Our Impact

It was thought to be strange and risky in the 1970s, but research with sheep paved the way to a new machine that gave critically-ill patients with failing hearts and lungs a chance for their organs to rest and repair themselves. To date: 50,000 patients treated; more than 2,000 of them right here at U-M, and thousands of lives saved.

U-M researchers are using the regenerative properties of zebrafish to develop novel strategies for treating blinding eye diseases.

Scientists and doctors have long wanted to know how much insulin a person has, but haven't been able to know the exact amount without physically removing the pancreas from a deceased patient for review. But a new study in the journal Diabetes details how a group of researchers was finally able to visualize stored insulin in the pancreas of a living creature -- in this case, a mouse.

A small device implanted under the skin can improve breast cancer survival by catching cancer cells, slowing the development of metastatic tumors in other organs and allowing time to intervene with surgery or other therapies. The study, done in mice, expands on earlier research from the same team of U-M researchers that showed that the implantable scaffold device effectively captures metastatic cancer cells.

"We love animals, and we love people, and that's why we do the job we do."

Since the 1950s, animal studies have shown that pretreatment of the gut with antibiotics before trauma or other critical illness can protect against lung injury and death. As part of their recently published findings in Nature Microbiology, U-M researchers have concluded that critical illness involving the lungs has more to do with disruptions to the body's natural population of microbes, or microbiome, than previously thought.