DALLAS – Feb. 11, 2026 – Fewer concussions were reported among Texas high school athletes and students in urban and lower-income districts than in higher-income suburban districts despite larger enrollments, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers found in a study.

Mathew Stokes, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at UT Southwestern.

The research, published in Sage Open Pediatrics, was based on data collected through the statewide ConTex2 project led by UT Southwestern and the Medical Advisory Committee of the University Interscholastic League (UIL) in Texas and Rank One, a school activities management platform.

“Concussions are a major issue, with an estimated 15% of school athletes experiencing a concussion at some point that disrupts daily life and academic performance,” said senior author Mathew Stokes, M.D., Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at UT Southwestern. “While reporting differences are likely multifactorial, our findings suggest that differences in concussion awareness and access to resources such as medical personnel, athletic trainers, and protective equipment may contribute.”

Researchers analyzed more than 6,300 concussion cases reported by high school athletes as well as participants in activities such as marching band and cheerleading in grades 9-12. All Texas schools participating in the UIL are encouraged to report concussion data to the ConTex2 data portal, while all 6A high schools, the state’s largest, are mandated to report. 

Joshua Beitchman, M.D., M.B.S., is a clinical resident in Pediatric Neurology at UT Southwestern.

The analysis included data covering age, gender, grade, sport, mechanism of the injury, school, and district. The schools involved were segmented by socioeconomic classification and geographic location (urban, suburban, town, or rural). While the study analyzed discrepancies in how concussions are identified and reported, it did not quantify the true frequency of concussions occurring within the high school athlete population.

Concussions were reported less frequently in lower-income areas of Dallas-Fort Worth (in Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, Denton, and Rockwall counties), suggesting that financial disparities and resource availability may affect concussion reporting. Activities that had statistically significant differences between urban and suburban schools included cheerleading, cross country, softball, and marching band.

“While the differences were small between high socioeconomic and low socioeconomic districts in popular sports such as football, they were far more pronounced in smaller sports with fewer participants, such as wrestling, cross country, and swimming and diving, as well as activities such as drill team and band,” said co-author Joshua Beitchman, M.D., M.B.S., a clinical resident in Pediatric Neurology at UT Southwestern. “This points to awareness and resource allocation as an issue, as lower-resourced districts may struggle to provide awareness training and on-site medical coverage for smaller sports.”

The research builds on previous studies at UT Southwestern utilizing the statewide North Texas Concussion Registry (ConTex), which captures longitudinal data on concussions at Texas high schools across the lifespan. UTSW launched the ongoing ConTex registry in 2015.

C. Munro Cullum, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Neurological Surgery at UT Southwestern. He holds the Pam Blumenthal Distinguished Professorship in Clinical Psychology and is an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.

“One of the best ways we can improve safety for young athletes is providing equitable access to concussion awareness and medical resources, regardless of where or what they play,” said C. Munro Cullum, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Neurological Surgery at UTSW and Principal Investigator for ConTex. “Unrecognized or unreported concussions can delay treatment and increase the risk of prolonged symptoms, academic difficulties, and repeat injury. Our goal is to improve recognition and reporting so these athletes can receive timely, individualized care and reduce the long-term impacts of their injury.”

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to this study are first author Sarah Bivans, M.D., Pediatrics resident, and Cason Hicks, M.S., Lead Clinical Research Coordinator in the Cullum Lab.

Dr. Cullum holds the Pam Blumenthal Distinguished Professorship in Clinical Psychology and is an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute. 

This work was partially funded by ConTex, the Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair (TIBIR) at UTSW, and the O’Donnell Brain Institute. Ongoing research that builds off these findings includes the Care4Kids study funded by the National Institutes of Health-National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (U54NS121688-01).

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,300 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians in more than 80 specialties care for more than 143,000 hospitalized patients, attend to more than 470,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.3 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Feb. 10, 2026 – Certain chemotherapies are associated with an increased long-term risk of subsequent tumors in survivors of childhood cancer, according to a study led by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center. The findings, published in JAMA Network Open, could have important implications for the care of adults who had cancer as a child, particularly those treated for leukemia and brain tumors.

“This is the first large study that follows childhood cancer survivors into adulthood to demonstrate that specific chemotherapies – in addition to cranial radiation – independently increase the risk of single and multiple meningiomas, underscoring the need for lifelong monitoring as survivors age,” said lead author Daniel C. Bowers, M.D., Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at UT Southwestern and Medical Director of Pediatric Neuro-Oncology at Children’s Health. Dr. Bowers also serves as Medical Director of the After the Cancer Experience (ACE) Program for childhood cancer survivors and is a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.

Daniel C. Bowers, M.D., is Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at UT Southwestern and Medical Director of Pediatric Neuro-Oncology at Children’s Health. Dr. Bowers also serves as Medical Director of the After the Cancer Experience (ACE) Program for childhood cancer survivors.

The study analyzed data from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS), a National Cancer Institute-funded, multi-institutional cohort of 24,886 individuals diagnosed with cancer before age 21 between 1970 and 1999 who survived at least five years after diagnosis. Among these survivors, 471 were diagnosed with a total of 710 meningiomas decades after their original cancer treatment. Meningiomas are tumors that form in the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord, and most are benign and treatable. Thirty-five years after primary cancer diagnosis, survivors had a cumulative meningioma incidence of 2.3%, with risk continuing to rise across adulthood.

Cranial radiation therapy (CRT) has long been recognized as a major risk factor for the development of subsequent meningiomas. However, this study is the first to demonstrate that specific chemotherapy agents independently contribute to risk, even after accounting for radiation exposure.

“This study newly identifies platinum agents, antimetabolite chemotherapy, and intrathecal methotrexate as independent risk factors for subsequent meningiomas,” Dr. Bowers said.

In addition to chemotherapy exposure and CRT, the study identified females and patients who were first diagnosed with cancer at a younger age as being at particular risk. Nearly one-third of affected survivors developed multiple meningiomas, and long-term follow-up showed substantial mortality: Nearly 1 in 5 survivors diagnosed with meningioma died within 15 years, with meningioma itself the most common cause of death. These findings highlight the complex medical needs of long-term cancer survivors and reinforce the importance of early detection and specialized follow-up care.

Unlike meningiomas in the general population, which typically occur later in life, survivors in this study developed tumors decades earlier, underscoring the need for lifelong risk-based follow-up.

With these findings, the risk of subsequent meningiomas for childhood cancer survivors is still low overall and extremely low for those not exposed to cranial radiation. Only those adult patients who develop symptoms, such as headaches, weakness, or behavioral changes, should be considered for screening, researchers noted.

Dr. Bowers has previously led clinical studies examining morbidity and mortality among childhood cancer survivors with secondary meningiomas and has served as lead investigator in the development of screening guidelines through the International Late Effects of Childhood Cancer Guideline Harmonization Group.

The findings support efforts to refine long-term counseling, surveillance, and screening strategies for survivors at highest risk. The ACE Program through UT Southwestern and Children’s Health provides comprehensive, lifelong follow-up care for individuals treated for cancer during childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood.

“This study provides a clearer understanding of meningioma risk and long-term outcomes among childhood cancer survivors,” Dr. Bowers said. “It supports the development of more targeted counseling and screening recommendations for those at highest risk.”

This research was funded by grants from the National Cancer Institute (U24CA55727) and the National Cancer Institute Cancer Center Support Grant (P30CA142543).

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,300 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians in more than 80 specialties care for more than 143,000 hospitalized patients, attend to more than 470,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.3 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Jan. 28, 2026 – Like falling dominoes, a sequence of activity in an area of the zebra finch brain plays to completion once initiated, allowing these birds to produce their full courtship song, a study led by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers shows. The findings, published in Nature, could lend insight into how the brain encodes the complex neural activity patterns behind certain motor behaviors – such as human speech.

Todd Roberts, Ph.D., is Professor of Neuroscience and an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern. He is a Thomas O. Hicks Scholar in Medical Research.

“Together, our results show that brain circuits learn to fuse sequential neuronal activity patterns for behaviors, ultimately achieving holistic control of naturally learned behaviors,” said Todd Roberts, Ph.D., Professor of Neuroscience and an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern. “This type of learning can significantly reduce the conscious effort needed to produce well-learned behaviors, like speaking, typing, or playing your favorite musical instrument.”

Dr. Roberts co-led the study with first author Massimo Trusel, Ph.D., Instructor of Neuroscience.

There are about 4,000 songbird species worldwide. In about a third of these, males attract mates by singing a single song. These include zebra finches, a popular pet in the U.S. that learn their song from their fathers as juveniles and in adulthood sing their imitated melody thousands of times per day.

Each zebra finch song contains several “syllables” the birds repeat in the same order. But how these songs are generated in the brain has been unclear, Dr. Trusel explained. Research has shown that a brain region called HVC is critical for birdsongs – removing it blocks song generation. However, whether the chain of nerve cell activity necessary to organize the learned song is fully contained within HVC or instead requires outside input has been unknown.

Massimo Trusel, Ph.D., is Instructor of Neuroscience at UT Southwestern.

To answer this question, the researchers engineered HVC neurons in zebra finches to be excited when exposed to light. They found that a milliseconds-long flash of light while a song was in progress resulted in the birds immediately stopping and then rapidly restarting their song from the beginning. This suggests the neural activity patterns necessary to generate the songs might be self-contained within HVC, Dr. Trusel said.

To confirm this idea, the researchers used similar genetic engineering to control the activity of neural inputs to HVC from other parts of the brain. They found that none of these circuits are needed for song completion. However, input from a brain region called the thalamus appears to be necessary to get a song started. Dr. Trusel said these results suggest that although some input is necessary to initiate singing, only neural activity within HVC is required for the birds to sing a complete song.

A closer look at the neural populations that make up HVC showed they are more strongly interconnected than previously realized and appear to work together for song generation. Using the findings they gathered in this study, the scientists created a computational model of how neural activity seems to flow through the brain to guide zebra finches’ songs, an effort led by Wenhao Zhang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics and an Investigator in the O’Donnell Brain Institute. This model reproduced the same neural and animal behavior the researchers saw, lending support to the idea that HVC produces the complex neural activity patterns necessary to generate birdsong without additional inputs, other than an instigating signal.

“This study resolves a long-standing question about how interacting brain regions generate seamless motor behavior,” said William T. Dauer, M.D., Director of the O’Donnell Brain Institute and Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience. “By defining how initiation signals give rise to self-organized neural dynamics, it offers a new framework for understanding skilled actions like speech. The collaboration between Drs. Roberts and Zhang highlights the O’Donnell Brain Institute’s commitment to uniting experimental and theoretical neuroscience – an area central to OBI’s mission.”

Dr. Roberts said these findings suggest how the brain might direct a variety of complex motor behaviors with only a little conscious effort – such as speaking, playing a musical instrument, or driving a well-traveled route – by establishing patterns of neural activity in the brain and then stringing them together for seamless production of the full behavior. The researchers plan to continue studying this phenomenon in other songbird species that vary their songs, a system more akin to human speech.

Additional UTSW researchers who contributed to this study are Jie Cao, Ph.D., Instructor of Neuroscience; Harshida Pancholi, Ph.D., postdoctoral researcher; and Ethan Marks, B.S., and Ziran Zhao, B.S., graduate student researchers.

Dr. Roberts is a Thomas O. Hicks Scholar in Medical Research. Dr. Zhang is a Lupe Murchison Foundation Scholar in Medical Research.

This study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (UF1NS115821, R01NS108424, and F99NS124172).

About UT Southwestern Medical Center   

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,300 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians in more than 80 specialties care for more than 143,000 hospitalized patients, attend to more than 470,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.3 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Jan. 26, 2026 – Disruptions in patterns of daily activity and rest may provide early clues to heightened dementia risk, a study co-led by a UT Southwestern Medical Center scientist found. The research, published in Neurology, suggests data from a widely used heart monitor could help identify circadian rhythm changes associated with dementia in older adults. 

“Circadian rhythm is the body’s internal clock that regulates physiological functions over a 24-hour cycle,” said Wendy Wang, Ph.D., M.P.H., Assistant Professor of Epidemiology in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health and of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern. Dr. Wang co-led the study with Lin Yee Chen, M.B.B.S., M.S., Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota.

Wendy Wang, Ph.D., M.P.H., is Assistant Professor of Epidemiology in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health and of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern. She is an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.

“Among community-based adults, altered rest-activity rhythms, which are markers of circadian rhythms, may be a risk factor for dementia,” Dr. Wang said. “A key aspect of our study was the novelty of using accelerometer data from an ambulatory monitor to measure rest-activity rhythms. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to use rest-activity rhythm measures obtained from chest-worn electrocardiogram (ECG) monitors to assess dementia risk.”

The researchers analyzed data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study, a long-running, community-based cohort. The analysis included more than 2,000 participants who had not been diagnosed with dementia and wore a chest-mounted ambulatory ECG monitor for up to two weeks between 2016 and 2017.

Using the monitor’s built-in accelerometer, the team assessed several features of the participants’ daily activity patterns, including the strength of activity cycles, fragmentation of activity and rest across day and night, and timing of peak activity.

Over an average follow-up of about three years, 176 participants developed dementia. After adjusting for age, education, cardiovascular risk factors, and genetic susceptibility (APOE ε4), the analysis showed that weaker daily rhythms, greater fragmentation, and later peak activity times were each associated with a higher likelihood of developing dementia.

