Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School – Blavatnik Family Foundation

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. […]