News

Lydia Villa-Komaroff, chief operating officer and vice president for research at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, has been named to the board of directors for Transkaryotic Therapies, Inc. (TKT), a Cambridge-based biopharmaceutical company.

A national report says postdoctoral researchers are "indispensable" to the advancement of science, a fact often overlooked by institutions and funding agencies. Now postdocs are pushing for change. And people are listening.

Robert Langer, the Kenneth J. Germeshausen professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at MIT, is a pioneer in biomedical engineering and author of more than 500 issued and pending patents. His research on drug delivery and tissue engineering serves as a foundation for today's $20 billion drug-delivery industry.

Almost 150 different genomes have been sequenced to date, including the human genome. But sequencing needs are growing faster than ever. This fall, researchers at Whitehead Institute will test new technology to speed genome sequencing.

Scientists know that proteins called transcription factors that regulate gene expression play a key role in cellular function. But what if that’s only part of the story? What if these regulators lead a double life no one knew before?

The American Society of Human Genetics presented awards to Whitehead Member David Page and former graduate student Sjoerd Repping during its 53rd annual meeting, held recently in Los Angeles.

Any criminologist will tell you that witnesses, even the best intentioned, don’t always get it right. New software promises to do for biology what any criminal investigator would do at a crime scene: cross-examine witnesses until a single, coherent account of the event emerges.

In research reported in the online version of the journal Blood, Whitehead scientists report the discovery of a new blood stem cell growth factor. This discovery provides a new tool that allows researchers to multiply blood stem cells in culture for potential therapeutic use.

For years scientists have suspected that both longevity and low cholesterol are closely linked to genetics. This suspicion proves accurate in a new study to be published this week online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which shows genetic variation in a gene known for playing a key role in lipoprotein production also appears to be significantly overrepresented in centenarians.

Despite the rich knowledge scientists now have of the genes that constitute the human genome, researchers have yet to unravel the precise choreography by which they work – or malfunction – together in the cell in response to triggers from the outside world.