Our Impact

After nearly two decades spent developing a vaccine agent, U-M researchers have translated this work to the development of a vaccine to treat food allergies. In their new study, the team demonstrates that this vaccine may successfully turn off peanut allergy in mice by altering the immune cell response to peanut exposure.

Using an animal model, U-M researchers are making progress on an extraordinary new artificial womb technology that could one day revolutionize the care of premature infants.

The results obtained from this animal study may provide important guidance for the development and use of anti-inflammatory therapies to minimize central nervous system injury in patients with severe cryptococcal infections, a major source of illness in people with HIV and AIDS.

"Whenever you generate mice exhibiting human disease-like phenotypes,” notes study team lead Ling Qi, Ph.D., “you know you are working on something with fundamental importance."

Researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified and characterized a new long noncoding RNA (lncRNA), called THOR, that is expressed in humans, mice, and zebrafish. It’s unusual for this type of RNA to be conserved throughout species like this. The team’s thinking was that if the RNA plays a role in other animals and species besides humans, it must be important.

A new study, conducted in mice and rats, finds that delivering additional Jagged-1 – a potent osteoinductive protein known to activate the Notch signaling pathway that regulates bone healing – could help jump-start the body’s natural process to repair bone injuries in some patients.

Based on study conducted in mice with colon cancer, ovarian cancer, melanoma, and lung cancer, researchers have discovered that PD-L1 in cells within the tumor microenvironment and lymph nodes may matter more than PD-L1 in tumors.

Researchers from Michigan Medicine and the University of California San Francisco are using mouse models to explore the important role that the protein PDX1 plays in the development and treatment of pancreatic cancer.

After years of research into the root causes of tinnitus, a team of University of Michigan researchers has developed a new experimental treatment device that uses specially timed auditory and electrical signals, first discovered in guinea pigs, to ease tinnitus symptoms.

The early successes of engineered polymeric materials known as hydrogels in animal models represent a new way to heal intestinal damage — a process that one day might be applied to other injured organs.