News

Newly appointed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said Monday he has contemplated the NIH’s piloting a program for exceptional young investigators modeled after Whitehead Institute’s Fellows program.

A multi-institutional team of Boston-area researchers has discovered a chemical that works in mice to kill the rare but aggressive cells within breast cancers that have the ability to seed new tumors.

A novel technique allows researchers to efficiently and precisely modify or introduce genes into the genomes of human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, according to Whitehead scientists.

Whitehead Institute scientists have developed a rapid, inexpensive drug-screening method that could be used to target diseases that until now have stymied drug developers, such as Parkinson’s disease.  This technique uses baker’s yeast to synthesize and screen the molecules, cutting target discovery and preliminary testing time to a matter of weeks.

Whitehead Fellow Kate Rubins is among nine men and women selected by NASA for the 2009 astronaut candidate class.

Low levels of a tiny RNA fragment in cells are associated with metastatic breast cancer in humans and increases the aggressive spread of breast cancer in mice, according to researchers at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Researchers at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have identified a protein in multiple myeloma cells, called DEPTOR, that indirectly activates a signaling pathway commonly turned on in cancer cells. Known as the PI3K/PTEN/Akt pathway, this signaling pathway controls cell survival, and when altered, keeps cancer cells from dying.

Whitehead Member Iain Cheeseman has been selected as a 2009 Searle Scholar. He is one of 15 award recipients chosen from 178 recently appointed assistant professors in the chemical and biological sciences.

Whitehead researchers have identified a novel mechanism that operates during formation of the “primary mouth”, the first opening between the outside of the embryo and the intestine.

Whitehead Institute researchers have found a large number of new prions, greatly expanding scientists’ notion of how important prions might be in normal biology and demonstrating that they play many and varied roles in the inheritance of biological traits.