“Disruptions in circadian rhythms may alter various processes, such as the regulation of oxidative stress or inflammation, which may ultimately lead to dementia,” Dr. Wang said. 

The study participants included a racially diverse group of older adults, with an average age of 79 and nearly one-quarter identifying as Black. As a result, the findings help clarify how dementia risk relates to circadian patterns in populations that have been underrepresented in prior research and in late adulthood, when disease-related changes are already emerging.

Because ambulatory heart monitors are commonly used in clinical care, information collected during routine monitoring could eventually complement existing approaches to assessing dementia risk, the researchers said. They cautioned, however, that additional studies are needed before such data could be applied clinically. 

“Future work assessing circadian rhythms earlier in life is warranted, especially given the long preclinical stage of dementia,” Dr. Wang said.

The findings also help lay the groundwork for future studies to explore whether interventions such as light therapy or lifestyle modifications can strengthen circadian rhythms and potentially reduce dementia risk.

Dr. Wang is an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.

The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (T32HL007779, R01HL126637, R01HL141288, R01HL158022, K24HL155813), the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (75N92022D00001, 75N92022D00002, 75N92022D00003, 75N92022D00004, 75N92022D00005), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (RF1NS127266, RF1NS135615), and the National Institute on Aging (R01AG075883, K01AG076967, K01AG080122).

About UT Southwestern Medical Center    

UT  Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Jan. 22, 2026 – UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have discovered that increasing the levels of a protein called BACH2 makes engineered cancer-fighting immune cells behave more like stem cells, improving their therapeutic effectiveness. The findings, published in Nature Immunology, suggest new strategies for improving the efficacy of these immune cells, known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells.

“Using a mouse model of solid cancer, we found that programming CAR T cells to acquire stem-like properties during manufacturing significantly enhances their antitumor activity. This fine-tuning of CAR T cells may represent a powerful strategy to overcome key barriers in solid tumor immunotherapy,” said Tuoqi Wu, Ph.D., who co-led the study with Chen Yao, Ph.D. Both researchers are Assistant Professors of Immunology and in the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at UT Southwestern.

Tuoqi Wu, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Immunology and in the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at UT Southwestern.

CAR T cells have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as an anticancer therapy since 2017. These cells are created by collecting a cancer patient’s own T cells, then genetically engineering them to fight that patient’s specific cancer. Although CAR T cells have shown enormous promise in fighting blood cancers, such as leukemias and lymphomas, they offer long-lasting remission in only a subset of cases. Additionally, CAR T cells are largely ineffective at fighting solid tumors.

This inefficacy mostly stems from a phenomenon known as exhaustion, Dr. Wu explained. Constant stimulation of CAR T cells by antigens on cancer cell surfaces eventually leaves them unable to fight cancer cells, proliferate, or respond to immune checkpoint-inhibiting drugs. They also show markers of a dysregulated metabolism and ultimately die. Understanding why exhaustion develops will be key to making CAR T cells a more effective therapy for all cancers.

Several years ago, Drs. Wu and Yao found an important clue in another study they performed examining T-cell exhaustion in chronic viral infections. There, T cells had a range of propensities to become exhausted. But those least likely to become exhausted had properties more akin to stem cells. Those with higher “stemness” produced more of a protein known as BACH2.

Chen Yao, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Immunology and in the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at UT Southwestern.

To see if the same was true in CAR T cells, the researchers developed these cells from mice. Much like in the previous study, cells with higher expression of the gene for BACH2 also maintained more stem-like qualities than those with lower expression. Cells with more BACH2 were also less likely to become exhausted and fought off leukemia better than those with less BACH2. The researchers found similar results when they looked at BACH2 expression in human CAR T-cell samples.

Capitalizing on these findings, the researchers generated mouse CAR T cells that produced varying levels of BACH2. CAR T cells that produced the highest levels of BACH2 remained the most stem-like and were the best at resisting exhaustion while growing in petri dishes. Using a different strategy, the researchers temporarily boosted the amount of BACH2 that CAR T cells produced during their manufacture, then infused them into a mouse model of neuroblastoma, a type of solid malignant tumor that develops in nerve cell precursors. This tweak significantly improved the cells’ cancer-controlling ability compared with typical CAR T cells, restricting the tumors’ growth.

Drs. Wu and Yao said their study suggests that increasing BACH2 production in CAR T cells could offer a viable technique to help them resist exhaustion and fight both blood and solid tumor cancers. They hope to eventually test this strategy in clinical trials.

Dr. Wu is an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern.

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to this study are first authors Taidou Hu, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher, Ziang Zhu, Ph.D., and Ying Luo, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher; Jonathan Hoar, M.S., and Sejal S. Shinde, M.S., research assistants; and Safuwra Wizzard, B.S., B.A., and Kiddist Yihunie, M.S., graduate student researchers.

This study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (AI158294, AG083398, AG056524, and AI154450); the Clinic and Laboratory Integration Program and the Lloyd J. Old STAR Program from the Cancer Research Institute; the V Scholar Award from the V Foundation; the Grant for Junior Faculty from the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR); the Hevolution/AFAR New Investigator Award in Aging Biology and Geroscience Research; the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (RR210035 and RP250282); the Department of Defense (HT94252310801); and a National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Center Support Grant (P30CA142543).

About UT Southwestern Medical Center    

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Dec. 24, 2025 – UT Southwestern Medical Center has been selected to operate the new Texas Behavioral Health Center – the first state acute care behavioral health hospital in the Dallas-Fort Worth area – announcing plans to care for its first patients this summer.

In partnership with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), UT Southwestern led the planning, design, and construction of the nearly 505,000-square-foot hospital, which is a key part of the state’s comprehensive plan to expand inpatient psychiatric services. Following thoughtful deliberations at the state level, UT Southwestern will be entrusted with operating the innovative facility.

“Texas has benefited greatly from the vision and commitment of our Legislature and its leaders, who have made significant investments in programs and facilities across the state to address behavioral health needs,” said Daniel K. Podolsky, M.D., President of UT Southwestern Medical Center. “UT Southwestern, HHSC, and community stakeholders have worked collaboratively to advance the shared goals of increasing access to care and improving patient outcomes statewide. UT Southwestern stands ready and eager to assume responsibility for operating this state-of-the-art facility and delivering essential behavioral health services to Texans in need.”

The new hospital includes several landscaped outdoor courtyards and an open-air balcony with tables to promote a healing environment.

When fully operational, the hospital will provide 292 beds, both civil and forensic, to serve adult and pediatric patients.

“We plan to introduce new models of care over time, such as interventional psychiatry,” said Hicham Ibrahim, M.D., M.B.A., Professor of Psychiatry and Vice President and Senior Executive Officer of Ambulatory Services at UT Southwestern, who will serve as Interim Chief Executive Officer for the state hospital. “These services are designed to expand access, improve outcomes, and strengthen the continuum of behavioral health care for North Texas and the state.” 

UT Southwestern brings extensive experience to this new responsibility. UT Southwestern faculty and care teams already deliver evidence-based, patient-centered behavioral health care across multiple hospital systems and settings, integrating pharmacological, psychotherapeutic, and neuromodulation treatments with the specialized medical care this patient population often requires. That experience and expertise will inform the clinical programs, staffing, and operations necessary to run the center safely and effectively.

The Texas Behavioral Health Center is located in Dallas’ Southwestern Medical District at the southwest corner of Medical District Drive and Harry Hines Boulevard near Zale Lipshy Pavilion – William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital, Parkland Memorial Hospital, and Children’s Medical Center Dallas. Children’s Health donated $261 million to support construction of the eventual pediatric unit, which will be operated by UT Southwestern along with the adult units.

“This new hospital will allow us to respond to the evolving mental health needs of our community,” said Kala Bailey, M.D., M.B.A., Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs of Psychiatry, and a member of the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute, who will serve as Interim Chief Medical Officer for the new Center. “As the DFW population continues to grow, we will be ready to provide much-needed access to comprehensive, inpatient mental health services and set a new standard for behavioral health care for our community.”

Dr. Podolsky holds the Philip O’Bryan Montgomery, Jr., M.D. Distinguished Presidential Chair in Academic Administration and the Charles Cameron Sprague Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science. Dr. Bailey holds the Drs. Anne and George Race Professorship of Student Psychiatry.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Dec. 22, 2025 – A designer version of the tau protein, developed by a team led by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers, maintains its biological function while resisting aggregation, a pathological trait linked to neurodegenerative diseases called tauopathies. These findings, reported in Structure, could lead to new treatments for conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and progressive supranuclear palsy.

“This is the first step toward creating a molecule that could, in principle, replace a protein that’s pathogenic (disease-causing) while still retaining its normal function,” said study leader Lukasz Joachimiak, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases and of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UT Southwestern.

Lukasz Joachimiak, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases and of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UT Southwestern. He is an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute and an Effie Marie Cain Scholar in Medical Research.

Tau plays an essential role in cells, where it regulates assembly and stability of microtubules, protein assemblies that serve as highways to guide vesicles, organelles, and other components through cytoplasm. Tau binds to microtubules through a part of the tau protein in which a stretch of amino acids is repeated either three or four times. These versions of tau are known as 3R or 4R, respectively.

In tauopathies, tau proteins stick together, or aggregate, forming threadlike clumps that create deposits in the brain. Previous research has shown that the vast majority of tauopathies occur from aggregation of the 4R form of tau, Dr. Joachimiak explained. But why this happens – and whether it’s possible to modify tau to prevent aggregation without disrupting microtubule binding – has been unknown.

To answer these questions, researchers from the Joachimiak Lab and their colleagues constructed fragments of tau made of the 4R repeats and the so-called VQIVYK motif – the portion of the protein responsible for forming clumps – changing a few amino acids between these sections to mimic those found in 3R. Although fragments made without the amino acid substitutions readily aggregated in test tubes, the designed fragments did not.

A closer look revealed why: The section between the repeats and the VQIVYK motif in the designed fragments formed a rigid curve that gave them a hairpin shape, preventing them from contacting VQIVYK motifs on other fragments and forming clumps.

Further experiments confirmed that this design strategy also worked in larger pieces of tau and in cells, with the altered protein thwarting aggregation with natural 4R tau. Importantly, Dr. Joachimiak said, changing these amino acids didn’t affect tau’s ability to bind to microtubules, suggesting the altered protein can still perform its biological function.

“The fact that the engineered tau variants retained microtubule binding indicates it may be possible to preserve physiological function while reducing pathogenic aggregation,” he said.

Dr. Joachimiak added that his team’s future research will test whether replacing natural tau with this designer version can thwart tauopathies in animal models, a step toward crafting new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.

“Many studies have examined tau isoforms, aggregation mechanisms, and mutations such as those associated with frontotemporal dementia,” he said. “But few, if any, have undertaken rational design of tau variants to reduce aggregation while retaining its function as we have with this research.”

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to this study are first author Sofia Bali, Ph.D., a former graduate student researcher in the Joachimiak Lab and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco; Josep Rizo, Ph.D., Professor of Biophysics, Biochemistry, and Pharmacology; Pawel M. Wydorski, Ph.D., postdoctoral researcher; Aleksandra Wosztyl, M.S., graduate student researcher; and Nabil Morgan, B.S., Research Assistant.

Dr. Joachimiak is an Effie Marie Cain Scholar in Medical Research. He and Dr. Rizo are Investigators in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.

This study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (F31NS12751301 and R01AG076459), an Effie Marie Cain Scholarship in Medical Research, a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Collaborative Science Award (2018-191983), The Welch Foundation, and Target ALS.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center    

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Dec. 19, 2025 – Early in his career, Ralf Kittler, Ph.D., attracted the attention of academic leaders at UT Southwestern Medical Center with his studies of DNA transcription factors and their role in tumor growth and suppression. His promising cancer research earned him an invitation to relocate to Dallas, where a $2 million grant from the state-funded Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) would help create his own lab at UTSW and turbocharge his scientific investigations.

Arriving from the University of Chicago in 2009, Dr. Kittler was the first of more than 300 highly sought-after scientists who have been recruited to Texas through the state’s multimillion-dollar program to advance the understanding and treatment of cancer.

In the more than 15 years since then, Dr. Kittler has become an Associate Professor at UT Southwestern’s Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development and the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center as well as in the Department of Pharmacology. And CPRIT has provided more than $250 million in financial support to add faculty at UT Southwestern, giving it a competitive edge to attract some of the world’s most dynamic and in-demand cancer researchers.

Ralf Kittler, Ph.D., (left) Associate Professor at UT Southwestern’s Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development, and Robert Bachoo, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Neurology, have studied ways to treat glioblastoma, a tumor that affects the brain and spinal cord.

This investment also has contributed to the foundational growth and success of Simmons Cancer Center, one of 57 NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers in the country and the only one in North Texas. Today, Simmons Cancer Center has 277 faculty members across 37 academic departments, runs hundreds of active clinical trials, and supports five research programs and 14 disease-oriented teams. UT Southwestern is also ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of the top 20 hospitals for cancer care in the nation.

“It was clear from the start that CPRIT would be transformative for cancer research at UT Southwestern,” Dr. Kittler said.

