Welcome back to another weekly roundup of research news from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia! Exciting and important pediatric research spans everything from conditions that are common and treatable, such as ear infections, to others more rare and deadly, such as cancer.
This week’s stories have elements that sound like fiction, but all are real, new scientific and medical findings: A condition that turns the body’s soft tissues into bone has new hope for a future treatment. Genetic superheroes walk among us, and they may not even know it. And pediatricians may have a tool to double their success in helping their patients’ parents quit smoking.
Welcome to our latest weekly summary of research news from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia! This has been a full week, including multiple studies of genetic influences on weight in childhood, a useful autism research explainer, findings on long-term impacts of congenital heart disease, and a neurological phenomenon with a literary namesake.
Researchers from the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia investigating a serious, rare disease called common variable immunodeficiency have discovered a gene linked to immune defense.
The Precision Medicine Initiative, which President Obama first announced in his 2015 State of the Union speech, calls for new funding to build a national infrastructure to help sophisticated biomedical data flow from health clinics to DNA sequencing labs and back again as innovative treatments.