Medicine & Health

Merck Foundation has made a $2 million commitment to Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis to establish two endowed assistant professorships supporting early-career physician-scientists from populations that are historically underrepresented in medicine and biomedical sciences.

Medical imaging scientist Samuel Achilefu and child psychiatrist Joan L. Luby, MD, both of Washington University School of Medicine, have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, one of the highest honors in health and medicine.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have figured out how respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) undermines the body’s defenses, a step toward understanding why the virus is capable of causing serious illness in vulnerable populations.

School of Medicine scientists have developed a compound that prevents SARS-CoV-2 and related coronaviruses from entering cells. The researchers are collaborating with the NIH to test the compound in animal models of COVID-19.

As artificial intelligence becomes more incorporated into the medical field, rigorous evaluation of these methods is needed before they are introduced into clinical practice, a team led by Washington University researchers Abhinav Jha and Barry Siegel, MD, proposed.

Jhullian Jamille Alston, a predoctoral trainee in biochemistry and molecular biophysics and in the laboratories of Alex Holehouse and Andrea Soranno at the School of Medicine, received a predoctoral-to-postdoctoral fellow transition award from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Four researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have been awarded “high-risk, high-reward” grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant program aims to inspire scientific discovery by providing support for highly innovative research. The grant recipients are (from left) Linda J. Richards; Brian J. Laidlaw, Anthony W. Orvedahl and Leonid Shmuylovich.

Alex Holehouse, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the School of Medicine, along with researchers at the University of California, Merced, and the University of Wyoming, received a four-year $992,485 grant from the National Science Foundation through the new “Integrative Research in Biology” program.

Robert Schmidt, MD, PhD, professor of pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine, has received the Meritorious Contributions to Neuropathology Award from the American Association of Neuropathologists.

Washington University School of Medicine researchers have found a protein in the blood that could be measured to identify patients with limb-threatening ischemia — a condition in which heavy plaque formation causes a severe narrowing of the arteries — earlier in the disease process.