Interdisciplinary research with the potential to inform policymaking received a huge boost on Sept. 21 with the dedication of a new University of Wisconsin-Madison Federal Statistical Research Data Center, or FSRDC, on the UW campus.
The Republican-controlled committee is slated to consider the bill Tuesday in the state Capitol. Passage looks all but certain and would clear the way for a vote in the full Senate.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have discovered a method to precisely detect and treat glioblastoma, a malignant form of brain cancer.
Chemotherapy drugs usually succeed at killing cancer cells, but some cancers have a tendency to develop a resistance to treatment, according to a University of Wisconsin Health release.
“If a patient will not be sensitive to a treatment, they should not be placed on that treatment. They should not be over-treated,” said Dr. Wei Xu, professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center and McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research and senior author of the study. “Also, we want to give timely treatments, because if you match the patient to the right treatment, you’re more likely to save someone’s life.”
A $3 million grant will allow the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center to coordinate research among six of the nation’s top research institutions, according to a UW Health release.
The Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Program is funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Cancer Institute, officials said. The project is looking to prevent cancer by pinpointing its environmental causes and factors.
We all thought it was a miracle when the Wisconsin Badgers beat Kentucky in the Final Four. Legislators – both Republican and Democrat – couldn’t wait to honor the University of Wisconsin basketball team.
Nearly 50 years after the late Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary told people to “turn on, tune in, drop out” with psilocybin, LSD and other psychedelic drugs — which became illegal in 1970 — researchers around the country are testing the substances’ ability to reduce anxiety and depression in people with terminal cancer.
Kandis Elliot has devoted her career to making science more beautiful — and accessible. As emerita senior artist at the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Botany, she spent decades illustrating plants and animals to educate and delight the public.
Noted: “If they did not have those trial drugs and didn’t do that extra work [at the Carbone Cancer Center], I don’t think she would have ever had that time. I actually don’t think she would have made it past that first summer.”
Because of that, Rich decided to honor Sherri by participating in the Carbone’s Race for Research, a 5K run and walk. Money from donations is used to continue the cancer research.
This could be big for UW-Madison. It’s exactly the sort of transformative discovery you would expect from a great research university. Like Harry Steenbock fortifying the vitamin D content of milk. Like James Thomson unlocking the mystery and promise of stem cells. In this case, two UW researchers have pioneered a breakthrough that could end of the flood of human antibiotics into animal feed.
The mysterious human ancestor called Homo naledi was primed for success in a prehistoric triathlon, new research shows—if the challenges were walking upright, climbing trees, and handily wielding tools.
MANITOWOC — There are stories hidden below the water of Lake Michigan. That includes shipwrecks – hundreds of them.
GREEN LAKE — Keeping water healthy in and around Green Lake, was the goal of an environmental field trip Monday.
William C. Campbell, who shared a Nobel Prize in medicine announced Monday, said that his time as a graduate student at UW-Madison helped shape his career. Arlie C. Todd and Chester A. Herrick, the professors who oversaw his research as a veterinary science and zoology student in the 1950s, gave him the freedom to be intuitive in his work, Campbell said in an interview from his home in Massachusetts. “That was very valuable,” Campbell said. He said he was allowed to develop his interests and to be imaginative in his approach, something not all professors of the day encouraged.
Associated Press story on three scientists from the U.S., Japan and China — including a UW-Madison alumnus William Campbell— who won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discovering drugs to fight malaria and other tropical diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people every year.
Three scientists who used modern laboratory techniques to discover anti-parasitic drugs long hidden in herbs and soil won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday.
A master’s and doctoral graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison was awarded a portion of the 2015 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, according to a release from the university.
A graduate of the University of Wisconsin is one of three scientists who’ve been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine. William Campbell and Satoshi Omura of Japan were honored for discovering the drug Avermectin. Two derivatives of that drug helped reduce the presence of diseases caused by parasitic worms, mostly in Asia and Africa. The other Nobel Prize winner is Tu Youyou, China’s first medicine laureate. He created a drug that sharply dropped mortality rates for malaria.
As she watched the surgeon operating on a farmer who had suffered third-degree burns across 95% of his body, researcher Lynn Allen-Hoffmann realized instantly she had a new mission: making human skin.
Successful organic farmers use agricultural practices that maximize crop production and benefit the environment. These organic management strategies were highlighted at the University of Wisconsin Organic Agriculture Field Day, held at the Arlington Agricultural Research Station Sept. 2.
