News

Project will investigate the effectiveness and toxicity of four herbs widely used by breastfeeding women worldwide to promote human milk production

Rhogerry “Gerry” Deshycka, a graduating senior working in the lab of Whitehead Institute Founding Member Harvey Lodish, has received one of MIT’s two Randolph G. Wei Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) awards for 2017 and MIT’s 2017 John L. Asinari Award. 

Cultured human cells are the foundation for disease and drug research. Now Whitehead Institute researchers have designed a growth medium that more closely resembles the cells’ environment in the body—and demonstrated that, relative to decades-old recipes that have remained the workhorses of cell culture studies, it significantly alters the cells’ inner workings.

Prize bestowed for discovery of the mTOR pathway’s impact on age-related diseases

Whitehead Institute scientists have identified a gene that could help clinicians discern which patients have aggressive forms of early stage breast cancer, which could prevent hundreds of thousands of women from undergoing unnecessary treatment and save millions of dollars.

The budget proposed on March 15, 2017 would cut National Institutes of Health funding by an estimated 20 percent.

Using red blood cells modified to carry disease-specific antigens, a team of scientists from Whitehead Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital have prevented and alleviated two autoimmune diseases—multiple sclerosis (MS) and type 1 diabetes—in early stage mouse models.  This research is an exciting step toward therapeutics for autoimmune diseases, which affect an estimated 23 million Americans.

Researchers at Whitehead Institute have now uncovered a role for the protein-folding chaperone HSP90 in humans, not only as a modifier of the effects of mutations, but as a mediator of the impact of the environment on the function of mutant proteins. And these effects of HSP90 can alter the course of human diseases.

Investigators at Whitehead Institute and the Broad Institute have succeeded in identifying the set of essential genes—those required for cellular proliferation and survival—in each of 14 human acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cell lines that had previously been characterized by genome sequencing. By combining their “gene essentiality map” with the existing genomic information, their study revealed liabilities in genetically defined subset of cancers that could be exploited for new therapies.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) and other “synucleinopathies” are known to be linked to the misfolding of alpha-synuclein protein in neurons. Less clear is how this misfolding relates to the growing number of genes implicated in PD through analysis of human genetics. Two new studies from researchers affiliated with Whitehead Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology explain how they used a suite of novel biological and computational methods to shed light on the question.