School Notes: School of Medicine
November/December 2024

YSM joins NIH Network

As part of an ongoing effort at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) to better understand rare diseases, a team spanning multiple departments and specialties from YSM and Yale New Haven Hospital has received a $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to join the Undiagnosed Diseases Network as a new Yale Diagnostic Center of Excellence (YDCoE). The Undiagnosed Diseases Network was established in 2013 by the NIH Common Fund with the goal of connecting research and clinical sites across the United States in order to better understand and treat patients with undiagnosed diseases. YDCoE will partner with key stakeholders in the community to increase genetic testing and diagnostic efforts in the Yale New Haven Health System and other health care systems in the state of Connecticut for patients with unexplained or undiagnosed symptoms, especially those from underserved groups and communities.

Professor named HHMI investigator

Valentina Greco, Carolyn Walch Slayman Professor of Genetics at Yale School of Medicine, is one of 26 scientists from 19 institutions who recently were named Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigators, one of the highest honors in biomedical science. With this status, Greco and the other new investigators will each receive 11 million dollars over a seven-year period to conduct research that, in the words of HHMI, will “push the boundaries of science,” and “radically changes our understanding of how biology works.” HHMI’s chief scientific officer, Leslie Vosshall, says the institute invests in “people, not projects,” and “provides investigators with the time and resources they need to go where their science leads.” Greco’s scientific focus is on the skin. Among the questions she investigates are how cell behaviors are an expression of the architecture of the tissue in which the cells are embedded, and why skin cancer is relatively rare even though mutations are frequent in the skin.