UVA Engineering faculty members earned the University of Virginia’s top honors for iimpactful research spanning careers, labs and disciplines.

A transformative $10 million gift from Cynthia King, the late Jeffery King, and Jason and Julie Borrelli launches the King Center for Lynch Syndrome at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Mount Sinai and King Saud University Medical City in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, today announced a three-year collaboration aimed at better understanding why inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) runs in some Saudi families, and how that knowledge can lead to risk ascertainment, earlier diagnosis and more personalized treatment options. The project will focus on Saudi families with multiple members affected by IBD, including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. By identifying exposure and biological markers that drive disease mechanisms and outcomes in these high-risk families, the parties aim to accelerate the development of new diagnostics and therapies tailored to individual patients around the world. As part of the collaboration, King Saud University Medical City will identify and enroll eligible participants and collect whole blood, serum, and stool samples, along with de-identified health and family history information, from individuals with IBD and relatives at increased risk. Mount Sinai will lead advanced biomarker discovery and integrative analyses using multi-omics profiling and other state-of-the-art research tools.

Neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) are typically diagnosed after irreversible pathology has developed. Aging, the strongest risk factor, drives molecular changes that predispose the brain to synaptic dysfunction and proteinopathy (neurodegenerative diseases characterized by the abnormal folding, aggregation, and accumulation of specific proteins within neurons or brain tissues). Glycosylation and extracellular matrix (ECM) remodeling are processes crucial for protein folding, stability and cell signaling and represent underexplored mechanisms linking aging to neurodegeneration, opening avenues for biomarker discovery; yet mass spectrometry-based glycoproteomics and glycomics studies have remained limited until now.