Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC) disease is a rare, genetic, cholesterol storage disorder that is always fatal, primarily striking children before or during adolescence, and it has a long history with the Notre Dame family. In 1994, Notre Dame alumni Cindy and Michael Parseghian founded the Ara Parseghian Medical Research Foundation...

The WHO names Tuberculosis (TB) as one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide and over 95 percent of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. To improve the global health community’s understanding of TB and provide information that could help treat it, Notre Dame researchers have developed...

  Siyuan Zhang, Nancy Dee Assistant Professor of Cancer Research, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences and affiliated member of Harper Cancer Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame, recently won a grant from the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI). Awarded Pilot Funding for Research Use of Core...

New research in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters shows scientists have developed a method to track perfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) in the body. PFAS are potentially toxic chemicals found in stain-resistant products, nonstick cookware, fire-fighting foams and — most recently — fast food wrappers. For the first time,...

Jeff Schorey In the time it takes to read this article, half a dozen people will have died from tuberculosis (TB). It is a cruel and persistent killer, claiming 1.8 million lives each year, an estimated 200,000 of which are children, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Considering the...

Click for larger image Nine University of Notre Dame graduate students will compete for prize money while attempting to explain their research in three minutes during the third annual Shaheen Three Minute Thesis competition on Monday (March 27). Known as 3MT, the goal of the competition is for Ph.D. students...

February 28, 2017 – For the first time, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a list of “priority pathogens” which constitute a current and extreme threat to human health. WHO is seeking to promote new efforts in the discovery and development of new antibiotics to address a growing threat of...

Coinciding with the World Rare Disease Day, Notre Dame acknowledges a recent, generous gift from Notre Dame parents David and Cathleen Reisenauer of Morgan Hill, Calif., which will allow the Warren Family Research Center for Drug Discovery and Development to initiate a new area of research, focusing on the rare...

Left to right: Finalists Julia Beck, Elizabeth Loughran and Stefan Freed The College of Science Shaheen 3MT competition began with a big bang on Monday in Jordan Hall of Science. Julia Beck (Biochemistry), Elizabeth Loughran (Integrated Biomedical Sciences), and Stefan Freed (Biological Sciences) took the top three spots, and will...

Rare Disease Day takes place annually on the last day of February. Its goal is to raise awareness amongst the general public and policy-makers. Global Genes maintains the RARE List™ of 7,000 rare diseases defined in the United States where a prevalence of less than 200,000 cases is the primary...

Cody J. Smith, the Elizabeth and Michael Gallagher Assistant Professor of Neural Development and Regeneration, has been selected as a 2017 recipient of the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship. Every year the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation selects 126 promising early-career scholars from the fields of science, engineering, technology, mathematics, and economics,...

The University of Notre Dame’s Edwin Michael, Professor, Department of Biological Sciences and member of the Eck Institute for Global Health, is on the cutting edge of an initiative to address the sociology of disease transmission and control, by factoring in the impacts that complex transmission dynamics and social determinants...

Kasturi Haldar, Director of the Boler-Parseghian Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases, (left) discusses one of the posters, about Neurofibromatosis 1, with biological science graduate student Stefan Freed and Brooke Gonzalez, a Notre Dame senior. Research has been performed on only about 300 of the 7,000 known diseases, according to...

Biochemistry graduate student Carolyn Shirey has been selected to attend the 2017 National Graduate Student Symposium (NGSS) at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Selection in the NGSS is extraordinarily competitive as application is by invitation only. Over 1,500 students were invited to apply for the 2017 symposium...

NDnano is hosting a one-day symposium on Thursday, ​March 30 entitled "Nanotechnology in the Treatment of Neurodegenerative Disorders." The keynote will be given by Kevin Tracey, M.D., President & CEO of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. Students are welcome and encouraged to attend the technical session and/or present their own...

For decades, professor Paul Helquist has partnered with colleagues in Sweden to send undergraduate and graduate chemistry students to each others’ laboratories—around 50 in total—to perform research at Notre Dame, the University of Stockholm, Gothenburg University, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm as well as the Astra Zeneca pharmaceutical...

Paul Huber and Norman Dovichi are exploring how a disruption to the SUMO protein’s ability to regulate embryo development may be linked to congenital heart defects.

The University of Notre Dame’s Alex Perkins, Eck Family Assistant Professor, and member of the Department of Biological Sciences, the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, the Eck Institute for Global Health, and the Environmental Change Initiative, was named a 2017 Early Career Fellow by the Ecological Society...

Pinar Zorlutuna and a team of University researchers have created a new type of diode, one that is made entirely of cardiac muscle cells and fibroblasts. Their recently published paper titled “Muscle-Cell-Based ‘Living Diodes’” discusses how using muscle cells as the diode components is ideal for cell-based information processing. An...

It’s been one year since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Zika a public health emergency. The virus, transmitted through the Aedes aegypti mosquito, has since been declared to be a long-term problem rather than an emergency, but Zika continues to concern health professionals. At the Eck Institute for Global...