Statewide, CPRIT’s impact has been equally profound. It has funneled nearly $1 billion to academic institutions, research organizations, and biomedical companies to bring the best and brightest scientists and clinical investigators to Texas. And it was all done with one bold mission in mind: to make the state a global leader in the fight against cancer.

Steering the future of cancer therapy

Created with voter approval in 2007, CPRIT began with a $3 billion investment to accelerate cancer research, support screening and preventive services, develop therapies, and recruit top talent to make it all possible. In 2019, Texans overwhelmingly supported a constitutional amendment to continue CPRIT’s work and infuse another $3 billion into the program. CPRIT has since become the largest state cancer research investment in U.S. history and the second-largest cancer research and prevention program anywhere. 

Carlos L. Arteaga, M.D., is Director of the Simmons Cancer Center and Associate Dean of Oncology Programs at UT Southwestern.

“CPRIT has invested millions of dollars in our effort to screen for, prevent, and fight cancer, moving us closer every day to breakthrough therapies and life-changing medicines,” said Carlos L. Arteaga, M.D., Director of the Simmons Cancer Center and Associate Dean of Oncology Programs at UT Southwestern. Dr. Arteaga, who joined UTSW as the Center’s director in 2017 with a $6 million CPRIT recruitment grant, is an internationally renowned physician-scientist who has led the development and approval of molecularly targeted therapies for breast cancer. In 2024, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine, one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.

Academic institutions across the state have successfully pursued some of the most accomplished researchers to bring to Texas. Investigators have come from every corner of the U.S. and abroad, including countries in Europe, South America, and Asia. And the grants are awarded to scientists of all levels, from first-time, tenure-track junior faculty to mid-level associate professors to established senior researchers.

Among the most recent high-profile hires at UT Southwestern is Stefan Gloeggler, Ph.D., Professor in the Advanced Imaging Research Center and of Biomedical Engineering, who was recruited from the Max Planck Institute of Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Germany. Dr. Gloeggler is a pioneer in hyperpolarized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology, which can be applied in studies of cancer metabolism to improve disease detection and treatment.

Daniel Addison, M.D., former Director of the Cardio-Oncology Program at The Ohio State University, also joined the faculty at UT Southwestern through a CPRIT Rising Star recruitment award. Dr. Addison is Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, Director of Translational Research in the Division of Cardiology, and Associate Director for Survivorship and Outcomes Research in the Simmons Cancer Center. His research on the link between cancer treatments and cardiovascular disease has led to multicenter clinical trials that aim to eliminate or reduce such heart complications.

Most recently, Shixuan Liu, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute, was recruited to UT Southwestern this year from Stanford University with the help of a $2 million CPRIT Scholar grant. Her lab’s research focuses on decoding the molecular mechanisms of the seasonal clock and its cross-talk with circadian rhythms.

Many early-career researchers who were brought to UT Southwestern through CPRIT have continued their path to great academic success.

Matteo Ligorio, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Surgery and in the Simmons Cancer Center, arrived at UT Southwestern in 2020 from Harvard after he was awarded a CPRIT First-Time, Tenure-Track Faculty Member grant. In October 2025, Nature Medicine published a one-of-a-kind study he co-led that shifted the paradigm on the understanding of how cancer kills. His findings suggest the ultimate cause of cancer death is not metastatic disease, but the invasion of tumors into major blood vessels that lead to blood clots and multi-organ failure. With this new discovery, he and his co-author Kelley Newcomer, M.D., Associate Professor of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern, are now collaborating with other researchers from around the world to design clinical trials that can test potentially more effective cancer therapies.

Just this month, the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science & Technology (TAMEST) named Yunsun Nam, Ph.D., Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UT Southwestern, as the winner of the prestigious 2026 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Biological Sciences for her scientific achievements. Dr. Nam was also recruited to UT Southwestern as a first-time, tenure-track faculty member. Arriving in Dallas in 2012, Dr. Nam is widely recognized for her research on the molecular interactions of RNA and modifying proteins.

Financially backed by CPRIT and UTSW, these impactful researchers have the funding they need to purchase leading-edge lab equipment and hire the necessary staff to continue their pursuit of cancer breakthroughs.

“The resources you have when you start your career as a principal investigator are vitally important,” Dr. Kittler said.

Since his arrival, UT Southwestern has recruited more than 90 other experts with CPRIT support specializing in a variety of cancers – from liver cancer to ocular cancer to breast cancer to leukemia — as well as biomedical engineers and stem cell researchers, all of whom have made significant contributions to science.

Dr. Kittler himself was the co-leader of an investigation into how lentiviruses can mutate oncoproteins and render cancer cells resistant to drug therapy. By understanding the mechanisms at play and how to manipulate them, Dr. Kittler’s findings may unlock the development of more effective and targeted cancer treatments.

“CPRIT triggered a rapid growth of resources, talent, and collaboration soon after its start,” Dr. Kittler said. “It has been a massive stimulus to our university and exceeded expectations.”

Discoveries that have a lasting impact

Sean J. Morrison, Ph.D., (left) founding director of Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern, works with Julia Phan, Ph.D., a former graduate student researcher and current student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at UT Southwestern.

In 2011, Sean J. Morrison, Ph.D., was recruited with a $10 million CPRIT grant to become the founding director of Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI).

The nonprofit institute is focused on pioneering research at the intersection of stem cells, cancer, and metabolism. Since CRI’s inception, the internationally recognized team of scientists has made significant discoveries that improved the understanding of the biological basis of diseases, including cancer.

Dr. Morrison’s research has redefined strategies for cancer treatment. His studies in melanoma showed that antioxidants can promote disease progression and led to studies that are attempting to develop new pro-oxidant therapies. His work also uncovered the role of the bone marrow microenvironment, where blood-forming stem cells are located, leading to new insights that improved the safety of bone marrow and stem cell transplantation.

“CPRIT has profoundly strengthened cancer research in Texas because it accelerates medical science in a way that is not replicated in other parts of the country, where funding is difficult to obtain,” said Dr. Morrison, Professor in CRI and of Pediatrics at UT Southwestern and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the European Molecular Biology Organization. Since 2000, he has also been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. “Texas is the only state, aside from California, to make a multibillion-dollar commitment to science and to renew that investment after the initial term,” he said.

Exceptional reputation and vision drive progress

At the core of UT Southwestern’s mission is the commitment to enhance lives by developing better treatments, cures, and preventive care – a common goal shared by all CPRIT scholars.

Joshua T. Mendell, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, studies how microRNAs contribute to oncogenesis and tumor suppression.

Joshua T. Mendell, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern, member of the Cellular Networks in Cancer Research Program in the Simmons Cancer Center, and an HHMI Investigator, was also recruited with CPRIT support in 2011, after discovering that microRNAs can be modulated to inhibit liver cancer in mouse models. At UT Southwestern, Dr. Mendell and his lab continue to investigate how these noncoding molecules contribute to oncogenesis and tumor suppression.

“Our goal is to advance our understanding of RNA biology and to discover new functions for RNAs, because these molecules play critical roles in normal biology and often go awry in cancer and other diseases,” said Dr. Mendell, who, in October 2025, was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.  “Because of this, there is a strong interest in developing medicines based on RNA – the most famous and successful example, in recent times, being the COVID-19 vaccine.”

In fact, it is the same field of research that was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in both 2023 and 2024.

“UT Southwestern has always recognized the value of basic science,” Dr. Mendell said. “The research conducted on this campus has repeatedly demonstrated how fundamental scientific discoveries can lead to new clinical innovations that impact the lives of patients. While UT Southwestern has grown since my arrival here, the institutional commitment to bold and collaborative research has also continued.”

Dr. Addison holds the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Chair in Cardiovascular Research.

Dr. Argenbright is a Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Dr. Arteaga holds the Annette Simmons Distinguished University Chair in Breast Cancer Research.

Dr. Gerber holds the David Bruton, Jr. Professorship in Clinical Cancer Research.

Dr. Kittler is the John L. Roach Scholar in Biomedical Research.

Dr. Mendell holds the Charles Cameron Sprague, M.D. Chair in Medical Science.

Dr. Morrison holds the Kathryne and Gene Bishop Distinguished Chair in Pediatric Research at Children’s Research Institute at UT Southwestern and the Mary McDermott Cook Chair in Pediatric Genetics.

Dr. Nam holds the Doris and Bryan Wildenthal Distinguished Chair in Medical Science and is a Southwestern Medical Foundation Scholar in Biomedical Research and a UT Southwestern Presidential Scholar.

Dr. Xiao holds the Mary Dees McDermott Hicks Chair in Medical Science.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Dec. 11, 2025 – Yunsun Nam, Ph.D., Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UT Southwestern Medical Center, will receive the 2026 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Biological Sciences from the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science & Technology (TAMEST) for her research into how RNAs and proteins interact at the molecular level. Her work has shed light on gene regulation, cancer biology, and RNA-based therapeutics.

TAMEST presents annual awards to recognize the achievements of early-career Texas investigators in the fields of science, medicine, engineering, and technological innovation. The O’Donnell Award comes with a $25,000 honorarium and an invitation to make a presentation before hundreds of TAMEST members. Dr. Nam is the 18th scientist at UT Southwestern to be honored with an O’Donnell Award since TAMEST launched the awards in 2006 and is one of five Texas-based researchers receiving the award this year.

“I am grateful for this award because recognition like this keeps encouraging us to aim high and keep challenging ourselves,” said Dr. Nam, who holds the Doris and Bryan Wildenthal Distinguished Chair in Medical Science. She is also a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.

Only an estimated 2% of the human genome codes for proteins. Most of the genome is still transcribed into RNAs, many of which function as noncoding RNAs that play crucial roles in gene regulation. The Nam Lab is particularly interested in a family of noncoding RNAs known as microRNAs that modulate messenger RNA (mRNA) translation and play key roles in diseases including cancer. Using cutting-edge biochemistry and structural biology methods, Dr. Nam and her colleagues have produced a wealth of insights into how microRNAs are processed in cells, modified with chemical groups, and remodeled by different proteins to exert their effects.

Using cryo-electron microscopy, which allows scientists to image molecules at atomic resolution, the team determined the core structure of the Microprocessor protein complex, the processing enzyme that produces microRNAs by cleaving longer RNA pieces. Their research showed that this complex recognizes where to cut RNA based on structural motifs found in the longer segments, rather than specific RNA sequences as some researchers had assumed.

Their research also extends to other classes of protein enzymes that act on RNAs, such as RNA modification enzymes. They found that structural motifs determine where the METTL1-WDR4 protein complex places chemical modifications to regulate the stability and function of transfer RNAs. In contrast, their work on the METTL3-METTL14 complex showed that some proteins determine where to chemically modify mRNAs through sequence recognition.

Chemical modification performed by both complexes has been found to go awry in various cancers, Dr. Nam explained, suggesting these complexes and their interactions with RNA could eventually serve as targets for novel cancer therapies.

“Yunsun is a rising star in the study of RNA-protein interactions,” said Yuh Min Chook, Ph.D., Professor of Pharmacology and Biophysics at UTSW and recipient of the 2015 O’Donnell Award in Biological Sciences, who nominated Dr. Nam for her O’Donnell Award. “Her work on how proteins modify RNAs is very much basic science, and yet when these modification processes go awry, they lead to diseases like cancer and developmental disorders. The work in the Nam Lab thus provides a unique foundation for development of therapeutics to target these diseases.”

Dr. Nam came to UTSW in 2013, supported by a recruitment grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Born in Korea and raised in Indonesia, she was inspired to become a scientist at 8 years old after reading a biography of Marie Curie she had borrowed from the library. She followed her dream to Harvard University, where she earned an undergraduate degree in biochemical sciences and a doctoral degree in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology, and continued on for postdoctoral fellowships. She became interested in noncoding RNAs while working on her last postdoctoral research project, where she studied RNA recognition by Lin28, a stem cell factor and an oncogene.

The Edith and Peter O’Donnell Awards recognize rising star Texas researchers who are addressing the essential role science and technology play in society and whose work meets the highest standards of exemplary professional performance, creativity, and resourcefulness. The Edith and Peter O’Donnell Awards are made possible by the O’Donnell Awards Endowment Fund, established in 2005 through the generous support of several individuals and organizations.

This year’s recipients will be honored at the 2026 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Awards Ceremony on Feb. 3 and will present their research at the TAMEST 2026 Annual Conference: Pioneering Climate Innovations at the Kimpton Santo Hotel in San Antonio.

“The Edith and Peter O’Donnell Awards have shone a spotlight on Texas’ brightest emerging researchers who are pushing the boundaries of science and technology for the past 20 years,” said Edith and Peter O’Donnell Awards Committee Chair Margaret A. Goodell, Ph.D., Chair and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. “Each year, these awards celebrate not only exceptional individual achievement but also the profound impact that innovative research has on communities, industries, and our future. It is inspiring to witness the next generation of trailblazers making Texas a global leader in transformative discovery.”

