Health

The other ‘Alzheimer’s protein’: The quest to prevent toxic tau buildup in the brain

Lisa Marshall — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 22:00:04 +0000

The other ‘Alzheimer’s protein’: The quest to prevent toxic tau buildup in the brain Lisa Marshall Tue, 02/03/2026 - 15:00

Lisa Marshall

In the quest to cure Alzheimer’s, the protein known as beta-amyloid has long taken center stage, driving development of a long list of drugs aimed at breaking up “amyloid plaques” in the brain.

But mounting research shows a lesser-known protein called tau, which forms toxic hairball-like tangles inside neurons, plays an equally vital role in fueling this and other neurodegenerative diseases.

New �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder research published in the journal PNAS offers fresh insight into how tau tangles form and spread. In a companion paper, published in the journal Neuron, the researchers propose a new strategy for preventing this process and show the approach can halt or reverse neurodegeneration in mice.

The findings could ultimately pave the way toward a ‘neuronal vaccine’ that stops neurodegeneration before it can spread.

“If we really want to treat Alzheimer’s and many of these other diseases, we have to block tau as early as possible,” said senior author Roy Parker, distinguished professor of biochemistry and director of the BioFrontiers Institute. “These studies are an important step forward in understanding why tau aggregates in cells and how we can intervene.”

A good protein gone bad

First discovered 50 years ago, tau helps brain cells keep their shape and shuttles important molecules around within them. When it malfunctions, tau can turn toxic and spread through the brain killing neurons.

This process underlies more than two dozen neurodegenerative diseases called ‘tauopathies.’ In Alzheimer’s, which affects 7 million people in the U.S., amyloid beta forms plaques that kick-start the spread of tau tangles.

“By the time you treat an Alzheimer’s patient, even if you can completely get rid of amyloid plaque in the brain, it’s often too late because tau has already done its damage and is continuing to spread,” said Parker.

Other ‘tauopathies’ include Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), often found among football players with head trauma; and some forms of frontotemporal dementia, a cruel and fast-moving disease which causes personality changes and memory loss in adults as young as 40.

Roy Parker, director of the BioFrontiers Institute at CU Boulder.

�Թ�� one in 1,000 children who get measles will acquire a fatal tauopathy called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) six to 10 years after infection, noted Parker.

“That’s the one that scares me the most, as so many people think measles is not a big deal,” Parker said.

To date, there are no FDA approved drugs to target tau. But Parker’s lab and others are making progress toward that goal.

A "vaccine" for brain cells

Previous studies looking at postmortem brain tissue of Alzheimer’s patients have found that tau aggregates include unusual proteins containing disordered chains of an amino acid called serine.

This led Parker’s team to wonder whether these “polyserines” somehow drive tau to, essentially, turn bad.

Through a series of experiments described in the PNAS paper, he and his students found that when polyserine makes its way to a budding seed of tau inside a brain cell, it can prompt tau to misfold, clump and spread toxic aggregates to other neurons like a virus.

They also found that when mice with a predisposition to tauopathies have more polyserine on board, they get sicker faster.

“In experiments in human neurons in the test tube, fruit flies, animals and human tissue, we have now shown that overexpression of polyserine increases tau aggregation,” said Parker. “The question now is: How do you target this process to prevent or treat disease?”

In one clever strategy, described in the Neuron paper, they turned polyserine — which naturally gravitates toward tau aggregates— into a sort of Trojan horse.

They administered polyserine, attached to a different protein expressly engineered to bust up tau tangles, to mice. They found that this led to a striking decrease of tau aggregates in the brain, diminished production of new seeds of toxic tau and decreased anxiety and memory deficits in the animals.

“Essentially, if we use this strategy in a mouse that is prone to tau aggregation, it either doesn’t get disease or it slows it way down,” said Parker.

In future work, his lab hopes to get a better sense of why polyserine forms in the first place and what else goes wrong inside cells to turn typically beneficial tau into a lethal threat to neurons.

He imagines a day when his lab’s research can inform development of a preventative treatment, given to people predisposed to tauopathies far earlier in the disease process.

“The holy grail here would be a safe, cheap therapy that is well-tolerated and can be given to people who need it before they have a lot of symptoms,” he said. “Understanding how the cellular environment influences this process, and how to interfere with it, is a huge part of getting there.”

Toxic protein clusters known as tau aggregates underlie dozens of neurodegenerative diseases, or ‘tauopathies.’ New research illuminates why they form and spread and how to stop them.

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Tau protein clusters known as tau aggregates underlie dozens of neurodegenerative diseases known as 'tauopathies.'

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Toxic clusters of the protein tau underlie dozens of neurodegenerative diseases known as 'tauopathies.'

Creating pathways to accessible heart health

Emma Holst — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 17:33:00 +0000

Creating pathways to accessible heart health Emma Holst Tue, 02/03/2026 - 10:33

Emma Holst

February is American Heart Month, a time when people are encouraged to focus on their cardiovascular health.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death globally. Risk factors for poor cardiovascular health include tobacco use, an unhealthy diet, physical inactivity and physiological factors like high blood pressure.

Researchers Sanna Darvish (left) and Sophia Mahoney (right)

At CU Boulder’s Integrative Physiology of Aging Laboratory led by Doug Seals and Matt Rossman, researchers are studying cardiovascular aging.

Sanna Darvish, a doctoral student of integrative physiology, is working toward reducing CVD risk in underrepresented and ethnic populations. “We hope that by studying vascular dysfunction in vulnerable, underrepresented groups, we can better understand the mechanisms contributing to their exacerbated CVD and identify effective interventions,” explained Darvish.

In a study published in 2024, Darvish and integrative physiology doctoral graduate Sophia Mahoney explored the intersection of ethnicity and race, socioeconomic factors and cardiovascular health.