UW-Madison isn’t the only university to find the fetal tissue research battle on its doorstep as legislators seek to prohibit the use of tissue from aborted fetuses for research in light of the fallout from the Planned Parenthood sting videos. Since the release of the videos this summer, five states – including Wisconsin – have introduced legislation around fetal tissue donation and research, Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health advocacy group, told ThinkProgress. Arizona is looking at an administrative rules approach.
Three scientists from the U.S., Japan and China, including a University of Wisconsin-Madison alum, won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discovering drugs to fight malaria and other tropical diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people every year.
The medicines they helped develop are credited with improving the lives of millions. And now three researchers working in the U.S., Japan, and China have won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Among the winners: William C. Campbell of Drew University in Madison N.J., for his work on the roundworm parasite. Campbell is a UW alum.
Officials of the nation’s leading universities have watched with dread as the fallout from the Planned Parenthood sting videos has threatened to engulf labs that depend on fetal tissue for research.
Sure, nails look pretty all trimmed and polished, and they make opening a can of soda a lot easier, but these are not the reasons that humans have fingernails. So what is the reason? It’s because humans are primates, said John Hawks, a biological anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Unlike most mammals, which have claws for digging and climbing, humans and other primates have fingertips that are perfect for grasping tools and other objects, Hawks told Live Science in 2013.
While debate continues over the nature of climate change, the public next Tuesday can hear from a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who says human health risks pose the largest of threats.
Quoted: Dr. Michael Fiore and Timothy Baker, tobacco researchers from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, wrote in a commentary in the journal that the study shows the potential for a policy to cut nicotine that “could help to end the devastating health consequences” of smoking.
Matthew Desmond’s “genius grant” was made in Madison and Milwaukee. Desmond, 35, is a sociologist who earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and whose groundbreaking work on the impact of eviction on the urban poor came from his granular research in Milwaukee.
We all thought it was a miracle when the Badgers beat Kentucky in the Final Four. Legislators — both Republicans and Democrats — couldn’t wait to honor the University of Wisconsin basketball team. But the real miracles are happening in the labs at UW, at the Waisman Center, at Research Park, and across Wisconsin.
An unprecedented avian influenza epidemic struck the poultry industry in the U.S. over the spring and early summer of 2015.
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., joined three other members of Congress Tuesday in a letter questioning the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ policies regarding the sale of fetal tissue.
No mention of UW-Madison but a germane and particularly good examination of the use of fetal tissue in research: The National Institutes of Health alone funds about $76 million in fetal cell research each year. This type of scientific study has gone on for decades.
NIH Director Francis Collins, writing about the difficulty of screening new drugs for toxicity: “As an important step in this direction, NIH-funded researchers at the Morgridge Institute for Research and University of Wisconsin-Madison have produced neural tissue chips with many features of a developing human brain.”
Davenport native David Glowacki, 56, is part of a project that’s preoccupied with minutiae. Through the software Glowacki develops, scientists observe minutiae — specifically, nearly mass-less particles called neutrinos — at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a powerful telescope at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.
Artists find their muses in different places. For example, Kandis Elliot recently finished rendering every single kind of fish in Wisconsin.
Scientists in Wisconsin have succeeded in growing three-dimensional brainlike tissue structures derived from human embryonic stem cells. Unlike previous miniature model brains, the new structures can be easily reproduced and they contain vascular cells and microglia, a type of immune cell.
MADISON — High in a laboratory overlooking Lake Mendota, University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist Gail Robertson is looking for the next breakthrough in medical science. If Republican lawmakers will let her, that is.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos says he’s optimistic the chamber will vote on a bill outlawing research on tissue taken from aborted fetuses.
Age is nothing but a number when it comes to unravelling the relationships of species from our past. We do not know the actual geological age of the Dinaledi fossils, the single largest fossil hominin find in Africa, but the discovery of Homo naledi still provides insight into how our ancestors evolved.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is optimistic he’ll be able to muster the votes needed to pass a bill banning research on tissue from aborted fetuses. Opponents of the measure – including some Republicans and the state’s largest business lobby – have expressed concerns that the bill will harm biomedical research in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin legislators are set to hold another public hearing on a bill that would outlaw research on tissue taken from aborted fetuses.