Dr. Nam is a Southwestern Medical Foundation Scholar in Biomedical Research and a UT Southwestern Presidential Scholar. Dr. Chook holds the Alfred and Mabel Gilman Chair in Molecular Pharmacology, is a Eugene McDermott Scholar in Biomedical Research, and is a member of Simmons Cancer Center.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center    

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

Essential tremor linked to loss of Purkinje brain cells

Essential tremor (ET) is a common movement disorder affecting about 2% of the American population, and more than 20% of those over 90 years old. Despite its prevalence and decades of study, researchers don’t know the precise mechanisms underlying ET. Some research has suggested the brain’s cerebellum, responsible for coordinating voluntary movements, balance, and motor learning, gradually loses Purkinje cells (large neurons) and their cellular neighbors in ET patients. However, other studies haven’t shown this phenomenon.

To determine definitively whether these cells are lost, Elan Louis, M.D., M.S., Chair and Professor of Neurology and Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Center, worked with longtime collaborators at Columbia University Irving Medical Center to examine 452 postmortem brains. Among these specimens, 215 were donated over a 21-year period by patients who had ET, 165 were donated by healthy individuals, and 72 were donated by patients who had spinocerebellar ataxia, another movement disorder.

Their analysis, published in Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, showed that the ET patients had about 15% lower Purkinje cell density compared with the other groups, as well as significant loss of nearby cells. Discovering the cause of this loss could lead to new treatments for ET, the study authors said.

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to the study are Roberto Hernandez, Ph.D., Data Scientist, and Nora Hernandez, M.D., Manager of Research Programs.

GLP-1RAs shown to reduce risk of cardiovascular death

Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) such as semaglutide, liraglutide, and tirzepatide are widely prescribed both for Type 2 diabetes and weight loss. These drugs also have shown promise in clinical trials for patients with chronic cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic diseases. Those studies focused mainly on patients with singular diagnoses, but these conditions often overlap.

To determine the effect of GLP-1RAs on individuals with concurring conditions, a team of researchers including Ambarish Pandey, M.D., Associate Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Cardiology and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health at UT Southwestern, pooled the results of 15 clinical trials examining the effects of these drugs on heart failure hospitalization and cardiovascular death in more than 87,000 patients with multiple conditions. The study, published in the European Journal of Heart Failure, found that the drugs significantly reduced the risk of these events in almost all patients with overlapping cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic diseases.

The only exception was patients with a subtype of heart failure, who were slightly more likely to be hospitalized if they took a GLP-1RA but still had a lower risk of cardiovascular death. The study authors suggest these findings support the use of GLP-1RAs as effective therapies for people with singular and multiple conditions.

Alzheimer’s changes appear early in patients with Down syndrome

Down syndrome is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. Because of genes present on this chromosome that are known to contribute to Alzheimer’s disease, patients with Down syndrome often develop the disease, sometimes at a relatively young age. However, few studies have examined Alzheimer’s-related pathological changes in the brains of people with Down syndrome, especially pediatric patients and those who are Black or Hispanic. Studies also hadn’t explored other neurodegenerative conditions in those with Down syndrome.

In a study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, researchers led by a team at UT Southwestern examined 34 postmortem brains donated by patients with Down syndrome who underwent autopsies at UTSW between 1986 and 2023. They also incorporated findings from four previous studies, along with data from the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center (NACC), which collectively included an additional 126 brains from individuals with Down syndrome. The combined data encompassed a wide range of ages and races.

The findings showed that pathological changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease, such as amyloid plaques appearing as early as age 11 and tau tangles emerging by the mid-30s, were present in people with Down syndrome and increased with age, regardless of race. Other neurodegenerative conditions that frequently occur with Alzheimer’s disease were relatively rare in individuals with Down syndrome. These findings could help researchers develop unique diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for this population, the researchers concluded.

UTSW researchers who contributed to the study include first author Fatih Canan, M.D., Neuropathology fellow; Jack Raisanen, M.D., Professor of Pathology; Dennis Burns, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Pathology; Kimmo Hatanpaa, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Pathology; Charles White III, M.D., Professor of Pathology and Director of Neuropathology and the Winspear Family Special Center for Research on the Neuropathology of Alzheimer's Disease; and senior author Elena Daoud, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Pathology. Drs. Daoud and White are Investigators in the O’Donnell Brain Institute.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center 

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Nov. 13, 2025 – A hormone known for regulating energy balance also helps the body cope with influenza by triggering protective responses in the brain, a study led by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers shows. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that targeting this pathway could offer a new pharmacological approach for treating the flu.

Steven Kliewer, Ph.D., is Professor of Molecular Biology and Pharmacology at UT Southwestern. He is a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute. Dr. Kliewer holds the Diana K. and Richard C. Strauss Distinguished Chair in Developmental Biology and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our work demonstrates that FGF21, a stress-induced hormone that regulates whole-body metabolism, acts on the brain to protect against the hypothermia and weight loss caused by influenza infection,” said senior author Steven Kliewer, Ph.D., Professor of Molecular Biology and Pharmacology at UT Southwestern.

The study found that levels of fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21) rose in both humans and mice during flu infection. In mice, the hormone activated a brain region that regulates the noradrenergic nervous system, prompting heat production from tissues that help regulate body temperature in mice.

This thermogenic response helped stabilize body temperature and improved the response to flu infection. Mice lacking FGF21 or its receptor in these neurons recovered more slowly, while treatment with pharmacologic FGF21 improved recovery. The hormone did not change viral levels, indicating that it protects the body by mitigating the physiological stress of infection rather than directly targeting the virus. Collectively, these results suggest FGF21 could help the body respond more effectively to a range of infections, not just influenza. 

“For serious cases of influenza infection, the care is mostly supportive,” Dr. Kliewer said. “Our findings suggest a new pharmacological approach for treating the flu. Further studies are required to determine if these findings are applicable to other infections.”

Kartik Rajagopalan, M.D., Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and in Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern.

The research builds on decades of work from the Mangelsdorf/Kliewer Lab at UTSW, which previously identified FGF21 as a hormone produced by the liver in response to metabolic stresses such as fasting and alcohol exposure. The new study extends that work to infection, showing that FGF21 uses the same liver-to-brain signaling pathway to help the body maintain metabolic balance during illness. 

“These findings demonstrate that the immune system is not the only critical part of the response to infection,” said corresponding author Kartik Rajagopalan, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and in Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern. “There are signals that are sent to the brain that reprogram metabolism for an optimal response.”

The work was a collaboration among UT Southwestern’s Departments of Pharmacology, Molecular Biology, and Internal Medicine, bringing together expertise in infection, endocrinology, and neuroscience. It also engaged trainees at multiple levels, including postdoctoral and clinical fellows, and incorporated human data showing that FGF21 levels rise during influenza infection.

“This project highlights the power of integrating basic and clinical research, which is a defining strength of UT Southwestern,” Dr. Kliewer said. “There are very few places where a project like this could have blossomed. We’re fortunate that UT Southwestern is one of them.” 

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to this study are first author Wei Fan, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral researcher in the Mangelsdorf/Kliewer Lab; Yuan Zhang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Pharmacology; Laurent Gautron, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine; Tadiwanashe Gwatiringa, Research Assistant and Lab Manager; and the late David Mangelsdorf, Ph.D., former Chair and Professor of Pharmacology. The human studies were performed by collaborators at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Dr. Kliewer holds the Diana K. and Richard C. Strauss Distinguished Chair in Developmental Biology and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Drs. Kliewer, Rajagopalan, and Gautron are Investigators in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern. Dr. Kliewer is also a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center.

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (K23HL151876, R01AG079937, and R01AA028473), the Robert A. Welch Foundation (I-1275), a Stony Wold-Herbert Fund Fellowship, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center    

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

Ceci Verbaarschot, Ph.D.

DALLAS – Oct. 30, 2025 – In her new office at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Ceci Verbaarschot, Ph.D., sits among unpacked boxes and discusses the intricacies of a brain-computer interface she is developing. The device is designed to restore sensation and movement in the upper limbs of people who are paralyzed from the neck down.

Dr. Verbaarschot, Assistant Professor of Neurological Surgery and Biomedical Engineering, came to Dallas and UT Southwestern’s Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute (OBI) in the summer of 2025 to continue her next-level neuromodulation research because “all the pieces of the puzzle are here – the science, the technology, and the expertise,” she said. “And by working with various patient groups, we can make the biggest impact.”

Marc Diamond, M.D.

Nearby at the OBI’s Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases (CAND), Marc Diamond, M.D., is taking aim at tau, the protein that underlies the formation of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. His lab’s acclaimed research is moving ever closer to earlier detection and treatments.

“The optimism within our field after decades of no real progress with clinical therapies is unbelievable,” said Dr. Diamond, Director of CAND and Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience. “In the world we have created within our Center, we are finding evidence of the disease at a biochemical level before there’s any cognitive impairment.”

That palpable sense of hope and purpose carries over to the clinical setting at OBI, where multidisciplinary teams are making significant gains in the treatment of epilepsy and essential tremor, depression, and schizophrenia – even intractable brain and spinal tumors.

William Dauer, M.D.

Founded in 2015 through a visionary gift from Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. and sustained by a $1 billion-plus “Campaign for the Brain,” OBI combines the best of both the research and clinical care worlds, creating a blueprint for how ingenuity, big ideas and investments, and, yes, brain power, can accelerate the future of neuroscience.

“The O’Donnell Brain Institute was envisioned as a place where we could forge new frontiers and offer our patients therapies that just a few years ago might have seemed out of reach,” said William T. Dauer, M.D., the inaugural Director of OBI and a renowned neurologist and neuroscientist. “United by our shared mission to overcome brain disease, every scientist, clinician, staff member, and administrator plays an essential role in bringing that vision closer to reality.”

With more than 300,000 patients treated annually and $140 million in research expenditures, OBI has a commitment to excellence in patient care and discovery that is unmatched in Texas.

On Nov. 4, voters approved $3 billion in funding for the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (DPRIT), designed to combat the growing rates of dementia – some estimates show a rise to more than 500,000 cases in the state by 2030.

“Texans have sent a powerful message by endorsing the actions of the Texas Legislature to establish the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas,” said Daniel K. Podolsky, M.D., President of UT Southwestern. “This historic investment will accelerate discoveries that bring hope to families affected by Alzheimer’s and other dementia-related diseases. At UT Southwestern’s Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute, we look forward to collaborating with partners statewide to translate research into transformative treatments that improve lives and position Texas as a national leader in neuroscience innovation.” 

OBI is already making tangible advances related to every aspect of the brain. Here are just some of the clinical, research, and technological innovations in progress at OBI, creating great promise for the future.

10 years and 10 areas of scientific innovation

Advances in neuromodulation

Hope for patients with dementia

Answers for neurodegenerative diseases

Improving care for mental illness

Brain mapping, epilepsy treatment breakthroughs

Understanding learning and memory

Key roles of the CLOCK gene

New standards for
stroke, TBI care

Impacting lives of brain tumor patients

Revealing genetic factors behind autism

Learn More

DALLAS – Oct. 15, 2025 – Activating specific neurons in a part of the brain that serves as the body’s master circadian pacemaker caused mice to eat significantly more during a time of day when they would normally be at rest, a UT Southwestern Medical Center study shows. The findings, published in Cell Reports, could lead to new strategies to help people lose weight, including night shift workers who have a higher prevalence of obesity.

“We identify for the first time a distinct set of neurons in the brain that controls feeding and metabolism during one specific time of day and accounts for a small but not insignificant proportion of body weight,” said Jeffrey Zigman, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Internal Medicine and Psychiatry at UT Southwestern. Dr. Zigman co-led the study with first author Omprakash Singh, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Zigman Lab.

Jeffrey Zigman, M.D., Ph.D., is a Professor of Internal Medicine and Psychiatry, a member of the Center for Hypothalamic Research and the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center, and an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern. He holds the Kent and Jodi Foster Distinguished Chair in Endocrinology, in Honor of Daniel Foster, M.D.; the Mr. and Mrs. Bruce G. Brookshire Professorship in Medicine; and The Diana and Richard C. Strauss Professorship in Biomedical Research.

Researchers have long known that eating impacts body weight differently depending on when food is consumed, Dr. Zigman explained. For example, eating late at night is associated with greater weight gain than eating the same amount during the day. This effect is especially apparent in night shift workers, who are more frequently overweight or obese despite caloric intake similar to day workers.

These observations suggest specific circuits of neurons that affect feeding and metabolism might operate differently at various times of the day. Dr. Zigman, Dr. Singh, and their colleagues hypothesized that one such circuit might be in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a part of the brain that sets circadian rhythms throughout the body based on light received through the eyes.

Previous research in the Zigman Lab showed that some SCN neurons are stimulated by ghrelin, a hormone that prompts feeding and slows metabolism to encourage weight gain. However, the significance of these findings had been unclear.

To better understand this population of SCN neurons, the researchers worked with mice genetically altered so the scientists could turn these neurons on and off. They found that if they turned on the neurons in the middle of the animals’ rest period – around 10 a.m., since mice are nocturnal – they ate more than two times as much as they usually do during this time. Turning the neurons off at this time reduced the already low amount of food typically consumed during this period.

Whether the neurons were on or off during other times of day or night had no effect on the rodents’ feeding behavior or weight. But turning the neurons off during their rest period for 15 straight days caused them to lose about 4.3% of their body weight, while mice with unaltered SCN neurons gained about 2.5%. These results suggest the activity of the ghrelin-stimulated SCN neurons is responsible for about 7% of body weight – a small but significant amount that could make a marked difference for overall health, Dr. Zigman said.

