Smithsonian Magazine recently featured “37 Under 36: America’s Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences,” and one of the up-and-comers was E. John Wherry, Ph.D., an immunologist at the Wistar Institute, an independent nonprofit biomedical research institute in Philadelphia.
The profile highlights Wherry’s contributions to an effort to develop a universal vaccine against influenza that would provide long-lasting protection against all strains of the virus, including those yet to emerge and the avian flu. The vaccine would reduce the need for annual vaccination programs and defend against pandemics. As conceived, the vaccine will also be more effective in protecting the atrisk elderly than current vaccines.
Read the profile in Smithsonian Magazine here.
May is National Cancer Research Month, and Pew’s biomedical scholars and Latin American fellows are doing their part to address the disease, which affects nearly 13 million people in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society.
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Edward De Robertis, National Advisory Committee member and founding member of the Pew Latin American Fellows Program, has been elected into the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. De Robertis, a native of Uruguay, is the N. Sprague Professor of Biological Chemistry at University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute—best known for identifying genetic patterns conserved throughout evolution.
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On May 9, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced that 27 of the nation’s top biomedical researchers—including seven Pew scholars—will become HHMI investigators and will receive the flexible support necessary to move their research in creative new directions. The Pew scholars named HHMI investigators are Peter Baumann (2003), Michael Dyer (2004), Nicole King (2004), Tirin Moore (2004), Dyche Mullins (2000), Michael Rape (2007), and Rachel Wilson (2005).
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An interview with Pew's 2011 Latin American Fellow Esteban Engel.
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2009 Pew Biomedical Scholar Charles Mullighan was part of a research team at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital which recently found mutations responsible for more than half of a subtype of childhood brain tumors. Their paper in Nature Genetics pinpointed alterations in two genes that increased the risk of low-grade gliomas—the most common childhood tumors of the brain and spinal cord—and identified an existing drug as a possible treatment.
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