Dr. Tan, a cancer genomics and bioinformatics researcher, joined The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in January. Within weeks of his arrival, Vice President Joe Biden launched the cancer “moonshot” initiative during a visit with cancer researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and CHOP at Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center.
Colorectal cancer mainly exists in people older than 50, but it also can occur in young adults who have a genetic condition called familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP).
Bone marrow failure syndromes are rare disorders in which the bone marrow does not produce enough blood cells, increasing the risk for life-threatening bleeding, anemia, and infections.
As part of its commitment to training the next generation of pediatric pioneers, every year CHOP Research takes time to honor its exceptional trainees, and recently announced the 2014 Distinguished Research Trainee Award winners.
Since the completion of the Human Genome Project, there has been a natural surge in biomedical research aimed at gene discovery. Using genome-wide association studies (GWAS), bioinformatics, and other approaches, this process has focused largely on determining what genes are implicated in specific diseases.
A group of prominent vaccine researchers, including The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute's chief scientific officer, Philip R. Johnson, MD, and the University of Pennsylvania's Stanley Plotkin, MD, recently called for a "human vaccines project" to accelerate the development of vaccines to prevent "major global killers such as AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other infectious diseases."
The United States has a weight problem: according to the CDC, more than one-third of American adults are obese. Moreover, as of 2010 one-third of children were either overweight or obese, with the rates of obesity doubling in children and tripling in adolescents in the past thirty years.
