Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have created synthetic nanoparticles that target lymph nodes and greatly boost vaccine responses, said lead author Ashley St. John, PhD, a researcher at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School . The paper was published online in the journal Nature Materials on Jan.

Kids with Pompe disease fail because of a missing enzyme, GAA, that leads to dangerous sugar build-up, which affects muscles and movement.

Patients treated for acute heart attacks in the United States are readmitted within 30 days more often than in other countries, a finding explained in part by significantly shorter initial hospitalizations, according to an international study led by researchers at Duke University Medical Center. The study, published in the Jan. 4, 2012, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association , found that 60 percent of severe heart attack patients enrolled in the United States were discharged in three days or less, yet 14.5 percent of the U.S.

Five scientists from Duke University Medical Center and three from Duke University have been chosen for the distinct honor of fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

A discovery in fruit flies may be able to tell us more about how animals, including humans, sense potentially dangerous discomforts. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center uncovered naturally occurring variations of a gene named TRPA1 that is important for the function of pain-sensing neurons throughout the animal kingdom. The gene makes an ion channel, which floods sensory neurons with calcium ions when the fly is near a heat source, causing fruit fly larvae to respond with a corkscrew-style rolling motion away from the heat source.  View a video of an escaping larva .

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded three grants to the Duke University Medical Center for HIV projects in the Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery (CAVD) program. The total amount of all three grants is about $37.2 million. A 5-year, $24.6 million grant from the Gates Foundation will allow David Montefiori, Ph.D., professor of surgery and director of the Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development in the Department of Surgery and his collaborators to continue their efforts

Improving health outcomes and quality of life for Durham County residents with type 2 diabetes are the twin goals of a bold collaborative effort spearheaded by Duke University Medical Center, the Durham County Health Department, and the National Center for Geospatial Medicine, based at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment.