Division News & Events - Pharmacology and Toxicology

Postdoctoral researcher in the Gore Lab Dr. Emily Hilz is a Phase 2 winner of a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services competition to reduce Black women’s risk of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Hilz’s winning program created Endoscreen, a mobile phone application to increase awareness of and reduce exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in personal care products.

Division Head and Professor of Pharmacology & Toxicology and Doluisio Regents Professor Karen Vasquez, Ph.D. recently published an article in Nature Communications. The study, titled “Obesity increases genomic instability at DNA repeat-mediated endogenous mutation hotspots,” represents the first demonstration that obesity increases genetic instability at alternative DNA structures (in this case H-DNA), which are hotspots for mutations in human cancers.

In a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), ongoing research into the causes of manganese-induced parkinsonism has revealed a possible treatment option. Dr. Somshuvra Mukhopadhyay and a team of researchers have released new findings that the PHD2 inhibitor, which is the cell’s master oxygen sensor, has a second physiologically essential function – to also act as the cell’s manganese sensor.