Posts Tagged ‘Discoveries’

Twenty-two years ago, David Barker, M.D., PhD., F.R.S., OHSU faculty member and professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Southampton, UK, made a discovery that would change the way researchers think about chronic disease. What Dr. Barker found was that babies with lower or higher than average birth weight had a significantly higher risk for developing heart disease later in life. Fast forward to now, and Dr. Barker’s research has grown into a booming … Read More

Monday, August 15 is your last chance to register for the 7th World Congress on Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD), a conference to be hosted by OHSU,  September 18–21, 2011. This international conference will feature researchers from OHSU and around the world, all of whom concentrate on discoveries related to developmental programming. Participants can expect to receive updates on traditional areas in the field and also to receive information on newly emerging areas, … Read More

A team of OHSU researchers, led by Daniel Marks, M.D., has discovered the brain mechanism that makes us feel tired when we’re sick. Sickness-induced fatigue, they found, happens in the orexin system, which regulates sleep and arousal. The good news? Treatments of sleep disorders using orexin have been studied for years. According to Dr. Marks, this should speed the time it takes to translate their research findings into a clinical treatment for tired, unmotivated patients … Read More

In a recent study co-authored by Henrique von Gersdorff, PhD, senior scientist at the Vollum Institute, OHSU researchers discovered that nerve cells in the eye require relatively high levels of vitamin C in order to function, leading them to believe that vitamin C may play a greater role in overall brain function than they had previously thought. Findings from the study were published in the June 29 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience. View the … Read More

New research by OHSU’s Glen Kisby, PhD, Peter Spencer, PhD, and collaborators, suggests that there may be a connection between neurodegenerative diseases, like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Alzheimer’s, and cancer. Drs. Kisby and Spencer came to this conclusion by studying the effects of methylazoxymethanol (MAM), a genotoxin that appears to act as both a neurotoxin and a carcinogen, in both humans and animal models. According to Dr. Kisby: “The overlap of molecular pathways implicated … Read More

Understanding how the ear can detect sound, particularly faint sounds, has long been perplexing for biologists. The organ of Corti, the anatomical structure within the ear that detects sound, is known to vibrate in response to sound. However, monitoring these vibrations has been difficult, as cells are positioned in within the choclea, deep within the skull. Alfred Nuttall, PhD, director of the Oregon Hearing Research Center, and collaborators from across OHSU worked together to develop … Read More

Researchers from the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have found the first naturally occurring disease in nonhuman primates that is comparable to multiple sclerosis in humans. The disease, they found, is caused by a type of herpes virus, which may also trigger multiple sclerosis in humans. The authors of the paper, published Tuesday in the Annals of Neurology, hope that this discovery will give insight into the cause of multiple sclerosis, and ultimately lead … Read More

A team of OHSU researchers, led by George Thomas, MD, surgical pathologist at the Knight Cancer Institute, have discovered a gene that makes some kidney cancers resistance to treatment. Drugs already approved by the FDA may be able to suppress this gene, according to Dr. Thomas. The results of this multidisciplinary study were published earlier this week in Science Translational Medicine. Read the full OHSU news release.

An estimated one in three adults in the U.S. is obese, but its treatment may be more complex than you might think, according to OHSU’s Kevin Grove, PhD, who has been featured in the New York Times and on ABC’s Nightline for his research on obesity and diabetes in “couch-potato” primates. Since we blogged about Dr. Grove’s research back in February, OHSU’s communications team has created a fact sheet about obesity and OHSU’s research on … Read More

A team of researchers, led by Louis Picker, M.D., associate director of OHSU’s Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute, has developed a vaccine candidate that has been shown to improve immune response to Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) in non-human primates. Dr. Picker’s findings were published in Nature in May 2011. The vaccine candidate—over ten years in the making—hinges on the discovery that an anti-viral response to SIV is possible within the first few days of infection. … Read More