Andrew MacLean of the Nussenzweig lab has been named a 2025 Cancer Research Institute (CRI) Irvington Postdoctoral Fellow. Congrats!
A study from the Campbell lab demonstrates that a previously published structure and mechanism for RNA capping at work in coronaviruses is incorrect, with potentially sweeping implications for drug development targeting these pathogens. “It is absolutely important that structures be accurate for medicinal chemistry, especially when we’re talking about a critical target for antivirals that is the subject of such intense interest in industry,” says Elizabeth Campbell, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Pathogenesis. “We hope that our work will prevent developers from futilely trying to optimize a drug around an incorrect structure.” Learn more here:
New research from the Strickland lab suggests that amyloid-beta (Aβ) oligomers and the vascular protein fibrinogen may, when forming a complex, contribute to Alzheimer's disease. The findings strengthen the evidence that vascular disease contributes to neurodegeneration and provide hope for Alzheimer's patients in the form of a promising new drug target: Aβ/fibrinogen complexes. “It takes a larger amount of Aβ or fibrinogen alone to cause serious damage in the Alzheimer’s brain,” says Erin Norris, research associate professor in the laboratory of Sidney Strickland at Rockefeller. “But when the two complex together, you only need very small amounts of each to cause damage. There’s a synergistic effect with Aβ and fibrinogen.”
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund has named Clinical Scholar Nicolas Gomez-Banoy of Paul Cohen's lab as a recipient of the 2025 Career Awards for Medical Scientists! He is recognized for his work unraveling genetic determinants of thermogenic adipose tissue in humans. Congrats!
Listen to the latest episode of the The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation podcast series featuring Rockefeller's Leslie Vosshall, who discusses how to approach collaborations, staying optimistic when facing major setbacks, and how old articles inspire her.
Charles Dowell of the Ruta lab has been named a member of the Simons Foundation Society of Fellows! His current research investigates how fruit flies use their sense of smell to navigate large distances to find food. By using neurogenetic tools and the complete wiring diagram (connectome) of the fruit fly brain, he hopes to build a detailed description of how spatial memories of odor structure an animal’s navigational objectives. Congratulations!
Don't miss this piece from The Scientist on how former president of Rockefeller Torsten Wiesel helped discover how the cerebral cortex processes visual information, earning him a Nobel Prize: Reflecting on his eminent career, marked with challenges, disappointments, and triumphs, Wiesel simply said, “It was like exploring nature. You have to try different ways and it’s not that you know what you will find. It’s that you have to be humble. You have to listen to nature and see what you find.”
Rockefeller's Lamia Wahba has been named a 2025 Rita Allen Foundation Scholar for her work on the non-DNA-based mechanisms through which biological information is transmitted across generations. Congratulations! External factors such as diet and stress have been linked to adverse consequences transmissible to offspring. This notion that environmentally-induced changes in an organism’s physiology can be passed on to offspring—once dismissed as heresy—has now gained widespread acceptance. However, critical questions on the prevalence and stability of such induced traits remain. Whether mechanisms driving these seemingly non-genetic changes could enable more rapid evolution in response to new environments than genetic alterations alone remains unclear. Addressing these questions drives research in the Wahba Lab, where Wahba and her team seek to answer a fundamental question facing biologists today: Do we need to radically rethink our views on inheritance to account for nongenetic mechanisms?
For more than 30 years, University Health and Wellness has been a hidden gem of the Rockefeller community, managing a range of health care services and providing primary care and wellness services to university employees, offering everything from biosafety level 3 testing to back massages. "We write prescriptions, we do travel medicine, and we make sure your ears and eyes don’t suffer damage from loud noises or lasers that may be in your workplace,” says Janica Barnett, the director of University Health and Wellness (UHW), an occupational clinic tucked into the ground floor of the Hospital Building. “And if you need blood pressure checks, chronic disease management, or a referral to a specialist, we can help with that too.”
In this Q&A, Rockefeller's Kivanç Birsoy discusses how his research is uncovering the hidden metabolic pathways that cancer cells exploit as well as how this work could help optimize strategies for using nutrition to improve human health: Q: What first drew you to study the intersection of nutrition and cancer? A: I was fascinated by how resourceful cancer cells are. They grow and spread at such an intense rate, far beyond what normal cells do, which means they need a lot more fuel. But the interesting thing about tumors is that they don’t just rely on the fuel that is already available. They actually rewire their own metabolic machinery to grab more nutrients from their environment or to survive even when resources are scarce. Early in my career, I realized that if we could figure out exactly what nutrients cancer cells need and how they’re getting them, we might be able to cut off their supply. Read the full Q&A here:
