Latest Baylor College of Medicine Stories

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine will receive up to $6.2 million over five years from the National Institute Of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, to develop a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome, commonly called SARS. "This will be our first major effort to develop a vaccine for a potential public health emergency threat in the United States. It gets us into a new area of biodefense while in the past we've been focusing on...

A molecule responsible for the proper formation of a key portion of the nervous system finds its way to the proper place not because it is actively recruited, but instead because it can't go anywhere else. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have identified a distal axonal cytoskeleton as the boundary that makes sure AnkyrinG clusters where it needs to so it can perform properly. "It has been known that AnkyrinG is needed for the axon initial segment to form. Without the axon...

HOUSTON, May 23, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Physicians, researchers and medical students from Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in Houston received prominent acclaim during the 2012 Society for Pediatric Radiology annual meeting held April 16 through 20 in San Francisco. Click here for more information about pediatric radiology at Texas Children's Hospital. Dr. George Bisset, chief of pediatric radiology at Texas Children's Hospital and the Edward B....

HOUSTON, May 22, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As one of the country's leading medical centers for diagnosing and treating fetal anomalies, and one of the first centers to provide a full range of prenatal surgical options, Texas Children's Fetal Center at the Pavilion for Women is proud to announce the team's first two successful in-utero fetal interventions to treat Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia (CDH). These are the only documented cases in the Southwestern United States...

Medical students who have an interest in space medicine can now take courses in the world's first officially recognized space medicine track as they pursue their medical degree. The track consists of a set of electives offered at Baylor College of Medicine and is managed by BCM's Center for Space Medicine. Developed and implemented during the past four years, the space medicine track was approved by the BCM Curriculum Committee in April 2012. Popular track "This elective program...

Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine have been awarded more than $5 million from Susan G. Komen for the Cure for three new breast cancer research grants, including a prestigious Komen Promise Grant. Komen Promise Grant The Komen Promise Grant is a three-year award for a total of $4,066, 940 to study restoration of endocrine therapy sensitivity in recurrent breast cancers. The grant was awarded to principal investigator Dr. Bert O'Malley, chair of molecular and cellular biology at...

As a basketball player scans he court, looking for an opening, his brain captures the position of other players for a few seconds, allowing him to choose the best path to the basket. Without those few seconds captured in memory, he would forget where each player is as his attention shifts. This visual short-term memory is like a "buffer" in a computer, allowing you to retain important pieces of information that will inform your future actions –whether it is on the basketball court, the...

Ongoing research by a Baylor College of Medicine pediatric oncologist to understand how special cells called natural killer T (NKT) cells can be used to suppress neuroblastoma tumor growth has led to the discovery that the protein IL-15 is key to protecting the NKT cells' anti-tumor effectiveness in a hostile environment. The study, led by Dr. Leonid Metelitsa, associate professor of pediatrics – hematology/oncology at BCM and Texas Children's Cancer Center, appears in the current issue...

The deletion of part of a gene that plays a role in the synthesis of carnitine – an amino acid derivative that helps the body use fat for energy – may play a role in milder forms of autism, said a group of researchers led by those at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital. "This is a novel inborn error of metabolism," said Dr. Arthur Beaudet, chair of molecular and human genetics at BCM and a physician at Texas Children's Hospital, and the senior author of the report...

When collaborators led by those at Baylor College of Medicine and Stanford University School of Medicine sought to unravel the mysterious role of the enzyme SIRT7 in the cell, they discovered a saboteur that uses other molecules to maintain tumor cells in their cancer state, suppressing the systems that are supposed to prevent that malignant transformation. A report on their work appears online today in the journal Nature. "This is a very bad gene," said Dr. Wei Li, associate professor in...