Gene-editing tools like Crispr/Cas9 offer the potential to both enhance and correct the building-blocks of life. What progress has been made in using gene editing to diagnose and treat disease?

What are drugs? What do they do? How do they do what they do? These questions are part of the field of pharmacology, and over this series we will learn all about a wide variety of different drugs that have clinical use. This will require...

It's time to learn about microorganisms! These are all the tiny little critters in the water, and the air, and in the ground, and inside you. We didn't even know they were there until a few hundred years ago, but once we started to learn...

Now that we know how drugs move through the body to reach their target, what happens once they get there? By what mechanisms can drugs interact with target proteins to elicit a particular cellular response, and by extension a...

We are able to become physically dependent on a wide variety of substances, which results in what we call drug addiction. What does this look like from a neurophysiological standpoint? What does the drug-addicted brain look like? Let's...

Now we know a bit more about how viruses interact with cells, whether those are bacterial cells, or animal cells, such as ours. But how do they gain access to our cells in the first place? How do viruses get inside the human body? Let's...

ADHD might seem like a convenient excuse to be able to medicate your overactive child. But it turns out that ADHD is a real diagnosis with a different combination of symptoms for each person. There are still a lot of questions...

We live in a time where there is much skepticism towards modern medicine. This stems purely from ignorance, however, and there are those who capitalize on this to sell an unbelievable array of alternative medicines that, almost without...

Substance abuse in the workplace is a serious issue. This presentation helps employees understand the impact, effects, and costs of substance abuse in the workplace.

The D.A.R.E. program, which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, was a staple of childhood for millions of American children in the '80s and '90s. It set out to tell kids about the perils of alcohol and other substances, but there...

Cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's -- why do some diseases still plague us? And can we cure them?

What is a drug? You can pause the video here and have a think, see if you know the names of any drugs. A drug is a substance that when released into the body will cause an effect. Drugs may be recreational, where people choose to take...

One day in 1976, there was a terrible outbreak of an unknown disease at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. What was the pathogen responsible for this so-called Legionnaires' disease? Let's find out!

Typhoid fever can be a very serious illness, and we may have already heard of it because of Typhoid Mary, a famous carrier in the beginning of the 20th century. Let's go in for a closer look!

In 1896, a mysterious disease spread through the Snake River Valley of Idaho. Some people called it a spotted fever, and hundreds got sick. As it turns out, this was all the doing of some bacteria, Rickettsia ricketssii. Let's get a...

Lots of kids get the chickenpox. I know I did! I was about four years old. It was awful. But now we can learn all kinds of things about the virus called Varicella-Zoster virus, which causes chickenpox and shingles. What is its structure...

Staphylococcus aureus is the bacteria responsible for what we commonly refer to as a staph infection. They are extremely common, but they are also developing antibiotic resistance at an alarming rate. Let's take a look at these now.

Syphilis is another infection that is typically caused by sexual contact, thanks to the pathogen Treponema pallidum. What does this bacterium do? How is the infection treated? Let's take a closer look now.

Lyme disease. It's that one you get from ticks! So what kind of ticks, and where are they? How does that work exactly, and what are the bacteria that are being transferred when they bite? The bacteria are called Borellia burgdorferi,...

For more information from the Khademhosseini lab visit

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Organs on a chip systems could transform the medical drug pipeline as we know it. ...

We've all gotten food poisoning before, and it's terrible. So what causes it? Just a little bit of bacteria called E. coli, that's all. Let's check them out!

If we are going to tell the story of medicine, we had better start at the beginning, which means we need to go all the way back to the start of recorded history. Every since we've been writing things down, we've been documenting our...

As disease-causing bacteria becomes increasingly resistant to antibiotics, scientists like Erin Carlson from Indiana University are turning to natural sources to find new medicines. "Science Behind the News" is produced in partnership...