Medicine & Health

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).

The National Institute of Mental Health has awarded Washington University School of Medicine a $12.2 million grant to create a center aimed at advancing research into neurosteroids as treatments for depression and other psychiatric disorders.

Meaghan Creed, assistant professor of anesthesiology at Washington University School of Medicine, received the 2021 Freedman Prize from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. The prize recognizes exceptional basic research in mental illness.

A pediatric COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial is underway in St. Louis. Led by Washington University School of Medicine, about 140 area children will receive the two-shot Moderna vaccine or a placebo at St. Louis Children’s Hospital as part of a clinical trial involving about 100 medical institutions in the U.S. and Canada.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and The Neuro of McGill University have received a five-year grant expected to total $35.1 million for an extension of a study designed to develop biomarkers that indicate which people with REM sleep behavior disorder will go on to develop neurodegenerative diseases.

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.