Hopkins Highlights

Bloomberg professor claims universe is expanding faster than expected

Hopkins astrophysicist and 2011 Nobel Prize in physics winner Adam Riess recently presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in the National Harbor. He suggested that the universe is expanding faster than previously predicted and that a new particle may be the cause of this deviation. This particle, called a sterile neutrino could be the fourth type of neutrino discovered by physicists and would explain why the universe is now expanding nine percent faster than expected based on data. Riess submitted his latest findings for publication.

Hopkins professors call for shared innovation in the life sciences

Phillip Phan, a professor at the Carey Business School, and Dean Wong, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, recently published a commentary in Nature Index criticizing the reluctance of companies in the life sciences industry to collaborate and share information with peers. Phan and Wong state that because of this reluctance, drugs take longer to be brought onto the market and companies are giving up on major research areas such as psychopharmacology. The authors blame these problems on a failure of open exchange of information between pharmaceutical companies but hope that efforts like the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium created in 2012, will help to propagate a culture of knowledge sharing.

Center for Cancer Target and Development created with Cancer Institute grant

Associate Professor of biomedical engineering and computer science Joel Bader and Associate Professor of cell biology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Andrew Ewald have joined with clinicians to create the Johns Hopkins Center for Cancer Target and Development. Bader and Ewald hope to unite computational biology approaches with traditional biology to study genetic patterns in breast cancer tumors. The pair are particularly intrigued by metastasis, the process by which cancer spreads to different parts of the body, and hope to use volunteer breast tissue to examine organoids, or 3D cultures derived from cells in hopes of improving patient outcomes.