Extremely preterm infants have a significant risk of death or severe intracranial hemorrhage in the first seven days of life. For six and a half years, staff at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Regional Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (RNICU) planned and instituted a comprehensive, evidence-based quality improvement initiative — now called the Golden Week Program — to […]

COVID-19, which has killed 1.7 million people worldwide, does not follow a uniform path. Many infected patients remain asymptomatic or have mild symptoms. Others, especially those with comorbidities, can develop severe clinical disease with atypical pneumonia and multiple system organ failure. Since the first cases were reported in December 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes […]

Why is the COVID-19 virus more dangerous in people with existing illnesses? Sadis Matalon, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and colleagues in Texas and San Francisco asked that question in a hypothesis paper published online in Physiological Reviews on March 27. They reviewed, in detail, research literature for hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular illness, chronic […]

Urgent high-impact COVID-19 research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is catching its second breath, thanks to the generosity of Alabama business leader donors and the discovery and clinical skills of UAB researchers. Ten new pilot projects — funded by $402,000 in donations — began Aug. 1. The projects will last six months and were selected […]

Altimmune, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, has announced positive results from the preclinical studies conducted in mice at the University of Alabama at Birmingham of its intranasal COVID-19 vaccine candidate, AdCOVID. The studies — a collaboration between UAB and the Gaithersburg, Maryland-based Altimmune — showed strong serum neutralizing activity and potent mucosal IgA immunity in the respiratory […]

The University of Alabama at Birmingham will join an international effort coordinated by Scripps Research to test drugs for COVID-19. The work centers around ReFRAME, a vast collection of drugs developed for other diseases that are already known to be safe for humans. Researchers at Calibr, the drug development division of Scripps Research, are teaming up with […]

The University of Alabama at Birmingham is launching a collaboration with the biopharmaceutical company Altimmune, Inc. for preclinical testing of a potential vaccine to prevent COVID-19 disease. The testing at UAB will investigate immune responses to the vaccine in mice — a key step before the Gaithersburg, Maryland-based Altimmune can launch a Phase 1 human safety and immunogenicity trial […]

Beta cells in the pancreas produce insulin. Their death is a key feature of Type 1 diabetes, and that loss starts long before diagnosis. However, there has been no straightforward way to measure that early loss. Anath Shalev, M.D., and colleagues at the University of Alabama at Birmingham now have identified an early biomarker of Type 1 diabetes-associated […]

O’Neal Industries Inc., a family-owned global business based in Birmingham, and its shareholders have given the largest single gift in the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s history – a $30 million donation to the Comprehensive Cancer Center. The gift will allow the center to change the lives of more patients and families through transformational cancer research, […]