If these results also apply to humans, he added, they suggest that targeting the same population of neurons in the SCN could offer weight-loss benefits similar to those seen with some modern weight-loss drugs. This strategy could be especially beneficial for night shift workers and other groups to prevent or treat weight gain linked to nighttime eating.

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to this study are Kripa Shankar, Ph.D., Instructor in the Center for Human Nutrition and of Internal Medicine; Deepali Gupta, Ph.D., Instructor in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute and of Neuroscience; Luis Leon Mercado, Ph.D., Instructor of Internal Medicine; Sherri Osborne-Lawrence, M.S., Senior Research Scientist; Corine P. Richard, R.N.; Sepideh Sheybani-Deloui, Ph.D., and Salil Varshney, Ph.D., postdoctoral researchers; Soumya Kulkarni, B.S., Moyu Lyu, M.S., and Bingbing Li, B.S., graduate student researchers; Avi W. Burstein, high school student researcher; and Connor Lawrence, research assistant.

Dr. Zigman is a member of the Center for Hypothalamic Research and the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and an Investigator in the O’Donnell Brain Institute. He holds the Kent and Jodi Foster Distinguished Chair in Endocrinology, in Honor of Daniel Foster, M.D.; the Mr. and Mrs. Bruce G. Brookshire Professorship in Medicine; and The Diana and Richard C. Strauss Professorship in Biomedical Research.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center    

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Oct. 13, 2025 – Using only text from doctors’ notes and radiology reports, an artificial intelligence (AI) program known as GPT-4o reliably identified patients’ types of strokes, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers found. Their study, published in Stroke, could eventually lead to new ways to help guide doctors’ medical decisions in real time and reduce the heavy workload necessary to report data to patient registries.

Ann Marie Navar, M.D., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health at UT Southwestern.

“Large language models (LLMs) that can decipher unstructured text are an emerging AI technology with immense potential in medical research. Our study provides proof that these LLMs can abstract medical diagnoses from medical notes as well as human chart abstractors,” said Ann Marie Navar, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health at UT Southwestern.

Dr. Navar co-led the study with Eric Peterson, M.D., M.P.H., Professor of Internal Medicine and in the O’Donnell School of Public Health, Vice Provost, and Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Research; and Dylan Owens, Ph.D., M.S., Postdoctoral Researcher.

Like most large academic medical centers, UTSW participates in several patient registries – systematic collections of data on specific conditions that researchers use for studies. One prominent example is the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines-Stroke (GWTG-Stroke), a quality improvement initiative involving over 2,600 hospitals across the country. When patients are treated at one of these hospitals for stroke, trained nurses collect a wealth of information from their electronic health records, inputting the data into lengthy forms. This process requires an enormous amount of human labor.

Eric Peterson, M.D., M.P.H., is Professor of Internal Medicine and in the O’Donnell School of Public Health, Vice Provost, and Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Research at UT Southwestern. He holds the Adelyn and Edmund M. Hoffman Distinguished Chair in Medical Science.

To decrease this burden, Drs. Owens, Navar, and Peterson wondered whether LLMs – a form of AI designed to understand and generate human language – could be used for the same purpose. They started with a simple question: Could an LLM accurately determine stroke type based only on “unstructured” data found in electronic health records, such as notes and reports?

The researchers tested this idea with GPT-4o, an LLM introduced this year with capabilities beyond the more commonly used ChatGPT. Using electronic health records for 4,123 patients hospitalized for stroke at UT Southwestern and Parkland Health between January 2019 and August 2023, the team evaluated three types of prompts asking the LLM to distinguish each patient’s stroke type. Zero-shot chain-of-thought prompts encouraged the model to break complex queries into smaller, logical steps using minimal human input; expert-guided prompts incorporated tips from neurologists and cardiologists; and instruction-based prompts steered the model to evaluate patients’ records using GWTG-Stroke registry guidelines.

The researchers compared the results they received from GPT-4o with those recorded in registry reports for these patients in GWTG-Stroke. They found that all three LLM prompt styles accurately distinguished between the two major types of stroke – hemorrhagic and ischemic – and between hemorrhagic subtypes. However, accuracy was lower for some ischemic subtypes, such as cryptogenic strokes. This lower reliability reflects real-world difficulty in classifying these subtypes, which tend to be diagnoses of exclusion, Dr. Owens explained.

Dylan Owens, Ph.D., M.S., is a Postdoctoral Researcher at UT Southwestern.

Together, he said, the results suggest LLMs could be a useful tool for accurately abstracting some information from electronic health records for populating time-intensive registry forms and could be used to flag other data that need a closer look from human abstractors. Future research will focus on using LLMs to fill in other parts of registry forms, as well as the feasibility of using LLMs for clinical decision support – programs that aim to improve patient outcomes by delivering timely information to providers at the point of care.

Dr. Owens noted that UTSW researchers also have achieved success working with LLMs for other tasks such as matching patients with clinical trials, performing quality assessments while investigating opportunities for population health improvement, and automating extraction of clinical data for research.

Additional UTSW researchers who contributed to this study are Justin Rousseau, M.D., M.M.Sc., Associate Professor of Neurology and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute and Deputy Chief Medical Informatics Officer for Neurosciences; Michael Dohopolski, M.D., Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology and a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center; and Danh Q. Nguyen, M.D., Clinical Fellow.

Dr. Peterson holds the Adelyn and Edmund M. Hoffman Distinguished Chair in Medical Science.

This study was funded by UT Southwestern Medical Center and grants from the National Institutes of Health (5T32HL12524710 and UL11R003163).

About UT Southwestern Medical Center 

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

About Parkland Health

Parkland Health is one of the largest public hospital systems in the country. Premier services at the state-of-the-art Parkland Memorial Hospital include the Level I Rees-Jones Trauma Center, the only burn center in North Texas verified by the American Burn Association for adult and pediatric patients, and a Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The system also includes two on-campus outpatient clinics – the Ron J. Anderson, MD Clinic and the Moody Outpatient Center, as well as more than 30 community-based clinics and numerous outreach and education programs. By cultivating its diversity, inclusion, and health equity efforts, Parkland enriches the health and wellness of the communities it serves. For more information, visit parklandhealth.org.

DALLAS – Oct. 08, 2025 – David Sanders, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases and Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, has been awarded $2.4 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support his research into the role of RNA/protein assemblies in neurodegenerative diseases. 

The NIH Director’s New Innovator Award is part of the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Program, which supports early-career investigators pursuing bold projects with broad potential impact on biomedical, behavioral, or social sciences. Dr. Sanders is one of approximately 30 researchers to receive an award this year.

Dr. Sanders, a member of the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern, investigates how cells organize proteins and RNA into liquidlike structures called biomolecular condensates. The New Innovator Award will fund his lab’s studies on how these structures regulate messenger RNA (mRNA) during stress and how their dysfunction may drive neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases.

“It’s known that mRNAs go bad in diverse neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases, from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to various myopathies,” Dr. Sanders said. “Our goal is to determine if new fundamental principles that concern all of mRNA biology might lead to these devastating diseases.”

The Sanders Lab is focusing on two condensates: nuclear speckles, which influence how mRNA is processed before becoming a template for protein synthesis; and stress granules, which form when cells halt protein production. Early findings suggest that stress granules act more like solvents than reaction hubs, shielding fragile mRNA molecules from clumping or misfolding when they flood the cell during stress.

By uncovering how cells prevent, or resolve, “entangled” mRNA, Dr. Sanders and his team aim to advance understanding of a new layer of quality control in biology that could inform therapeutic strategies for untreatable diseases of aging.

Dr. Sanders joined UT Southwestern in 2023 after completing postdoctoral training at Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Washington University, where he trained under Marc Diamond, M.D., who is now Director of the Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases and Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at UTSW.

The New Innovator Award is among the most selective NIH programs. Established in 2007, the program currently supports about 30 researchers nationwide annually. Dr. Sanders is the latest in a series of UT Southwestern researchers to receive the New Innovator Award in recent years, reflecting the institution’s strength in fostering creative, impactful science.

“UT Southwestern is a wonderful, collaborative community that really cares about the success of its scientists. It hires thinkers with potentially transformative ideas, and it invests in their long-term trajectory,” Dr. Sanders said. “Here, our leadership and scientists deeply care about, ‘Did you make a discovery?’ and ‘Will you continue to make discoveries?’ as opposed to short-term, incremental impact. This really makes UT Southwestern a unique place to do science.”

Dr. Diamond holds the Effie Marie Cain Distinguished University Chair in Alzheimer’s Research.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center 

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year. 

Cerebrovascular Dynamics Index could help diagnose Alzheimer’s

The buildup of two pathological proteins, amyloid beta and phosphorylated tau, have long been considered hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. However, efforts to diagnose Alzheimer’s by searching for these proteins in spinal taps, PET imaging, and blood samples have drawbacks, including high cost and relatively low accuracy.

Research has shown that Alzheimer’s impairs vasomotor reactivity, in which the brain’s blood vessels dilate when carbon dioxide builds up in the blood. To determine whether this effect could be used to diagnose Alzheimer’s, two researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center joined colleagues to develop the Cerebrovascular Dynamics Index (CDI). This noninvasive test uses Doppler ultrasound to measure blood flow velocity in some main arteries of the brain and near-infrared spectroscopy to measure oxygenation in the brain’s cortex.

Results from nearly 200 participants, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, showed that the CDI distinguished among mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s, and healthy individuals with better accuracy than existing methods. The authors say this test has significant promise to improve Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis and staging.

The study authors from UT Southwestern are Rong Zhang, Ph.D., Professor of Neurology, Biomedical Engineering, and Internal Medicine, an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute, and Director of the Cerebrovascular Laboratory in the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas; and Danilo Cardim, Ph.D., Instructor of Neurology.

Timed radiation extends survival for some non-small cell lung cancers

A subset of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common lung cancer type, has mutations in a molecule known as epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). Although EGFR-targeting drugs often work well initially to fight these cancers, most cases develop resistance and progress within two years. A study led by UT Southwestern researchers and published in eClinicalMedicine suggests that precisely timed radiation could be a useful additional treatment.

Results from a clinical trial involving 42 patients showed that highly targeted radiation therapy delivered eight weeks after drug initiation extended progression-free survival more than one year compared to outcomes seen with the drug alone. Patients on the new protocol also lived longer, with few additional side effects.

The study was led by Sawsan Rashdan, M.D., Associate Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology, and David Gerber, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health. Dr. Rashdan is Director of Thoracic Medical Oncology Clinical Operations and a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at UTSW. Dr. Gerber serves as Co-Director of Education and Training in the Simmons Cancer Center.

Investigating how airway cells respond to pathogens

Airway epithelial surfaces are the primary contact point for numerous infectious bacteria and viruses, including those that cause tuberculosis, measles, COVID-19, the common cold, and influenza. Rare epithelial microfold cells (M cells) can serve as an entry site and initiate early immune responses to these pathogens. Although M cells have been extensively studied in the intestines, little is known about their development and function in the airway.

To better understand these cells and how the body responds to airborne pathogens, UT Southwestern researchers and colleagues analyzed single cell gene expression to identify cell types in the adenoid – an airway immune organ where M cells are found – and defined their developmental trajectories and relationships. Their study in Mucosal Immunology identified 26 unique cell types and determined that airway M cells arise from progenitor club cells and have a distinct gene expression signature consistent with their ability to shuttle particles and pathogens from the airway surface to waiting immune cells.

The researchers also found a previously unknown cell type that appears to be primed by the immune molecule interferon to prevent early infection. This research could eventually lead to new treatments and vaccines for airway infections.

UTSW contributors to this study are first author Samuel Alvarez-Arguedas, Ph.D., Assistant Instructor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine; senior author Michael Shiloh, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine and of Microbiology; Ron Mitchell, M.D., Professor of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery and Pediatrics; and John Lafin, Ph.D., Computational Biologist.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Sept. 16, 2025 – A team led by UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists has identified early signals from the immune system that could help predict which cancer patients are most likely to develop harmful side effects from immunotherapy. The findings, published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, offer a path toward tests to help doctors tailor care for at-risk patients.

David Gerber, M.D., is Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health at UT Southwestern. He is also co-Director of the Office of Education and Training in the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center. He holds the David Bruton, Jr. Professorship in Clinical Cancer Research.

“Through a multi-omic biomarker analysis, we identified a pre-existing but clinically silent proinflammatory state in patients with increased risk of immunotherapy toxicities,” said David Gerber, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health at UT Southwestern. Dr. Gerber, who is also co-Director of the Office of Education and Training in the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center, co-led the study with first author Shaheen Khan, Ph.D., who was previously Assistant Professor of Pathology at UT Southwestern.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors – drugs that enhance the immune system’s ability to attack cancer – have transformed treatment for many cancers and extended lives even in patients with advanced disease. But they can also spark reactions that damage healthy organs, sometimes causing serious and lasting complications. More than half of patients receiving immunotherapy experience side effects, which remain difficult to predict or diagnose.

By analyzing blood from 162 patients at UT Southwestern and Parkland Health before and after immunotherapy treatment, researchers identified three key features linked to higher risk: elevated levels of antibody-producing cells and autoantibodies, stronger activity from inflammatory molecules such as interferon-gamma, and heightened signals from another key inflammatory molecule known as tumor necrosis factor or TNF. Patients with these immune profiles were more likely to develop side effects once treatment began.

