Nancy Fliesler

4 days ago | answers.childrenshospital.org | Nancy Fliesler

In 2021, research led by Ryan Flynn, MD, PhD, and his mentor, Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi, PhD, opened a new chapter in biology, characterizing a new kind of player on the cell surface: glycoRNAs. Extending this discovery recently in Cell, Flynn and colleagues showed that glycoRNAs form highly organized clusters with RNA-binding proteins on the cell surface. These clusters appear to regulate communication between cells and their environment.

1 week ago | answers.childrenshospital.org | Nancy Fliesler

Children are much more likely to survive cancer today than 50 years ago. Unfortunately, as adults, many of them develop cardiovascular disease, secondary cancers, or both, believed to result from the toxic effects of chemotherapy and radiation. But the full risk picture for survivors hasn’t been clear. “Patients want to know how long they’ll live once they’ve been treated for cancer.

1 week ago | answers.childrenshospital.org | Nancy Fliesler

Asa Cibelli feels like he’s been reborn. The straight-A middle schooler plays basketball and football, does jiu jitsu, is learning guitar, and can solve a Rubik’s cube in 40 seconds flat. But he once wondered if he’d ever feel better. From birth, Asa experienced chronic abdominal pain and severe diarrhea. The many doctors he saw at different medical centers in his home state of California couldn’t figure out why. “We went from doctor to doctor to department to department,” says his mother Katie.

1 week ago | answers.childrenshospital.org | Nancy Fliesler

Congenital diarrheas and enteropathies are rare and devastating for infants and children. Treatments have consisted mainly of fluid and nutritional management. But in recent years, targeted dietary and drug therapies have emerged based on genetic discoveries. Now, research led by Boston Children’s Hospital, The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and UCLA takes a major step toward genetically guided care for these conditions.

2 weeks ago | answers.childrenshospital.org | Nancy Fliesler

Years ago, as a neurology resident, Chinfei Chen, MD, PhD, cared for a 20-year-old woman who had experienced a very small stroke, affecting only the thalamus. “It was so tiny that she wouldn’t have noticed any symptoms had the stroke been in any other area of the brain,” says Chen, who is now an investigator at the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. “But she lost her ability to form new memories.