Harvard Medical School – Blavatnik Family Foundation

10 HMS Researchers Elected to National Academy of Medicine

Posted on October 19, 2023 (October 25, 2023) by Christine Ongsueng

Ten researchers from Harvard Medical School have been elected members of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM). Membership is extended to individuals who have made major contributions to advancing medical science, health care, or public health. Election to the NAM is considered one of the highest honors in health and medicine. The new members’ “leadership and expertise will be essential to helping the NAM tackle today’s urgent health challenges, inform the future of health care, and ensure health equity for the benefit of all around the globe,” NAM president Victor Dzau said. The newly elected members from HMS are: Bradley Bernstein, professor of cell biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and professor of pathology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in recognition of contributions to the understanding of chromatin structure and function; David Grabowski, professor of health care policy in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, in recognition of his leadership in and contributions to the field of health economics and his work on the determinants of COVID-19 in nursing home deaths, which resulted in policy changes; […]

Torn Muscle? Send In The Gut Microbes For Rapid Repair

Posted on March 7, 2023 (March 8, 2023) by Christine Ongsueng

“Our observations indicate that gut microbes drive the production of a class of regulatory T cells that are constantly exiting the gut and act as sentries that sense damage at distant sites in the body and then act as emissaries to repair that damage,” said study senior author Diane Mathis, professor of immunology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. The team cautions that the findings are based on experiments in mice and remain to be replicated in larger animals and in humans. However, the results raise interesting possibilities about harnessing the power of gut microbes to enhance recovery from injury. […]

4 Elected 2022 AAAS Fellows

Posted on January 31, 2023 (February 1, 2023) by Christine Ongsueng

Four Harvard Medical School researchers have been elected by their peers as 2022 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for their contributions to medical sciences. They are among the more than 500 scientists, engineers, and innovators around the world and across scientific disciplines who are being recognized for their scientific and socially notable achievements during the past year. The 2022 AAAS fellows from HMS are: Stephen Buratowski, HMS professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, for his research into the mechanisms of eukaryotic gene expression. […]

New Research Points Way to a Reverse Aging. But Don’t Expect a Miracle Drug Anytime Soon

Posted on January 13, 2023 (January 17, 2023) by Christine Ongsueng

“We think the various causes of aging may be addressable with a single treatment to reset the cell,” said Harvard scientist David Sinclair, the paper’s senior author. “So in the future, we could get one treatment — it could be a pill, it could be an injection — to go back 10 years [in cellular life], and then we’ll repeat that process every 10 years.” That kind of miracle drug won’t be developed overnight. The paper’s authors detail experiments with mice that would have to be replicated in humans before Sinclair’s vision could be realized. Scientists would also have to overcome potential safety and regulatory hurdles. But the paper supports what Sinclair, a genetics professor at Harvard’s Blavatnik Institute and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, calls the “information theory of aging” that identifies the epigenome as the primary culprit in the aging process. […]