Pathobiology News & Events

Pathobiology News Stories

Developing a drug to fight a deadly childhood parasite

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 10 people around the world do not have a safe water supply close to home. Around the world, diarrheal diseases are responsible for one in 10 deaths of children under the age of 5. One of the leading causes is Cryptosporidium, a microscopic parasite that is typically transmitted through contaminated water and usually lives in the small intestine. Yet it doesn’t lend itself to easy laboratory investigation and, until recently, scientists have been flummoxed in their attempts to make progress toward finding a treatment.

Confronted With Bacteria, Infected Cells Die So Others Can Live, Penn Study Finds

The immune system is constantly performing surveillance to detect foreign organisms that might do harm. But pathogens, for their part, have evolved a number of strategies to evade this detection, such as secreting proteins that hinder a host’s ability to mount an immune response.

Penn Vet Researchers Contribute Expertise to Checklist for ‘One Health’ Studies

A growing body of scientific research is focused on One Health, the integration of knowledge concerning humans, animals and the environment. Yet there is no clear, unified definition of what a One Health study is or how such a study should be conducted.

A Perturbed Skin Microbiome Can Be ‘Contagious’ and Promote Inflammation, Penn Study Finds

Even in healthy individuals, the skin plays host to a menagerie of bacteria, fungi and viruses. Growing scientific evidence suggests that this lively community, collectively known as the skin microbiome, serves an important role in healing, allergies, inflammatory responses and protection from infection.

Penn Vet launches new platform to accelerate microbiome research

Studies of the microbiome—the array of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microorganisms living in or on a given individual or environment—generate a lot of data. An investigation of the skin microbiome of people with eczema, for example, would include not only the identities of the microbes present, but also a vast amount of metadata, or data about the data, such as the sex, age, weight, and disease status of the individuals under study. Analysis tools that integrate metadata have the potential to reveal connections between the microbiome and clinical outcomes.

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Pathobiology Events

Oliver Billker, PhD, "Genetic screens in a malaria parasite reveal the unusual reproductive biology of a divergent eukaryote"

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