Care for horses & livestock/farm animals
Care for cats, dogs & other companion animals
Throughout the year, Penn Vet hosts seminars, conferences, symposiums, and speaker series, which serve as forums for academics to share the latest research approaches breakthroughs in a wide array of subjects.
Read the Penn Vet Research Newsletter to get the latest news about our faculty researchers, programs, projects, grants, and publications... Better yet, sign up to receive the latest Research Newsletter by email.
The autoimmune disease lupus, which can cause fatigue, a facial rash, and joint pain, strikes females far more often than males. Eight-five percent of people with lupus are female, and their second X chromosome seems partly to blame. According to a new study by Penn researchers, females with lupus don’t fully “silence” their second X chromosome in the immune system’s T cells, leading to abnormal expression of genes linked to that chromosome.
Most people who weather an infection with influenza fully recover after a week or two. But for some, a severe case of the flu can actually reshape the architecture of their lungs and forever compromise their respiratory function.
Ebola just isn’t going away. Following the major 2014 outbreak in West Africa, the deadly infection came back with a vengeance last year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it has claimed nearly 550 lives to date.
The impact has been felt closer to home as well.
For cancer to spread, it needs a hospitable environment in distant organs. This fertile “soil” can provide a home to circulating malignant cells. Recent research has shown that cancer cells from the primary tumor can help ready this soil by sending out small vesicles. These vesicles contain a cocktail of molecules that “educate” healthy cells to prepare the target tissues for cancer cells to seed and thrive. Blocking this process offers one strategy to stop metastasis, which is often responsible for cancer’s lethality.