The work of research team that includes Dr. David Montefiori of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute is highlighted in the NIH Director's Blog.

The human placenta performs a delicate balancing act: it must let beneficial nutrients pass from the mother to the developing fetus, but block harmful pathogens from making the same trip. Carolyn Coyne, PhD, investigates how the placenta has evolved to be such a fantastic protector but can also be vulnerable to pathogens.

When certain immune cells in our bodies are invaded by a dangerous pathogen, they sacrifice themselves to vanquish the intruders.

Humans are born with all the nerve cells they will ever have, and in each of those nerve cells live about two million mitochondria. As mitochondria age or become dysfunctional, the cell systematically removes them and replaces them with newer models. Neurobiologist Chantell Evans, PhD, wants to know more about this complex process.

Think of the inner circuitry of the brain as a traffic network. When nerve cells release a signal, the information speeds along various routes to its destination: another nerve cell elsewhere in the brain. Neurobiologist Josh Huang, PhD, is especially interested in a particular type of inhibitory nerve cells called chandelier cells.

Zhao Zhang, PhD — ZZ to just about everyone — is a bit of a scientific outlier. While most of his bioscience colleagues around the world are studying the 23,000 protein-coding genes that make us human, the assistant professor of pharmacology and cancer biology is looking at the other part of the genome and asking what it does.

When William J. Fulkerson, MD, MBA, steps down from his illustrious tenure as executive vice president of Duke University Health System (DUHS) at the end of this year, he will be celebrated as one of the most influential and successful figures in Duke Health’s 90-year history.

A new test can quickly test the ability of antibodies to neutralize spike proteins from different variants of COVID-19 simultaneously. The D4 assay shown here is the Teflon-like technology that makes the test possible.

In a lot of ways, Susan Blackwell (Crawford), MHS, PA-C’89, and the physician assistant profession have grown up together. They were born at roughly the same time, matured in parallel and proximity, and for more than three decades they’ve been inextricably linked.

With $21 million in new funding from the NIAID, the network now includes eight centers in North America and will study adolescent lung transplant recipients as well as adult.