Mitchell von Itzstein, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at UT Southwestern and a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“If prospectively verified, these findings potentially impact patients with any cancer types that are treated with immunotherapy,” said study co-author Mitchell von Itzstein, M.D., Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at UT Southwestern. “Currently, immunotherapy is used to treat most cancers in advanced stages as well as some cancers in earlier stages.”

The study builds on more than a decade of work at the UT Southwestern Simmons Cancer Center, where Dr. Gerber and other researchers have developed an institutional registry of immunotherapy patients and biospecimens. With contributions from more than 800 patients cared for at UT Southwestern and Parkland Health, the registry has enabled one of the most comprehensive efforts to date to connect immune, genetic, and antibody changes with treatment complications.

While the results are promising, the authors noted further research is needed to confirm these biomarkers in larger and more diverse groups and translate them into tools for patient care.

Jeffrey A. SoRelle, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Pathology and Pediatrics and a member of the Immunology Graduate Program at UT Southwestern.

“The prediction, diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of immune-related side effects remain major clinical challenges,” said study co-author Jeffrey A. SoRelle, M.D., Assistant Professor of Pathology and Pediatrics and a member of the UTSW Immunology Graduate Program. “Identifying the molecular mechanisms behind these side effects may help predict which patients are at greatest risk and potentially provide guidance for the treatment of these toxicities.”

Dr. Gerber holds the David Bruton, Jr. Professorship in Clinical Cancer Research. Dr. von Itzstein is a member of the Simmons Cancer Center.

A full list of contributors and their disclosures can be found in the published study.

This study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (1U01AI156189-01 and K08AI155832), an American Cancer Society-Melanoma Research Alliance Team Award (MRAT-18-114-01-LIB), a V Foundation Robin Roberts Cancer Survivorship Award (DT2019-007), a Melanoma Research Alliance and Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer Young Investigator Award (619351), the University of Texas Lung Cancer Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) (P50CA070907-21), and a National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Center Support Grant (P30CA142543).

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

About Parkland Health

Parkland Health is one of the largest public hospital systems in the country. Premier services at the state-of-the-art Parkland Memorial Hospital include the Level I Rees-Jones Trauma Center, the only burn center in North Texas verified by the American Burn Association for adult and pediatric patients, and a Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The system also includes two on-campus outpatient clinics – the Ron J. Anderson, MD Clinic and the Moody Outpatient Center, as well as more than 30 community-based clinics and numerous outreach and education programs. By cultivating its diversity, inclusion, and health equity efforts, Parkland enriches the health and wellness of the communities it serves. For more information, visit parklandhealth.org.

DALLAS – Sept. 2, 2025 – The National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently funded the North Texas Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) to be based at UT Southwestern Medical Center, in collaboration with UT Dallas and UT Arlington.

A long history of innovative research and high-quality clinical care on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in North Texas laid the groundwork for this grant. The five-year award, expected to total $23 million, will fund initiatives to investigate the basic mechanisms underlying these diseases and clinical interventions for diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment.

ADRCs, established in 1984, are congressionally designated NIH Centers of Excellence funded by the NIA. They provide resources, support, and research opportunities to advance efforts against Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. The mission of the ADRCs includes improving detection, diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and care for patients and families. Each center has a unique theme tailored to its local population and scientific priorities.

“Being named an ADRC is not only an indication of scientific excellence, but also highlights an intentional commitment to research Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive impairment in our community,” said the Center’s Principal Investigator, Ihab Hajjar, M.D., Professor of Neurology and Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.

William T. Dauer, M.D., is Director of the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute and Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at UT Southwestern. He holds the Lois C.A. and Darwin E. Smith Distinguished Chair in Neurological Mobility Research.

The North Texas ADRC, one of two in Texas and 37 in the U.S., will have the general mission of enabling ongoing and new research in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias; facilitating ideas and approaches that accelerate the discovery of novel treatments and contributing risk factors; enhancing scientific and clinical collaborations locally and nationally; and creating education opportunities for researchers, clinicians, learners, and the North Texas community focused on caregivers.

The Center’s emphasis will be to advance the national research agenda on Alzheimer’s disease by exploring cardiometabolic factors that contribute to the disease and related dementias, particularly high blood pressure – a condition also known as hypertension that affects nearly 120 million Americans.

Another pursuit will be harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to make discoveries. For example, Dr. Hajjar said, the Center plans to use AI voice analysis to discover vocal changes that accompany cognitive decline. Researchers also plan to use “digital twin” technology to develop virtual representations of patients that will help decipher factors that are part of normal aging and those associated with dementias.

The North Texas ADRC will be based at UT Southwestern not only because of its research prowess in various forms of dementia – a focus of the Department of Neurology as well as the O’Donnell Brain Institute, established a decade ago – but also for its location, Dr. Hajjar said. As the country’s second-most populous state, Texas has the third-most Alzheimer’s disease patients, the second-most Alzheimer’s-related deaths, and the highest dementia burden score, a measure used to assess the emotional and psychological impact of caregiving for individuals with dementia.

The other ADRC in Texas is a collaboration between UT Health San Antonio and The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Elan D. Louis, M.D., M.S., is Chair and Professor of Neurology and an Investigator in the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute. He holds the Linda and Mitch Hart Distinguished Chair in Neurology.

Dr. Hajjar said research generated by all the centers will contribute to communal datasets that will be publicly available, spurring collaboration and speeding discoveries that will provide hope to patients with dementia and their loved ones.

“Through our ADRC, we have the chance to make an unprecedented leap in understanding and treating Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias,” Dr. Hajjar said.

William T. Dauer, M.D., Director of the O’Donnell Brain Institute and Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience, said of the new Center, “This designation reflects the power of bringing together outstanding scientists, clinicians, and community partners to tackle one of the most urgent societal challenges. It will strengthen our ability to link discoveries from O’Donnell Brain Institute laboratories with the needs of patients and families in North Texas and beyond, accelerating progress against Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.”

Elan D. Louis, M.D., M.S., Chair and Professor of Neurology and an Investigator in the O’Donnell Brain Institute, said, “Our new ADRC reflects a growing emphasis in the Department of Neurology on learning about, understanding, and treating a group of disorders that affect millions of elderly people nationwide.”

UT Southwestern is ranked No. 9 for Neurology & Neurosurgery on U.S. News & World Report’s annual Best Hospitals list. UTSW has 12 nationally ranked specialties, the most of any hospital in Texas.

Dr. Dauer holds the Lois C.A. and Darwin E. Smith Distinguished Chair in Neurological Mobility Research. Dr. Hajjar holds the Pogue Family Distinguished University Chair in Alzheimer's Disease Clinical Research and Care, in Memory of Maurine and David Weigers McMullan. Dr. Louis holds the Linda and Mitch Hart Distinguished Chair in Neurology.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Aug. 21, 2025 – Most days, neurologist Sasha Alick-Lindstrom, M.D., M.P.H., FAAN, FACNS, FAES, can be found staring at rows of brain signals on multiple computer screens, inspecting the squiggly lines for any irregularities or spikes of electrical activity.

Today she’s working in her office, but she could just as easily be in the hospital, her home office, the lab, or a classroom because, as Clinical Epilepsy Director of UT Southwestern Medical Center's Magnetoencephalography (MEG) Center of Excellence, that’s the job: reading between the lines, literally, to unlock the mystery of her patients’ crippling seizures.

The MEG is a state-of-the-art neuroimaging machine that can capture the brain’s signals with unparalleled precision. It relies on 306 sensors that, when secured to a patient’s head, pick up the magnetic fields produced by the brain’s electrical activity with ultra-high-speed temporal resolution.

And much like a detective, Dr. Alick-Lindstrom, an Associate Professor of Neurology and Radiology at UTSW, tracks down all 306 leads to find the misfiring neurons. She works side by side with Elizabeth Davenport, Ph.D., MEG Technical Director and Assistant Professor of Radiology at UT Southwestern, and Amy Proskovec, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Radiology, to take the raw data the MEG churns out and create a highly detailed 3D brain map to trace the seizures to their source.

Each Wednesday, they join about a dozen other specialists – neurosurgeons, radiologists, neuropsychologists, neuropsychiatrists, medical fellows, and a team of adult and pediatric epileptologists – for a larger surgical conference to review patient cases and pool the team’s collective findings to devise a clear diagnosis and treatment plan.

“MEG is clinically approved to localize epilepsy disorders and perform presurgical mapping,” Dr. Davenport said.

And its impact has been profound in that regard. Since 2020, the MEG program has helped hundreds of patients like 17-year-old Aarush Gotur, who was experiencing up to 25 seizures a day when he first came to Children’s Health and UTSW and now has been seizure-free for nearly two years. MEG has also cemented UTSW’s designation as a Level 4 Epilepsy Center, the highest level awarded by the National Association of Epilepsy Centers (NAEC), representing the most advanced care for epilepsy at a high-volume center. It was Joseph Maldjian, M.D., Professor of Radiology at UT Southwestern and Director of the Advanced Neuroscience Imaging Research (ANSIR) Lab, who had the vision and prescience to appeal to UTSW leaders and secure the $6 million in capital funding needed to bring the MEG machine online.

Joseph Maldjian, M.D., is Professor of Radiology and Director of the Advanced Neuroscience Imaging Research Lab at UT Southwestern.

Now UTSW is testing the limits of this technology beyond epilepsy.

“The MEG has boundless research potential for all manner of neurological disorders  including Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injuries, autism, and schizophrenia, just to name a few,” said Dr. Davenport.

Several such studies are already underway in labs at UT Southwestern, which houses one of the fewer than 50 clinical MEG sites nationwide and serves the widest range of patient populations in North Texas.

The MEG brain trust

UTSW’s MEG program distinguishes itself in another way: The team of researchers, technologists, and physicians who run it consists almost entirely of women – an outlier in a highly specialized, male-dominated field. Dr. Davenport once described the community of MEG scientists as so small as to be able to “fit around a dinner table.”

This MEG image shows delta wave activity captured from a teenage football player participating in a UT Southwestern concussion study.

Dr. Alick-Lindstrom added: “At conferences, typically attended by the same MEG researchers and clinicians, our team turns heads because we are usually the only women there.”

Afsaneh Talai, M.D., Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at UTSW and a member of the MEG team, focuses on treating children with intractable epilepsy disorders and believes patients benefit from the UTSW team’s different backgrounds and experiences.

“We can treat them more holistically,” she said. “This is especially true in a specialty as narrow as ours, and we’re better able to troubleshoot problems as they come up.”

A good example: One time when the staff was having trouble securing sensors, Dr. Davenport solved the issue by suggesting fashion tape.

Widening the field to women and recruiting more MEG trainees from varied backgrounds in general would introduce a heterogeneity of ideas and accelerate research, Dr. Alick-Lindstrom said. Before UT Southwestern launched its MEG program in late 2019, Drs. Alick-Lindstrom and Talai had to travel to Houston to receive specialized training.

“We want to advance the field and the technology, and that requires an investment in talent,” Dr. Alick-Lindstrom said. “MEG has been around since the first prototype was introduced around 1969, and there are so many research applications to explore.”

She and Dr. Davenport were awarded UTSW’s 2023 Synergy Grant for Collaborative Research and are currently investigating the use of a more mobile MEG device. Instead of the hulking piece of machinery that must be housed in a suite surrounded by 1-foot-thick walls to block out signal interference, the two hope to scale it down to something smaller and easier to maneuver, similar to an easily transportable helmet. The equipment was recently acquired.

“The goal is to eventually be able to deploy it for rapid-response situations, such as a traumatic brain injury or seizures on-site, rather than having to transport the patient to our center,” Dr. Alick-Lindstrom said.

Elizabeth Davenport, Ph.D., MEG Technical Director and Assistant Professor of Radiology at UT Southwestern, likens the MEG to Google Maps for the brain.

Exploring Alzheimer’s, depression, and concussion

Dr. Davenport often describes the MEG by comparing it to Google Maps for the brain. It can look at locations and neighborhoods and pinpoint street-level information such as traffic jams and accidents through brain signal data – which is one reason why so many UTSW scientists are eager to integrate the MEG into their research.

For instance, the landmark Dallas Heart Study (DHS) is incorporating MEG data in its third phase, which has about 1,500 participants who agreed to undergo a bevy of scans, including MEG, to probe the link among certain cardiovascular risk factors, aging, and cognitive function. Launched in 2000, the DHS has generated more than two decades of valuable data related to heart health and has spawned at least 230 papers in medical journals advancing the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and heart failure. The scope of the program was expanded in 2020, when it was renamed the Dallas Hearts and Minds Study, and investigators are hopeful its findings could lead to new discoveries related to dementia and other memory disorders.

MEG provides an extremely valuable method to precisely map brain networks and the effect of stimulation with exquisite spatial and physiological detail that is not available with any other brain mapping techniques.”

“We want to know how the MEG technology can be applied to studies in Alzheimer’s disease,” Dr. Davenport said. “There is a signal that we can see on MEG that we think is an early biomarker that appears before any symptoms. That’s a question Dr. Proskovec is working on: Can we use this data to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease? And, eventually, can it be used one day as a screening procedure?”

