A new treatment regimen can help some patients who have blood cancer to live disease-free longer, University of Florida researchers and colleagues have found. Low doses of a drug called lenalidomide can help hold off the return of multiple myeloma after bone marrow transplantation. Patients who took the drug to maintain health also lived longer [...]

The time may have come to scrub the idea that brain plaque — deposits of protein that clog passages between brain cells — might not be all that bad. University of Florida researchers have discovered that people with no signs of dementia during their lives, even though their brains contained the debris typical of Alzheimer’s [...]

Using gene transfer techniques pioneered by University of Florida faculty, Taiwanese doctors have restored some movement in four children bedridden with a rare, life-threatening neurological disease. The first-in-humans achievement may also be helpful for more common diseases such as Parkinson’s that involve nerve cell damage caused by lack of a crucial molecule in brain tissue. [...]

The Center for NeuroGenetics at the University of Florida has received a highly competitive $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to study a new idea that challenges conventional understanding of how proteins in cells are made, and their impact on inherited diseases. Scientists have long understood the role of messenger RNA, known as [...]

Neuroscientist William G. “Bill” Luttge, 67, the founding executive director of the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute of the University of Florida, died on Saturday, March 24, 2012, at Shands at UF medical center. His wife, sons and other family members were at his side. He was diagnosed in January with multiple [...]

Tyler’s Hope for a Dystonia Cure has presented $100,000 to the UF Center for Movement Disorders and Neurorestoration to establish The Tyler’s Hope Season of Hope Fellowship for clinical training and research in dystonia, Parkinson’s disease and movement disorders. “The money will establish a yearly fellowship, so we will be able to meet that critical [...]

Flowers are a symbol of happiness and good cheer. But new research reveals that the sweet scent of flowers may serve a sneakier purpose: co-opting humans into propagating and protecting them. This thought is leading researchers to the idea of emotion as an evolutionary force. For Brain Awareness Week at the University of Florida’s McKnight [...]

For some, successful aging means looking and acting like the young. But not when it comes to the brain. Imaging and molecular studies show that even when older adults perform at a high level, their brains often don’t do things in the same way as young people’s brains. In fact, it’s low-performing older adults whose [...]

For the past 12 years, University of Florida researchers at the Powell Gene Therapy Center have pioneered gene therapies aimed at helping patients with inherited blindness and paralyzing neuromuscular diseases. With many of these therapies finally about to cross over from the laboratory to mainstream medicine, the Powell Center’s original benefactors, Earl and Christy Powell, [...]

Irene Litvan, M.D., a world authority on the diagnosis of a rare, Parkinson-like disease, will visit the McKnight Brain Institute on Friday to talk about the “many faces of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.” The presentation is part of a symposium focused on advances in Parkinsonism and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, known as PSP. A professor of Parkinson’s [...]