Breakthroughs Podcast

With a new $20 million grant from the National Institute on Aging, Northwestern investigator, Linda Teplin, PhD, is extending the work of the Northwestern Juvenile Project to study the long-term consequences of incarceration on age-related conditions, including Alzheimer's and other age-related diseases. This project is the only large-scale longitudinal study of its kind tracking health and outcomes of detained juveniles in the years following their release.

Understanding the systemic drivers of health disparities within marginalized populations is complex. In this episode, Michelle Birkett, PhD, explains how she uses network and quantitative methodologies to study the health of marginalized populations, particularly sexual and gender minority youth. She also discusses her new center, the Center for Computational and Social Sciences in Health, and the importance of transdisciplinary research. 

Nearly one million people in the U.S. are living with Parkinson's disease, a condition for which there is still no known cause or cure. Joseph Mazzulli, PhD, has led two recent studies published in Neuron and Nature Communications uncovering previously unknown cellular mechanisms driving the disease. These studies highlight the potential for new therapeutic targets, including restoring neuronal function for patients with Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases.   

New research from the lab of Issam Ben-Sahra, PhD, could rewrite textbooks on our understanding of cellular metabolism and potentially identify new targets for cancer and metabolic diseases such as obesity. The discovery, published in the journal Science, has been praised for its rigorous simplicity and underscores the importance of understanding the molecular mechanisms that underlie specific biological processes.

Jeffrey Gordon, MD, often called “the father of microbiome research,” is the 2024 recipient of the Mechthild Esser Nemmers Prize in Medical Science. 

In this episode, Gordon discusses the impacts of his long career in gut microbiome research, which has profoundly transformed our understanding of human health. Specifically, he shares the evolution of groundbreaking approaches to treating malnutrition and childhood undernutrition with microbiota-targeted therapies.

The MYC oncogene is notorious in the cancer research world because it is implicated in many advanced or aggressive cancers such as treatment-resistant prostate cancer. In this episode, Sarki Abdulkadir, MD, PhD, shares how his team bucked the conventional notion that the MYC gene is “undruggable” and uncovered a handful of compounds that block MYC gene activity, making prostate cancer tumors sensitive to hormone therapy and opening up a potential new therapeutic target for treatment-resistant prostate cancer.