadelphia Science Festival, with their message of how to mind your brain from concussions with hand-on demos.

The labs of senior authors Yale E. Goldman, and Erika L.F. Holzbaur, both in the Physiology department, have been studying molecular motors for close to a combined five decades

Penn Medicine will play a starring role in the Philadelphia Science Festival again this year. The Festival is a citywide collaboration showcasing science and technology every April. This year it runs from April 19 - 28, 10 days to celebrate the region’s strengths in science and technology, bringing together more than 100 partners from academia to museums to restaurants.

The Center for Brain Injury and Repair will again participate in Science Day at the Ball Park, as part of the 2013 Philadelphia Science Festival

Metformin, the most widely prescribed diabetes drug, has come full circle from a home remedy in the European medieval apothecary called goat’s rue to now being investigated for a host of modern chronic conditions.

Frank Oppenheimer, founder of the famed science museum in San Francisco, the Exploratorium, called artists and scientists “the official ‘noticers’ of society,” adding that “they notice things that other people either have never learned to see or have learned to ignore, and communicate those ‘noticings’ to others.” Lili Guo, a...

In December and early January, years of neurological research unfolded in a few weeks time as papers published the work of Penn researchers and were able to deepen our understanding of a variety of conditions, both rare and common, hopefully getting closer to refining or finding effective treatments as a result.

Despite their use in approximately 60,000 surgeries per day in the U.S. alone, medical researchers don’t know exactly how anesthetics cause unconsciousness – or what the true long-term impact of their use could be on the brain and the rest of the body. "The development of anesthetic drugs has been...

Modern day medical imaging exams have become a critical diagnostic tool for conditions of all kinds – from detecting the earliest breast cancers, long before a tumor could grow large enough for a woman to feel a lump in her own body, to finding malformations in the hearts of tiny...

Life is full of embarrassing moments. Who among us hasn’t suffered the mild mortification of unknowingly walking around with toilet paper trailing from a shoe? Or an unzipped fly? How many of us know what it’s like to emerge from an underwater dive only to discover that part of our...

The fear that athletes who suffer repeated blows to the head may end up with a preventable cause of dementia called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is leading neurodegeneration researchers at Penn to join in a collaborative study of retired NFL players, to see if there are any clinical symptoms (such as depression, disinhibition, cognitive or motor impairment) and biomarkers present that can be measured and tracked over time. The ultimate goal is to use the clinical symptoms and biomarkers to be able to diagnose CTE during lifetime, as the only way to diagnose CTE currently is through an examination of brain tissue after death.

The lab of Erika Holzbaur, a professor of Physiology at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, has been using live-cell imaging to get a better handle on what happens when the transport of cellular cargo goes off track, and how that may be the start of neurodegenerative diseases. In this case, a Parkinson’s-like disorder and a hereditary form of motor neuron disease.

Art has been shown to have a calming and healing effect, which makes it a vital presence in a hospital environment. This is especially true in an intensive care unit which can be a frightening experience for both patients and visitors, with all its unfamiliar equipment and sounds. When the...

A diverse team of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania is in New Orleans at the American Academy of Neurology’s 64th Annual Meeting, sharing the latest data aimed at enhancing the speed of diagnosis and treatment, and ultimately helping people with neurologic conditions.

The Philadelphia Science Festival Carnival tents have all been folded and hauled away. There have already been four nights of non-stop science cafes at local watering holes. But, there are still six more days of the festival to go, and Penn Medicine faculty will be participating at events on most of those days.

In a layer cake of research labs nestled on separate floors in a remote corner of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, a new use for an existing drug was uncovered. The drug, epothilone D (EpoD), stalled after original tests as a cancer treatment, but Perelman School of Medicine...

In a recent Journal of Cell Biology study Erika Holzbaur, PhD, a professor of Physiology, postdoctoral researcher Sandra Maday, Ph.D., and Karen E. Wallace, all from the Perelman School of Medicine, examined autophagosomes in neurons from transgenic mice reared with florescent green biomarker. These neurons, when grown in culture, send out axon-like projections, which grew 1 mm in two days, making it easier for the team to record movies of the sacs moving along the projection. The team saw the sacs form and engulf cargo at the end of the projections farthest from the nucleus, and mature into the degradative autolysosomes as they moved toward the cell body. The autolysosomes also become increasingly acidic as they move along the axon, most likely to aid in more efficient degradation.

Sleep keeps neuroscientist Marcos Frank awake, studying the importance of slumber during early life. Building on his research showing that the brain during sleep is fundamentally different from the brain during wakefulness, Frank an associate professor of Neuroscience at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has found that cellular changes in the sleeping brain may promote the formation of memories. In the newest study from the lab, published in the March 1 issue of Current Biology, the team found that sleep is associated with increased brain protein synthesis and transcription of messenger RNAs.