Nader Pouratian, M.D., Ph.D., Chair and Professor of Neurological Surgery, is investigating conditions such as treatment-resistant depression and movement disorders. He was recently awarded a grant of up to $5 million from the Raynor Cerebellum Project and is leading a team to develop neuromodulation therapies for disorders of the cerebellum, which controls muscles and motor movement, balance, and certain cognitive functions.

“Our ability to use brain stimulation to treat neurological and psychiatric disease has been severely limited by an incomplete understanding of how these diseases affect brain networks and how to precisely tune brain stimulation to repair those networks,” he said. “MEG provides an extremely valuable method to precisely map brain networks and the effect of stimulation with exquisite spatial and physiological detail that is not available with any other brain mapping techniques.”

Dr. Davenport is using MEG to lead a study on the brain activity of adolescent athletes with concussions. The aim is to deepen understanding of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) and improve the standard of care for patients 17 and younger, who make up about 70% of emergency department visits for sports- and recreation-related TBIs and concussions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“What we’re really interested in is getting these athletes in the MEG scanner within the first 72 hours of concussion because we think it’s going to be the most predictive of how they will heal. Better data will allow us to give a more precise prognosis, including when it will be safe for them to return to play and how they will respond to certain medications,” Dr. Davenport explained. “What sets us apart is we are one of the few to do this with pediatric patients, which means we’re working with a more vulnerable population. Their brains are still developing, which makes it a harder problem to address because there are more variables.”

Dr. Davenport and the MEG team are no strangers to firsts. Their reputation is growing nationally, and recently they were the first to employ a new brain-mapping software that featured an improved user interface, making the system and its data easier to navigate and access. UTSW was chosen to pilot the program because of the high number of patients the MEG team sees.

A world of difference for patients

While MEG technology is playing an ever-expanding role in the future of brain research, it is also delivering life-changing results for patients at UTSW right now. In just a few years, UT Southwestern has become a high-volume MEG center, providing presurgical brain models achieving accuracy rates over 90% and finding real-world solutions for people with intractable epilepsy.  

Aarush Gotur with his mother, Hitha Gotur

Aarush Gotur, the 17-year-old who just a few years ago was experiencing up to 25 seizures a day, described himself as a “professional” patient. Diagnosed with epilepsy at age 7, he spent nearly half his life struggling with “brain freezes” that would render him unresponsive but still aware of his surroundings. He had endured countless doctor appointments and an alphabet soup of neuroimaging procedures: EEG, fMRI, and SPECT. Even with several anti-seizure medications, his symptoms persisted and worsened as he grew older.

The Goturs eventually sought help from Rana Said, M.D., Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology and Director of Pediatric Neurology Education at UT Southwestern, whose combined network at UTSW and Children’s Health could offer more support than any private practice.

Dr. Said suggested a MEG scan, which marked “the turning point in the whole treatment plan,” said Hitha Gotur, Aarush’s mother.

“Aarush had seizures that were clearly focal onset, and they came with a stereotypical aura. Despite this, he had MRIs at high resolutions that did not show a lesion,” Dr. Said explained. “This is what prompted my recommendation to obtain a MEG scan.” 

“We decided to do it because it was noninvasive, and we were hopeful it would tell us something about the root cause of his condition,” Mrs. Gotur said. “We tried so many other scans and we just wanted something to give us real results.”

On that front, the MEG delivered. In spring 2023, Aarush checked in at UTSW’s Department of Radiology and was led down a winding hall where the MEG machine is set up in a small room constructed with walls made of a specially manufactured metal alloy. Staff ensured the necessary sensors were in place before closing the door to block out noise and prevent signal interference.

Rana Said, M.D., is Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology and Director of Pediatric Neurology Education at UT Southwestern.

Aarush doesn’t remember much from the quiet procedure, but he recalls how the resulting MEG brain model prompted the identification of something strange on the left side of his frontal lobe on his MRI: focal cortical dysplasia, a congenital condition that affects the development of the cortex and is the most common cause of drug-resistant epilepsy identified in children.

“There was just a feeling of relief, to be able to see the problem with my own eyes and know we found the cause,” Aarush said. “For me, MEG provided a breakthrough in identifying the origin of my epilepsy that was missed by several other scans for almost seven years. I am hoping this scan will help other drug-resistant epilepsy patients like me to identify and address the root cause of the issue sooner rather than later. I think it should be more universally accessible and included as a standard practice in diagnosing epilepsy.”

The tiny irregularity had gone undetected for years, but the discovery prompted doctors to perform a stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG) scan to confirm the MEG’s findings – which it did – and recommend ablation therapy to surgically destroy the abnormal tissue.

“The MEG also gives us ‘functional’ information,” Dr. Talai said. “We tested where his language center is, so we could make sure to avoid injuring his speech abilities.”

Ultimately, it helped to effectively end an eight-year health struggle.

“It’s been amazing,” Aarush said. “I’m still taking medication, but I haven’t had a single seizure since 2023. The biggest change I’ve noticed is a jump in my energy level.”

“We are so blessed to have had the right doctors and the access to the right tests and treatment,” Mrs. Gotur added. “There are so many parents who are going through similar situations with their children, and some aren’t even aware of the options available. For us, it was very fortunate that UT Southwestern launched the MEG center when it did, and we were able to go through that process and get to where we are today.”

That’s the value of MEG, Dr. Talai said. It is part of an arsenal of resources available at UT Southwestern that gives hope back to people who thought they had none.

“We treat patients with seizures who cannot control them and are not responding to medication,” Dr. Talai said. “We’re talking about brain surgery, and when it comes down to it, we want to have the most accurate, the most precise, and the most detailed information possible to ensure the best outcome. For patients like Aarush, the MEG’s capabilities and our team’s expertise can make all the difference in the world.”

And for physicians and researchers at UTSW, the possibilities for the MEG seem limitless.

“We have many scientists who recognize the potential of MEG to bolster their research,” Dr. Davenport said. “Essentially, this imaging technique can be used to investigate any question related to the brain.”

Dr. Maldjian holds the Lee R. and Charlene B. Raymond Distinguished Chair in Brain Research. Dr. Pouratian holds the Lois C. A. and Darwin E. Smith Distinguished Chair in Neurological Surgery. Drs. Davenport, Pouratian, and Proskovec are Investigators in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center 

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – Aug. 15, 2025 – More than two-thirds of 16-year-olds have experienced a traumatic event, such as the Central Texas flooding in July that killed over 130 people, including numerous children at summer camp. Childhood trauma can also stem from abuse or neglect, some sort of violence such as a school shooting, or the sudden loss of a loved one.

Sabrina Browne, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at UT Southwestern and practices pediatric psychiatry at Children's Health.

Kids who go through such distressing situations often feel fear and worry, and some may be too frightened to return to the place where a traumatic event happened. An expert at UT Southwestern Medical Center says it’s vital for parents to have reassuring conversations with their children who have been through these ordeals to ensure they feel safe, their feelings and emotions are validated, and they learn coping skills to navigate the challenges they’re facing.

We spoke with Sabrina Browne, M.D., Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at UT Southwestern, who practices pediatric psychiatry at Children’s Health. She offers guidance for parents on how to approach sensitive discussions with children who have seen or been part of a traumatic event.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center 

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – July 31, 2025 – The CLOCK gene, which serves as a master controller of circadian rhythms, may play a key role in the extraordinary cognitive abilities of humans as well as neuropsychiatric disorders that afflict them, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers report. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, shed light on human evolution and could lead to new treatments for seasonal affective disorder, depression, schizophrenia, and other conditions.

“Our study suggests the human CLOCK gene, a core circadian regulator, evolved new spatiotemporal expression patterns that contribute to complex brain architecture and advanced cognition,” said Joseph Takahashi, Ph.D., Chair and Professor of Neuroscience at UT Southwestern. Dr. Takahashi co-led the study with Genevieve Konopka, Ph.D., former Professor of Neuroscience at UTSW and now Chair of Neurobiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California-Los Angeles, and first author Yuxiang Liu, Ph.D., former Instructor of Neuroscience at UTSW.

Joseph Takahashi, Ph.D., is Chair and Professor of Neuroscience and an Investigator in the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern. He holds the Loyd B. Sands Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience.

Dr. Takahashi discovered the mouse version of CLOCK, known as Clock, in 1997 and the human CLOCK gene in 1999. The gene produces a transcription factor, a protein that controls the activity of other genes. While many genes controlled by CLOCK regulate the rhythmic cycling of biological functions central to the body’s 24-hour circadian clock, other affected genes don’t appear to have a circadian role, Dr. Takahashi explained.

In 2012, Dr. Konopka discovered that human CLOCK has increased expression in the cerebral cortex – an area of the brain that is thought to be key to advanced cognition and has been linked to a variety of neuropsychiatric and neurologic conditions. These discoveries suggested CLOCK has “extra-circadian” functions unique to humans, although those have been unclear.

Dr. Konopka added that the traditional means of studying the functions of genes – either in cells growing in petri dishes or using analogous versions in animals such as mice – don’t resolve how CLOCK affects brain cells in their native environment or behavior in a living organism. Thus, she and her colleagues needed to take a different approach to better understand CLOCK’s functions.

Genevieve Konopka, Ph.D., is former Professor of Neuroscience at UT Southwestern and now Chair of Neurobiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California-Los Angeles.

In the new study, the researchers developed “humanized” mice, replacing their native Clock gene with the human CLOCK gene during embryonic development. After the mice became adults, Drs. Konopka, Takahashi, Liu, and their colleagues compared them to mice that carried extra copies of the mouse Clock gene and “wild-type” mice that weren’t genetically altered.

The team found that brains of mice carrying multiple copies of the human CLOCK gene expressed it in a pattern similar to humans, with more of the CLOCK protein made in the cerebral cortex relative to other areas of the brain. This region also became denser, with more cells than the cerebral cortexes of mice carrying extra copies of mouse Clock or wild-type mice.

A closer look showed the excitatory neurons (cells that transmit electrical signals) in the cerebral cortexes of humanized mice grew more dendrites and spines compared with those in the other mice – anatomy that allows for greater connectivity with other neurons. These cells displayed an opposite presentation to human neurons growing in petri dishes in which CLOCK had been deleted; those cells grew fewer dendrites and spines compared with unaltered human neurons and made fewer connections to other neurons.

Yuxiang Liu, Ph.D., is former Instructor of Neuroscience at UT Southwestern.

To determine whether the differences seen in the humanized mice affected their behavior, the researchers had the animals complete a complex cognitive task that required them to learn a changing set of associations to receive a food reward. Mice carrying the CLOCK gene performed significantly better than the other two groups, suggesting enhanced cognitive abilities.

When the researchers looked at which genes were uniquely affected by CLOCK in the humanized mice, they found many genes that play a role in forming connections between neurons. This finding helps explain the animals’ behavioral differences, since greater connectivity could enhance cognitive ability, Dr. Konopka said. These results may also provide insight into CLOCK’s link to neuropsychiatric and neurologic disorders, since several of the identified genes have been linked to these conditions.

The researchers plan to further study CLOCK’s role in the developing brain.

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to this study are Jay Gibson, Ph.D., Professor of Neuroscience; Ashwinikumar Kulkarni, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute and of Neuroscience; and Matthew Harper, M.S., Research Associate.

Drs. Takahashi and Gibson are Investigators in the O’Donnell Brain Institute. Dr. Takahashi holds the Loyd B. Sands Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience.

This study was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation 21st Century Science Initiative in Understanding Human Cognition Scholar Award (22002046), grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (HG011641, MH207672, and MH103517), an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship (915654), an NIH F30 Predoctoral Fellowship (MH105158-01A1), and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator award.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center 

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – June 25, 2025 – Many survivors of cardiogenic shock showed evidence of new cognitive impairment after leaving the hospital, according to a study led by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers. The findings, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, highlight a need to screen survivors and provide referrals to neuropsychology experts, the authors said.

James de Lemos, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine and Chief of the Division of Cardiology at UT Southwestern, was the study's senior investigator. He holds the Sweetheart Ball - Kern Wildenthal, M.D., Ph.D. Distinguished Chair in Cardiology.

“Our study demonstrated that nearly two-thirds of cardiogenic shock survivors experienced cognitive impairment within three months of hospital discharge, underscoring a critical but overlooked aspect of recovery,” said senior investigator James de Lemos, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine and Chief of the Division of Cardiology at UT Southwestern. “The findings are important for developing interventions that focus not only on improving survival but also on preventing or mitigating the functional consequences of cardiogenic shock, including cognitive decline.”

Cardiogenic shock affects approximately 100,000 Americans each year, resulting from heart failure, heart attack, or complications following cardiac surgery. The condition, which occurs when the heart is unable to pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs, has historically resulted in high mortality.

With advances in treatment during the past two decades, up to 70% of patients suffering from cardiogenic shock can now survive. But there is limited understanding of survivors’ recovery and quality of life after they leave the hospital.

“Our study is the first to systematically examine the cognitive outcomes of cardiogenic shock survivors, evaluating how cognition impacts patients’ ability to return to daily activities,” said Eric Hall, M.D., a clinical fellow in the Division of Cardiology who was the study leader and first author. “We found that cardiogenic shock is associated with cognitive impairment, which is an under-recognized consequence strongly linked to patients’ overall quality of life.”

Eric Hall, M.D., clinical fellow in the Division of Cardiology at UT Southwestern, was the study leader and first author.

