Diseases

Our latest Research Highlights video features three exciting new findings from Whitehead Institute: New work from the Jaenisch lab helps explain bats' impressive resistance to viruses; researchers in the Young lab identify a common denominator underlying chronic disease states; and researchers in the Cheeseman lab identify precise regulatory mechanisms controlling the production of protein variants during mitosis.

Whitehead Institute Member David Page and colleagues identified underlying biological differences in how male and female heart cells generate energy. These differences could contribute to sex differences in heart disease incidence and outcomes.

Whitehead Institute Member Richard Young and colleagues have created a machine learning model that can predict in which cellular compartments a protein will reside, generate proteins to reside in a desired compartment, and detect disease mutations that alter cellular compartments, with implications for understanding and remedying disease.  

Researchers across Whitehead Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology joined faculty from Boston Children’s Hospital for a research matchmaking event, aiming to foster collaboration in fields ranging from rare disease and immunology to cancer.

Chronic diseases such as diabetes are on the rise and are costly and challenging to treat. Whitehead Institute Member Richard Young and colleagues have discovered a common denominator driving these diverse diseases, which may prove to be a promising therapeutic target: proteolethargy, or reduced protein mobility, in the presence of oxidative stress.

Bats rarely get sick from deadly viruses like Ebola and Nipah despite carrying them. Now, Whitehead Institute Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch and colleagues have found that while the SARS-CoV-2 virus can enter bat cells, the innate immune system prevents it from replicating and hijacking the cell's machinery.

Jaspreet Sandhu is a postdoc in Whitehead Institute Member Jonathan Weissman’s lab studying how the genetics of individual cells determine their behaviors within the liver. He is also a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. We sat down with Jaspreet to learn more about him and his experiences in and out of the lab.

Valhalla Fellow Lindsey Backman explains what the microbiome is and the roles that different members of our microbiomes play in health and disease. She also discusses how her lab studies adaptations that some microbes have evolved to tolerate oxygen-containing environments, and how researchers may be able to use what she learns to create better antibiotics and probiotics.

Whitehead Institute Member Rudolf Jaenisch and colleagues found that Rett Syndrome can cause significant mitochondrial dysfunction in astrocytes, a brain cell type that supports neurons, and in neurons that later acquire these mitochondria.

In Parkinson’s disease, clumps of sticky proteins trigger inflammation in the brain, leading to neuronal death. Whitehead Institute’s Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch and colleagues have now found that a mutation causing these proteins to misfold and become sticky can also turn the brain’s immune cells from friends to foes, possibly accelerating the progression of the disease.