LATEST NEWS & PUBLICATIONS

NIH Awards Grant to Fund Minnesota Site for the Kidney Precision Medicine Project

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $2.5 million to the University of Minnesota to fund the “Minnesota Precision Medicine CKD & Resilient Diabetes Recruiting Site: Engagement, Enrollment & Ethics (Minn-KPMP)." Minn-KPMP will be a recruitment site for the Kidney Precision Medicine Project (KPMP), a coalition of leading research teams using precision medicine to deve

Register Now For the 2022 Minnesota Water Resources Conference

Registration is now open for the 2022 Minnesota Water Resources Conference, which will be held in-person October 18-19 in St. Paul. The conference will feature plenary sessions on climate change adaptation and the future of the Minnesota Clean Water Fund; presentations on wetlands, agriculture, stormwater and nutrients in surface waters will also be offered. In addition, the inaugural Deborah L.

Professor Judy Illes Presented Alvin J. Thompson Award by the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research

Judy Illes, CM, PhD, FRSC, FCAHS, was recently presented the Alvin J. Thompson award in recognition of her partnership with the Tahltan, a First Nations people living in what is now considered British Columbia, Canada. Their program is recognized for being a "genuine research partnership between academic researchers and a First Nations community, which brought together knowledge and expertise to advance research and wellness." The Northwest Association of Biomedical Research (NWABR) learned of Dr.

Stem Cell Institute Researcher & Team Awarded NIH Grant to Study COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s

Professor of Neurosurgery and Stem Cell Institute faculty member Walter Low, PhD, is among a group of researchers who were recently awarded a five-year grant by the National Institutes of Health to study the potential impact of SARS-CoV2 infection on cognitive function, especially in people at risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Individuals with a particular gene variant, APOE4, are more vulnerable to both long-COVID and Alzheimer’s disease. Some Alzheimer’s researchers also hypothesize that Alzheimer's may be triggered by a latent viral component.

New Organ Transplant Research Protocol Significantly Improves Organ Preservation Time

Researchers demonstrated that rat livers could be preserved 5 times longer using partial freezing, a new approach to organ preservation. Increasing the length of time organs can be stored prior to transplantation is a national research priority, and will ultimately enhance the supply of organs for patients by mitigating key logistical limitations in transplant medicine. The lead author of the study is ATP-Bio Organisms Testbed Lead Shannon Tessier, PhD. ATP-Bio Deputy Director Mehmet Toner, PhD, Thrust Area One Co-Lead Korkut Uygun, PhD, and other ATP-Bio personnel were also involved.

Addressing Pandemic Disparities: Equity and Neutral Conceptions of Justice

Professor Debra DeBruin authored a chapter in a recently published book, Ethical Public Health Policy Within Pandemics: Theory and Practice in Ethical Pandemic Administration. DeBruin’s chapter focuses on disparities in how COVID-19 affected BIPOC communities, provides a model that explains those disparities, and considers whether race and ethnicity should be taken into account when responding to a pandemic. Prof.

CIDRAP Launches Monkeypox Resource Center

As the Monkeypox outbreak continues to spread worldwide, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy has launched a Monkeypox Resource Center on their website. The Monkeypox Resource Center features up-to-date information on the Monkeypox outbreak and is being updated frequently as the situation evolves. CIDRAP has been a longtime member center of the Consortium on Law and Values and its Director, Dr. Michael Osterholm, is a member of the Consortium’s Executive Committee. 

MIDB Study Identifies Methods to Combat Gender Bias in Autism Diagnoses

A multidisciplinary study led by Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain scholar Dr. Catherine Burrows has demonstrated that earlier, improved screening for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may help correct for large gender differences in ASD diagnoses. Currently, male children are diagnosed with ASD four times as often as female children. The research team identified gender-based differences in the presentation of symptoms of ASD; once the team had corrected for those differences, they found that an approximately equal number of children were at risk for ASD.