UTMB News

  • Future vaccine could protect your teeth, smile

    If you know that bacteria cause tooth decay, it should come as no surprise that researchers are working on vaccines against cavities. More than 40 years have been spent trying to develop such a vaccine, write Drs. Megan Berman and Richard Rupp in the Vaccine Smarts column.

  • Image of Chair of Neurosurgery, Dr. Kan

    UTMB Clear Lake treats first ruptured aneurysm

    A 72-year-old woman with a severe headache was treated Monday at University of Texas Medical Branch Clear Lake Hospital for a ruptured aneurysm – a first for the south Harris County hospital. “This represents a major milestone towards gaining comprehensive stroke center status,” said Dr. Peter Kan, chair of Department of Neurosurgery at UTMB.

  • Cruise Ship

    Making Waves with Medicine

    UTMB Health partners with Carnival Cruise Lines to provide the expertise of UTMB doctors via phone call or video chat when specialized care is needed at sea.

  • Performing Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery

    Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery: Treating Oral, Head and Neck Cancers

    The physicians in UTMB Health’s Division of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery provide expertise that extends beyond impacted wisdom teeth and dental implants—they treat patients with head, neck and mouth cancers, injuries due to facial trauma and a wide array of other surgical needs related to the face and mouth.

  • Researchers are racing to figure out if Omicron can beat our vaccines

    To really understand how effective vaccines remain, we need to see who becomes sick with the variant, and how severe that disease becomes. That takes time. “It’s been about two, three weeks since South Africa started reporting these cases. What I’ll be looking for is: Is there a corresponding increase in hospitalizations, and a week later, an increase in deaths?” said Dr. Vineet Menachery, an immunologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch who studies the interaction between the immune system and coronaviruses.

  • Why COVID-19 Tests Don't Tell You Which Variant You May Have

    Dr. Pei-Yong Shi, chair in innovations in molecular biology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told Verywell that sequencing data is meaningless if it cannot be paired with information on the variant’s severity and its impact on the population. “(Variants) need to be very carefully studied, because otherwise it’s just a mutation, it’s just a code,” Shi said. “You can speculate a little bit based on the knowledge of the closer-related (mutations), but you really have to do experiments to find out what is the impact.”

  • UTMB team working to determine how dangerous the omicron variant really is

    Scientists at UTMB are reverse engineering this version of the coronavirus to figure out exactly what they are dealing with. “The data we've presented has been presented to the FDA, CDC, and government agencies and of course our long-term collaborators of Pfizer BioNTech,” Dr. Pei-Yong Shi said.

  • Social media threats targeting Henrico schools prompt extra security measures

    Several non-credible social media threats targeting Virginia schools appeared following the Nov. 30 shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan that left four dead. “There’s a contagion effect that we know about in terms of suicides, shootings, bad things happening, and people copycat what they see,” said Dr. Jeff Temple, a professor and psychologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch who studies adolescent violence. “Coupled with the real adolescent mental health crisis caused by COVID and everything else, we’re seeing more and more of this.”

  • Pandemic isolation, fentanyl cause spike in opioid-related deaths, experts say

    When the COVID-19 pandemic hit two years ago, the country already was facing a different crisis—an opioid epidemic. And as shutdowns and working from home spread, the opioid epidemic worsened as many who struggled with opioid use found themselves isolated from support and spiraling in their addictions, experts say. “All of this physical distancing and this social distancing has impacted the ability to get treatment, remain in treatment and have their support systems in place,” said Dr. Kathryn Cunningham, director of the University of Texas Medical Branch Center for Addiction Research.

  • Cyberbullying: The glossary of the new scourge

    The article in The Magazine section of the Greek news website quoted a 2018 study by Dr. Jeff Temple, director of Center for Violence Prevention at UTMB: “As with sex, in sexting if there is no consent or something is done compulsorily, there are negative issues in mental health.”

  • Why is it nearly always the upper arm with shots?

    The fact that it’s easy to get to and not embarrassing to expose is a small part of it, but there are important technical reasons, write Drs. Norbert Herzog and David Niesel in the latest Medical Discovery News column.

  • Reconstruction of a survivor inspires others with breast cancer

    Dr. Colleen Silva, director of Breast Health and professor of surgery at UTMB, commented on the importance of survivor support groups. “I think sharing your own experiences, asking questions about what to expect, expressing your fears or concerns with women who have been through it is very important and plays a vital role in developing personal resiliency and making it successfully through the entire treatment. Some patients have told me that being a part of this support group saved their lives,” Silva said.

  • Clark Joins COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence Champion Network and Team Halo

    The COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence Champion Network aims to educate colleagues, patients and communities about the safety and benefits of COVID-19 vaccines, and Team Halo is a group of scientists and healthcare professionals from around the world, working to end the pandemic by volunteering their time to address COVID-19 vaccine concerns and misinformation.

  • Our first preview of how vaccines will fare against omicron

    Omicron harbors more than 30 mutations in its spike protein, the primary target of most of the world’s COVID-19 shots. And it’s certainly dodging some of the antibodies that vaccines goad our bodies into producing—more so, it appears, than the variants that have come before it.

  • Omicron is likely to weaken COVID vaccine protection—but boosters could restore it

    It will also be important to see further studies confirming the latest results, because variables such as the type of cell used can affect their conclusions, says Pei-Yong Shi, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “In the next week or 10 days, there will be a lot of confirmatory results coming out,” he said.

  • Studies suggest sharp drop in vaccine protection vs. omicron—yet cause for optimism

    In South Africa researchers at the Africa Health Research Institute took blood from about a dozen people who had been vaccinated with two shots of the Pfizer vaccine and looked to see how well their antibodies kill the virus. In the experiment, everyone's antibodies were able to neutralize an earlier version of the virus quite well. And that's a lot. "It's astonishing ... in terms of the reduction," said Pei-Yong Shi, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston who has been doing similar experiments to determine the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against the coronavirus. This story was picked up by NPR affiliates across the country.

  • How scary is omicron? Scientists are racing to find answers.

    Microbiologist Pei-Yong Shi runs a high-containment laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Over Thanksgiving, his team began engineering a replica of the new variant to test against the antibodies generated by vaccines. But it doesn’t happen overnight: It will take about two weeks to build the omicron replica, another few days to confirm that it’s an accurate facsimile, and one more week to pit the virus against blood samples from vaccinated people. “I think there is a lot of overreaction, and we just have to sit tight,” Shi said. “There are no results yet, these are just the mutations. What does that mean? We have to see.”