The Senate’s health committee was scheduled to hold a hearing on the Republican-authored measure Tuesday morning in the state Capitol. The Assembly’s criminal justice already has held a hearing and approved the bill, clearing the way for a full vote that chamber but it’s unclear how much support the proposal has among Senate Republicans, who are concerned the measure’s effect on research.
The authors of a bill that would outlaw research on tissue from fetuses aborted are trying to persuade the state Senate’s health committee to approve the proposal.
Sen. Duey Stroebel and Rep. Andre Jacque, both Republicans, told the committee during a public hearing Tuesday that the bill will stop atrocities and aborted children should be treated like humans, not specimens.
Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and leader of the giant neutrino telescope known as IceCube, has won the 2015 Balzan Prize, an award worth about $775,000.
Award-winning University of Wisconsin-Madison Physicist Francis Halzen will discuss The IceCube Project and the hunt for neutrinos at Marquette University’s annual George V. Coyne, S.J. Lecture at 4 p.m. on Oct. 1.
A bill banning certain types of research using fetal tissue from abortions and allowing others likely lacks the votes needed to pass the state Assembly, Speaker Robin Vos said Tuesday.
Associated Press synopsis of the bill forwarded by Wisconsin Republicans that would outlaw research on tissue from aborted fetuses. A public hearing on the measure was held Tuesday.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation added its voice Tuesday to those opposing legislation that would criminalize the use of fetal tissue in biomedical research.
The top Republican in the state Assembly says a controversial proposal that would ban researchers from using most tissue from aborted fetuses likely does not have the votes needed to pass out of his chamber right now.
A bill that would make it a felony to use or sell aborted fetal tissue in Wisconsin had its first state Senate hearing Tuesday, with public comments becoming heated at times.
Using a Jell-O-like substance and stem cells to create a structure that mimics human brain tissue, scientists in Wisconsin have offered a glimpse at how we may one day test the safety of both pharmaceutical drugs and commercial compounds.
Three-dimensional “tissue chips,” grown from stem cells on tiny scaffolds, could become a new way to screen drugs and chemicals for toxicity, UW-Madison researchers said Monday.
Perhaps its stem cell advances are one reason Reuters News Service lists the UW System among the top 10 in its first Top 100 ranking of the most innovative universities in the world. UW came in at No. 8. Stanford University was No. 1.
University of Wisconsin College of Engineering announced Thursday, Sept. 17, a $22 million commitment from the Grainger Foundation for engineering undergraduates.
Noted: “If I’m seeing a patient in the clinic and I know that influenza is hitting in the schools around, I’m much more likely to be thinking of it and treating the patient appropriately,” said Dr. Jon Temte, a professor of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Temte directed the $1.5 million study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study is looking at students in the Oregon School District and working to accurately diagnose influenza cases among students.
Aggressive state efforts to ban the use of fetal tissue in research are alarming some scientists who say such measures will set back efforts to cure the world’s deadliest diseases, including cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.
A new study says that more first or second homes are being built in rural areas, raising concerns about fire and loss of animal habitat.
A conflict is escalating over U.S. researchers’ use of human fetal tissue. Legislators in Wisconsin last week advanced a bill that would make it a felony for scientists working in the state to conduct studies using tissue or cells obtained from recently aborted fetuses. The measure, approved by a committee of the Wisconsin State Assembly, has drawn opposition from universities and research groups, who say it will stifle important disease studies. The bill is likely just the first of many similar state-level efforts, science policy observers predict.
UW-Madison and the City of Madison will join more than 20 other city-university partnerships as beneficiaries of a $1 million grant to launch a program coordinating efforts of research and funding between academic institutions and their communities.
The White House announced the MetroLab Network, funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in a statement Monday along with other “Smart Cities” initiatives.
VIDEO: Sarah Bolser with Joggin for the Noggin talks about their event this weekend in Madison that will benefit the UW Carbone Cancer Center’s Brain Cancer Research Program.
Noted: BioForward honored two of the state’s successful life sciences leaders: Hector F. DeLuca, a University of Wisconsin-Madison vitamin D researcher who has received more than 1,000 patents and developed 12 pharmaceutical products, received the inaugural Hector F. DeLuca Scientific Achievement Award. Through his work, DeLuca has touched the lives of virtually everyone at UW-Madison, and of millions of people around the world, said Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which does patenting and licensing for UW-Madison.
