The authors demonstrate that agents that raise cGMP and activate the cGMP-dependent protein kinase (PKG), including the widely-used phosphodiesterase 5 inhibitors sildenafil (Viagra) and tadalafil (Cialis), stimulate proteasome activities and protein breakdown by the ubiquitin proteasome system, without affecting autophagy. Like cAMP, cGMP enhances the degradation of misfolded and regulatory proteins, but cGMP also stimulates the breakdown of the bulk of cell proteins, which is unaffected by cAMP.
Tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) is a neurological disorder causing non-cancerous tumors, called cortical tubers, to grow throughout the brain and body, as well as other conditions like epilepsy and autism. While medications are used to treat some of the manifestations of the disease, safe and more effective treatments targeting disease at a fundamental level are lacking. Key takeaways · No drugs…
Research expenditures at the University of Massachusetts increased by $33 million in one fiscal year to a record high of $684 million in Fiscal Year 2019. This continued increase reflects the long-term growth of the university’s research enterprise, which has grown by 14 percent since FY14 and 40 percent since FY09. Federal funding remained the largest source of research funding…
The Dan and Diane Riccio Fund for Neuroscience has announced four $50,000 seed grants to UMass Medical School researchers. In 2017, Dan and Diane M. (Casey) Riccio, PhD, (GSBS ’03) donated $2 million to support neuroscience research at UMass Medical School, with $1 million to establish the Dan and Diane Riccio Fund for Neuroscience, and an additional $1 million to…
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is honoring Cigall Kadoch, PhD, with the 2020 AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Basic Cancer Research. Kadoch is assistant professor of pediatric oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and an Institute member at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is being recognized for her pioneering biochemical and…
Biologics to modulate the migration and activation of specific innate immune cells, called neutrophils, discovered in the lab of Beth McCormick, PhD, at UMass Medical School, have been licensed by Bacainn Therapeutics, Inc., to develop treatments for various acute medical conditions, including ulcerative colitis. The Massachusetts company received FDA clearance for a Phase I clinical trial of its compound to…
A novel liquid biopsy method can detect kidney cancers with high accuracy, including small, localized tumors which are often curable but for which no early detection method exists, say scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The report in Nature Medicine suggests that if validated in larger trials and applied widely, the non-invasive test could find more early kidney cancers when they haven’t spread,…
The Wyss Institute and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have signed an agreement worth up to $16 million over the next year to use Wyss technologies to identify and test FDA-approved drugs that could be repurposed to prevent or treat COVID-19. Specifically, DARPA will use the computational drug-discovery pipelines and human organ chip technologies developed by the Wyss Institute for Biologically…
With a proclamation issued on Monday, US President Donald Trump extended and expanded immigration restrictions to limit the entry of foreign workers to the United States. The move set off ripples of alarm among scientists and drew fire from experts concerned about the future of US science. According to the order, the United States will stop issuing certain categories of…
There’s a long-standing assumption in the pharmaceutical industry that when drug molecules enter a cell, they spread through it evenly — but, says biologist Rick Young, “that could not be further from the truth”. In a study published today in Science1, Young and his colleagues at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, show that cancer-drug compounds become concentrated in precise spots…
