Basic Science News at Duke School of Medicine

Experimental vaccine targets portions of the flu virus that don’t change

Two School of Medicine faculty were among five Duke faculty members elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) on April 30 in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.  New NAS members with appointments in the School of Medicine were:   David Beratan, PhD, R.J. Reynolds Professor of Chemistry, professor of biochemistry, and professor of physics. Beratan is developing theoretical approaches to understand the function of complex molecular and macromolecular systems. 

Cagla Eroglu, PhD, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Cell Biology and Neurobiology in the School of Medicine, is one of two Duke University faculty elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences for 2024. 

Graduate students at Duke University School of Medicine have been honored by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).    Alev M. Brigande and Daniel Quintero in the Duke Department of Neurobiology, along with Violet Beaty, Porter Krev Ellis, and Celeste Marin in the Duke Department of Biochemistry received fellowships, joining biochemistry student Dalal Azzam who earned the honor in 2022. 

Colin S. Duckett, PhD, and Chuan-Yuan Li, DSc, have been elected as 2023 fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the most distinguished lifetime honors in the scientific community.

Scientists at Duke University School of Medicine have long probed the mysteries of RNA, with an eye to harnessing its power for new and better therapies for cancer, diabetes, heart disease and more.

Dean’s Award for Research Excellence recognizes basic science achievements of PhD candidates and their impact beyond the lab.

A common powerful mutation found in melanoma can push heart muscle cells to multiply in laboratory models of heart tissue.

A perplexing problem for people with recurring urinary tract infections (UTIs) is persistent pain, even after antibiotics have successfully cleared the bacteria. Now Duke Health researchers have identified the likely cause - an overgrowth of nerve cells in the bladder.

Duke University, in collaboration with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and ​​​NC​​ State University, has received a three-year, $3 million grant from the Chan​ ​Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) to map and manipulate the unseen complexities of biological networks, with a focus on kinases.  Their work on kinases, which is a class of proteins, will help researchers better understand cellular organization, nervous system function, and neurological diseases affecting the brain. The living kinome is the complete set of protein kinases encoded in the genome.