Research
The promise of personalized diabetes care
November 15, 2023
The work of UT Health Science Center San Antonio faculty has transformed the medical community’s understanding of Type 2 diabetes, while helping usher in new therapies and improved protocols.
Fighting dementia with precision interventions
November 15, 2023
Researchers at the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases use a comprehensive approach to discover new targets for personalized and precise treatments of dementia.
Advances in the fight for a longer health span
November 15, 2023
The one thing life guarantees is that it ends. But what about the diseases that come with aging, such as obesity, muscle wasting, cancer and dementia? Must we simply accept those as inevitable, too?
Living your best life by sleeping better
November 15, 2023
Inadequate sleep doesn’t just cause sleepiness and poor concentration. It can also degrade the body over time and age us quicker.
Seeking participants for a healthier future
November 15, 2023
The primary health challenges that emerge with aging, such as preventing dementia, cancer and heart disease, remain unsolved. Often, the only way to solve these is by testing new anti-aging compounds in volunteers.
Long COVID: A syndrome wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma
November 15, 2023
University researchers are discovering key biomarkers of this complex condition, contributing significantly to the nationwide race to uncover its root causes and impacts on aging.
Preventing permanent brain injury after stroke
November 9, 2022
In the early 2000s, James Lechleiter’s lab at UT Health San Antonio was doing basic research focused on astrocytes, the star-shaped cells that do everything from managing neurotransmitters to clearing debris to regulating blood flow in the brain. What they discovered led to a potential novel finding, and he has spent the last 16 years investigating it.
Kickstarting a cure for hiccups
November 9, 2022
For years, Ali Seifi could not get the idea of curing hiccups out of his mind. He spent hours daydreaming of air pressure, flow, enervation and throat tissue flaps. Finally, after talking with a patient who had been up all night with hiccups after surgery, Seifi decided to turn his idea into a working prototype.
Harnessing AI to optimize patient treatments
November 9, 2022
Bradley Brimhall and collaborative teams of researchers are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and predictive modeling to develop leading-edge diagnostics. The use of AI in medical decision-making is the future, and physicians can lead that change or be swept before it.
Breaking cancer’s will to survive
November 9, 2022
The search for a novel compound on which to design a first-in-class cancer therapy is a long, arduous process. Daohong Zhou evaluated hundreds of compounds synthesized by the team of Guangrong Zheng, PhD, a medicinal chemist who specializes in the design and synthesis of natural and synthetic compounds at the University of Florida. Zhou and his team were looking for a compound that degraded a cancer’s survival signal, termed BCL-xL, without being toxic to blood platelets.
Hitting triple-negative breast cancer where it hurts
November 9, 2022
Ratna Vadlamudi had a long collaboration with other University of Texas System schools to discover novel drugs to treat breast cancer. During the lead optimization process of designing a drug candidate, Vadlamudi and his team discovered a small molecule that was highly active against solid cancers — ERX-41. The discovery identified a novel therapeutic vulnerability and targeting agent that kills a range of hard-to-treat cancer types in petri dishes and animal models.
Repurposing approved drugs for new therapies
November 9, 2022
One way to short-circuit the “valley of death” is to repurpose an approved drug for a new indication. The Food and Drug Administration has approved more than 20,000 drugs, and these drugs have demonstrated safety and efficacy in human trials. This population of proven compounds also offers researchers rich data sets to discover new indications for these drugs.