Over 60 years of life-saving research and humane animal care
By Jordana Lenon, Senior Editor, Wisconsin National Primate Research Center Forty years ago today, the United States Environmental Protection Agency banned commercially manufactured polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), acting on evidence of their extreme environmental persistence and toxicity. Five years before the April 19, 1979 ban, New Scientist published “US losing fight against PCBs – a new cancer risk?” The magazine referenced its 1973 …
By Jordana Lenon Preeclampsia is a medical condition that affects pregnant women, raising a mother’s blood pressure and threatening both her life and her baby’s. Accompanying symptoms include water retention and protein in the urine. Rarer, but more severe outcomes can include pain, headaches, nausea or even seizures, liver or kidney failure. Most women can …
By Jordana Lenon See also Castro IM, Ricciardi MJ, Gonzalez-Nieto L, Rakasz EG, Lifson JD, Desrosiers RC, Watkins DI, Martins MA. Recombinant Herpesvirus Vectors: Durable Immune Responses and Durable Protection Against SIVmac239 Acquisition. J Virol. 2021 Apr 28:JVI.00330-21. For the first time, scientists have used a genetically engineered herpesvirus to achieve significant vaccine protection against the AIDS virus …
By Jessica Knackert, WNPRC editorial intern A male Bornean orang-utan in Tanjung Puting National Park, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. (Photo by Graham L. Banes) Research at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center (WNPRC) has brought about major accomplishments in biomedical research, whether it be through advancements in various treatments and therapies, discovering the origins of numerous …
Twenty years ago, WNPRC scientist James Thomson derived the world’s first human embryonic stem cells — and later the first induced pluripotent stem cells — launching a new era of regenerative medicine. This piece marks the anniversary and traces how those breakthroughs, born from nonhuman-primate research at WNPRC, now drive dozens of clinical trials.
University of Pittsburgh and Wisconsin National Primate Research Center writers contributed to this story Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading infectious cause of death worldwide. The bacterial infection killed roughly 1.6 million people in 2017, according to the National Institutes of Health. In the past 200 years, TB claimed the lives of more than 1 billion …
WNPRC scientists Marissa Kraynak and Ricki Colman used marmoset monkeys to probe why menopause raises women’s risk of diabetes and weight gain — and found, surprisingly, that the decline in ovarian estradiol may play a much smaller role in metabolism than previously thought, pointing instead to estrogens produced elsewhere in the body, including the brain.