College News

A University of Oklahoma researcher is part of an international team developing a new way to discover obesity drugs using human cells instead of animal models, an approach that could speed the development of more effective and affordable treatments. The effort is supported by a $12 million grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

For decades, scientists believed that photoreceptors in the retina relied primarily on neighboring support cells, known as the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), to remove waste. While the RPE is still responsible for clearing away the worn-out tips of photoreceptors each day, new findings from the University of Oklahoma reveal that photoreceptors also perform much of their own internal housekeeping. The study is published in Cell Death & Disease.

As faculty members helped first-year medical students into crisp white coats, the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine Class of 2030 crossed an important threshold. The annual White Coat Ceremony marked the beginning of their journey from aspiring doctors to future physicians, symbolizing the trust, compassion and responsibility that come with caring for patients.

University of Oklahoma College of Medicine researcher Jody Summers, Ph.D., has long hypothesized that inflammation plays a role in the development of myopia, or nearsightedness, in which close-up vision is clear but distance vision is blurry. Her laboratory experiments have been convincing, and now she has preliminary human data to support the theory.

The University of Oklahoma College of Medicine has been awarded a five-year, $10.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to create the Oklahoma Center for Biomedical Research Excellence in Sensory Biology. The center will serve as a hub for research into how cells sense and respond to their environment and the diseases that can occur when that process malfunctions.