UTSW researchers conducted the study by enrolling 141 patients from William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital and Parkland Memorial Hospital who had survived cardiogenic shock before being discharged. To establish a baseline, family members completed a questionnaire, the AD8 survey, about the patients’ cognitive function before hospitalization.

Before discharge, each patient completed an assessment, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Blind (bMoCA), to screen for signs of cognitive impairment. Three months after discharge, patients repeated the assessments, allowing researchers to track changes in thinking ability and daily functioning over time.

Among patients with no sign of cognitive impairment before admission, 65% were found to have new impairment at discharge, and 53% continued to show impairment at their three-month follow-up. UTSW researchers emphasized that these findings should inform the development of comprehensive survivorship programs including screening protocols to identify impairments patients face and rehabilitation programs to help them recover from those challenges.

“We hope to use this study as a foundation to develop targeted rehabilitation strategies that connect patients with neuropsychology experts and improve long-term recovery in cardiogenic shock survivors,” Dr. de Lemos said.

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to the study are Maryjane Farr, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Cardiology; C. Munro Cullum, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Neurological Surgery, and Neurology; Jeff Schaffert, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychiatry; Laura Lacritz, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology; Amil Shah, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Cardiology; Colby Ayers, M.S., Faculty Associate, Division of Cardiology; and Alexandra Sykes, M.D., Cardiology Fellow. Dr. Cullum is an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.

Dr. de Lemos holds the Sweetheart Ball - Kern Wildenthal, M.D., Ph.D. Distinguished Chair in Cardiology.

The study was funded by a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute T32 training grant (5T32HL12524). Dr. Cullum has served as Scientific Director of the Texas Alzheimer’s Research and Care Consortium (TARCC).

About UT Southwestern Medical Center 

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

About Parkland Health

Parkland Health is one of the largest public hospital systems in the country. Premier services at the state-of-the-art Parkland Memorial Hospital include the Level I Rees-Jones Trauma Center, the only burn center in North Texas verified by the American Burn Association for adult and pediatric patients, and a Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The system also includes two on-campus outpatient clinics – the Ron J. Anderson, MD Clinic and the Moody Outpatient Center, as well as more than 30 community-based clinics and numerous outreach and education programs. By cultivating its diversity, inclusion, and health equity efforts, Parkland enriches the health and wellness of the communities it serves. For more information, visit parklandhealth.org.

DALLAS – June 10, 2025 – Young patients from lower-income households in Texas may not be getting the most effective treatment for severe depression and suicidal thoughts, based on findings from researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

According to the study conducted as part of the Texas Youth Depression and Suicide Research Network (TX-YDSRN) initiative, these patients are much less likely to receive a combination of psychotherapy and medication, which prior research has shown to be more effective than either treatment alone in improving outcomes for youth with moderate to severe depression. The findings were published in Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice.

Madhukar Trivedi, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry and founding Director of the Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care at UT Southwestern. He is also an Investigator in the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute and holds the Betty Jo Hay Distinguished Chair in Mental Health and the Julie K. Hersh Chair for Depression Research and Clinical Care.

“Combination treatment is the recommended option for moderate to severe depression in youth, as it targets both biological and psychological aspects of the disorder,” said senior author Madhukar Trivedi, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Chief of the Mood Disorders Division, and founding Director of the Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care (CDRC) at UT Southwestern. “When youth cannot access this treatment, often due to financial or geographic barriers, they may receive care that is less effective, increasing the risk for persistent depression and suicidal behavior.”

The researchers studied patient data collected by the TX-YDSRN for 646 depressed youth ages 8 to 20 from clinical sites across the state, including Children’s Health. Patients were grouped by the treatment they received during their first month of care: no treatment; therapy only; medication only; or a combination of therapy and medication. Sociodemographic and clinical features were compared across these treatment types.

The most common treatment was combination therapy (52.8%), followed by medication only (34.8%). However, young patients who received medication only were more than three times as likely to come from households earning $25,000 or less annually than those from households earning $200,000 or more (20.5% vs. 6.2%). Young patients from higher-earning households were more likely to receive combination therapy (18.3% vs. 9.3%).

“These findings reinforce the importance of integrating both psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy into the treatment of depression in youth based on youth and caregiver preferences. They also highlight the need to remove financial barriers to accessing combination treatment, which could lead to better patient outcomes and reduced suicide risk,” Dr. Trivedi said.

E. Rabia Ayvaci, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at UT Southwestern.

E. Rabia Ayvaci, M.D., Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at UT Southwestern and the study’s first author, said that there were no significant differences in treatment by race or sex and that youth with more severe symptoms were more likely to receive combination treatment.

“The goal is to continue examining treatment access and outcomes longitudinally, which will allow for future evaluation of the effectiveness of different treatment approaches over time,” Dr. Ayvaci said. 

Dr. Trivedi said a recent initiative from the CDRC and TX-YDSRN, called Activ8, could play a role in improving access to care across Texas.

“Activ8 is a behavioral activation telehealth program for teens that reduces time, financial, and geographic/transportation barriers to care,” he said. “The initiative aims to improve access to empirically based interventions for teens with depression and increase the number of providers in Texas communities. Activ8 is an example of how we are working to improve youth mental health outcomes by identifying barriers to care and using that knowledge to inform and guide future efforts.”

TX-YDSRN is a state-funded initiative under the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium, designed to collect comprehensive, longitudinal clinical data on youth depression and suicide risk and address critical gaps in mental health care for youth in Texas. The network facilitates the development of evidence-based interventions and policy recommendations to improve mental health outcomes. Dr. Trivedi leads the TX-YDSRN, serving as the Scientific Lead, and Lynnel Goodman, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, is Director of the UTSW Hub.

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to the study are Karabi Nandy, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health and of Psychiatry; Laura Stone, M.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry; Abu Minhajuddin, Ph.D., Professor in the O’Donnell School of Public Health and of Psychiatry; Graham J. Emslie, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics; and Ryan Becker, B.S., Clinical Research Assistant.

Dr. Trivedi, an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute, holds the Betty Jo Hay Distinguished Chair in Mental Health and the Julie K. Hersh Chair for Depression Research and Clinical Care.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center 

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – June 02, 2025 – People of South Asian descent make up one-quarter of the world’s population, but they account for 60% of cardiovascular disease cases. To help reduce the elevated risk of heart disease among South Asians living in North America, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers joined global colleagues in developing comprehensive recommendations, published in the American Journal of Preventive Cardiology, for health care providers, patients, community members, and policymakers.

Anand Rohatgi, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Cardiology at UT Southwestern, conceived the idea of a framework to address the higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension in South Asians compared with other races and ethnicities. Known as cardiometabolic disorders, these and other conditions can affect South Asians even at normal weights and can be overlooked during routine examinations.

Anand Rohatgi, M.D., is Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Cardiology at UT Southwestern.

“There’s a lot of background evidence on elevated heart disease risk in South Asians, but a lack of prospective programming and interventions for prevention and management,” Dr. Rohatgi said. “It occurred to us that health care providers and other stakeholders could use a road map to identify gaps in clinical care and research while addressing how we can collectively move forward.”

Over 5 million U.S. residents are from South Asian countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives, and Bhutan, and more than 2 million live in Canada.

Genetic, cultural, and environmental influences combine to raise South Asians’ cardiometabolic disease risk. They develop coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death worldwide, at two to four times the rates of other ethnic groups. They also tend to develop hypertension earlier and more often, are less likely to take medications to control it, and are at a greater risk of developing Type 2 diabetes at younger ages and lower body mass indexes (BMI). South Asian women have higher rates of adverse pregnancy outcomes, further exacerbating risk from younger ages.

The authors said clinicians should be proactive about preventive care of South Asian patients by screening earlier for blood glucose levels, body composition, arterial plaque, mental health, genetic risk, and potential for adverse pregnancy outcomes. 

South Asians may benefit from lifestyle modifications or medications despite “normal” test results, the authors said. At UT Southwestern’s South Asian Heart Program in Coppell, which Dr. Rohatgi started in 2022, clinicians model this proactive approach using comprehensive evaluation and counseling. 

The authors explained that foundational studies on the accuracy of medical tests and patient responses to health interventions are lacking for South Asian populations. While efforts to include South Asians in clinical research have been slow, some patients are also skeptical about the safety of participating. This report could help drive funding for research and recruitment efforts, the authors indicated.

Language barriers and cultural norms, such as lack of exercise and preferences for alternative medicines, also may contribute to disease risk, the authors noted, along with the scarcity of dietary advice that includes healthy South Asian dishes. The authors suggested collaborations between South Asian community leaders and health care workers to help patients make healthy dietary and lifestyle choices. 

“Our biggest takeaway is that people who are part of South Asian communities or who engage with them in any way, particularly in medicine, should become aware of the risk and take action to empower South Asians to lead healthy lives,” Dr. Rohatgi said.

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to the study are Manish Jha, M.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry and an O’Donnell Clinical Neuroscience Scholar; Parag Joshi, M.D., Associate Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Cardiology; and Madhukar Trivedi, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Chief of the Division of Mood Disorders, and Director of the Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care. Drs. Jha and Trivedi are Investigators in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center 

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.

DALLAS – May 29, 2025 – UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists have identified a protein that appears to act as a master control switch for reactive gliosis, a prominent feature of many neurodegenerative diseases that is thought to contribute to their pathology. The researchers’ findings, published in Neuron, could eventually lead to new treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s diseases and other neurodegenerative conditions.

Chun-Li Zhang, Ph.D., is Professor of Molecular Biology, a member of the Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine, and an Investigator in the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern.

“Reactive gliosis can help the nervous system adapt to stressful conditions to continue healthy functioning, but it can also be maladaptive, even causing neuronal death. Learning how to control this condition could help us protect cells from the negative aspects of reactive gliosis, changing the trajectory of neurodegenerative disease,” said Chun-Li Zhang, Ph.D., Professor of Molecular Biology, a member of the Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine, and an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern. Dr. Zhang co-led the study with first author Tianjin Shen, Ph.D., Research Scientist in the Zhang Lab.

More than half the volume of the central nervous system is made of glia, non-neuronal cells that support neurons by delivering nutrients, producing insulation, and removing pathogens and dead cells. Astrocytes and microglia are two common glial cell types. When the central nervous system becomes stressed through trauma or disease, these cells proliferate and grow larger, secreting protective proteins, absorbing harmful factors, and shoring up the blood-brain barrier, all hallmarks of reactive gliosis.

However, this condition also can have detrimental effects, Dr. Zhang explained. Reactive gliosis can harm the connections between neurons, called synapses; restrict regeneration of axons, the long extensions on neurons; increase neuroinflammation; and prompt apoptosis, or programmed cell death. These negative aspects of reactive gliosis are thought to play a significant role in the pathology of neurodegenerative diseases.

Tianjin Shen, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist in the Zhang Lab at UT Southwestern.

Although researchers have identified several proteins involved in reactive gliosis, their production is believed to be regulated by genes further upstream in the molecular signaling cascade responsible for this condition. To search for this condition’s master controls, Dr. Zhang and his colleagues searched a database of gene activity in the astrocytes of mice after these cells were exposed to a bacterial toxin that causes inflammation. They soon homed in on Gadd45g, a gene whose activity significantly increased in response to the toxin.

Gadd45g is part of a larger family of genes identified as stress sensors in cancer research, but its role in healthy astrocytes was unclear. To seek answers, the researchers worked with mice whose astrocytes were altered to overproduce GADD45G, the protein product of the Gadd45g gene. Not only did this modification spur reactive gliosis in astrocytes, but also in nearby unmodified cells. This suggested the astrocytes secreted chemical signals to prompt reactive gliosis in other cell types – a theory the researchers confirmed using genetically modified astrocytes growing in a petri dish with neurons. In both experiments, reactive gliosis prompted by the astrocytes decreased the number of neuronal synapses and triggered inflammation.

In a mouse model of severe Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers found increased activity of Gadd45g in the brain, supporting the idea that the gene instigates the reactive gliosis that accompanies this disease. Analysis of gene activity in people with Alzheimer’s confirmed this gene is upregulated in human patients as well. When the researchers genetically modified the model to produce more GADD45G, symptoms of the disease were dramatically worse than in unmodified models – their brains collected double the amount of pathological amyloid-beta protein and had significantly increased inflammation at an earlier age.

Conversely, selectively deleting Gadd45g in astrocytes significantly reduced the amount of amyloid-beta protein in the model. Additionally, down-regulating the gene enhanced cognition in the Alzheimer’s model, boosting performance in multiple tests of learning and memory.

Together, Dr. Zhang said, these results suggest GADD45G serves as a master regulator of reactive gliosis. Finding ways to control its activity could eventually improve outcomes for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to this study are Wenjiao Tai, Ph.D., Instructor of Molecular Biology; Shuaipeng Ma, Ph.D., Xiaoling Zhong, Ph.D., and Yuhua Zou, M.Sc., Research Scientists; and Dongfang Jiang, Ph.D., postdoctoral researcher.

Dr. Zhang is a W. W. Caruth, Jr. Scholar in Biomedical Research.

The study was funded by grants from the Texas Alzheimer’s Research and Care Consortium, the Decherd Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health (NS092616, NS127375, and NS117065).

About UT Southwestern Medical Center 

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.