“I think the public knows men have a high risk of heart attacks, but this is mostly because women and other groups have been historically understudied in biomedical research,” said Darvish. “Most people don’t realize that CVD risk is actually higher in older women compared with older men, and this is exacerbated in Black and Indigenous women.”

One tactic to help combat CVD risk is to stay informed. A conversation with Darvish explored what interventions her research has identified to improve heart health and what steps the laboratory has taken to address accessibility challenges for those from underrepresented groups.

What interventions have you found effective in improving heart health among different populations?

Aerobic exercise is the standard-of-care clinical strategy for reducing CVD in older adults across all racial and ethnic groups. This is emphasized by organizations such as the American Heart Association that recommend 150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise per week, plus at least two strength training sessions.

These exercises might include hiking, swimming or yoga. If integrating a workout into your week presents a challenge, remember that some daily activities are also considered forms of exercise. These might include mowing the lawn and gardening, shoveling snow or walking to the store and carrying groceries.

Could you share any trends or patterns you’ve observed regarding exercise and heart health in specific communities?

Most studies have been conducted in largely non-Hispanic white populations. There are a few studies, as outlined in our review paper, that have found that aerobic exercise training improves vascular function among Black Americans, Hispanics, Indigenous Americans, Southeast Asians and Native Hawaiians.

It is important to note that there are many barriers to performing aerobic exercise training, especially in underrepresented groups, including cost, time, limited resources and a lack of motivation and health literacy. These barriers provide justification to identify potential alternative interventions that also improve vascular function but overcome these barriers. Our laboratory is currently studying a few lifestyle and supplement-based interventions that are proving to be effective at improving vascular function in older adults.

What heart health statistics have you found most significant in your work?

Importantly, around age 55–60, women supersede men with higher CVD risk. Accumulating evidence demonstrates this is largely due to menopause and the diminished estrogen production that follows reproductive aging.

I think that increasing education and overall health literacy in the general public about the risks of CVD in women and underrepresented communities is important because many people don’t realize that certain factors, such as menopause or race or ethnicity, do substantially increase the risk for many chronic diseases.

We don’t fully understand the mechanisms of increased CVD risk in these groups. It is our job as researchers to identify those risks and mechanisms so physicians and public health officials can better help their patients live healthier lives.

What challenges have you faced in studying the intersection of socioeconomic factors and cardiovascular health?

Studying underrepresented groups is quite challenging in Boulder because we have a relatively homogenous community in terms of race, socioeconomic profile, education status, etc. This makes it difficult to study people who are representative of the U.S. demographic. However, neighboring cities and counties do have more diverse populations, so we do recruit a decent number of people from outside Boulder to participate in our clinical trials.

Could you share any steps that CU Boulder or your lab has taken to address these challenges?

Recently, our laboratory has emphasized pouring more resources into strategies that may help participation in research be more accessible for individuals of underrepresented groups.

To better accomplish these goals, we have done some reflection as a laboratory and identified specific internal and external methods to improve diversity in our clinical trials. A majority of our lab has completed a training focused on creating inclusive research environments for participants and colleagues, and all lab members complete a mandatory implicit bias training when they join the lab. A large focus of our discussions is dismantling biases we have against the aging community, which is even more discriminatory against aging people of color.

In terms of making our clinical trials more directly accessible, we compensate participants for their time and travel, offer free transportation assistance for those who lack safe and reliable transport, and we offer meal vouchers for participants. We think these steps can be easily adopted by other research groups on campus who are seeking to diversify their clinical research participant cohorts.

Sanna Darvish discusses the interventions her research has identified to improve heart health and the steps the Integrative Physiology of Aging Laboratory has taken to address accessibility challenges for people in underrepresented groups.

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What causes chronic pain? A new study identifies a key culprit

Lisa Marshall — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 23:49:09 +0000

What causes chronic pain? A new study identifies a key culprit Lisa Marshall Tue, 01/27/2026 - 16:49

Lisa Marshall

A neural circuit hidden in an understudied region of the brain plays a critical role in turning temporary pain into pain that can last months or years, according to new �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder research.

The animal study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that silencing this pathway, known as the caudal granular insular cortex (CGIC), can prevent or halt chronic pain.

“Our paper used a variety of state-of-the art methods to define the specific brain circuit crucial for deciding for pain to become chronic and telling the spinal cord to carry out this instruction,” said senior author Linda Watkins, distinguished professor of behavioral neuroscience in the College of Arts and Sciences. “If this crucial decision maker is silenced, chronic pain does not occur. If it is already ongoing, chronic pain melts away.”

The study comes amid what first author Jayson Ball calls a “gold rush of neuroscience.”

With new tools enabling them to genetically manipulate precise populations of brain cells, neuroscientists are now able to identify, with unprecedented granularity, potential targets for new therapies. Such therapies, including infusions or brain-machine interfaces, could someday provide safer and more effective alternatives to opioids.

“This study adds an important leaf to the tree of knowledge about chronic pain,” said Ball, who earned his doctorate in Watkins’ lab in May and now works for Neuralink, a California-based startup that develops brain-machine interfaces for human health.

When touch hurts

�Թ�� one in four adults have chronic pain, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and nearly one in 10 people say chronic pain interferes with their daily life and work.

Those with nerve-related pain often suffer from a condition called allodynia, an extreme sensitivity in which even light touch hurts.

Acute and chronic pain work differently. Acute pain serves as a temporary warning sign, initiated when an injured tissue—like a stubbed toe—sends a signal to the spinal cord and onward to the brain’s pain center. Chronic pain is more like a false alarm, in which pain signals persist in the brain for weeks, months or years after the initial tissue injury has healed.

“Why, and how, pain fails to resolve, leaving you in chronic pain, is a major question that is still in search of answers,” said Watkins.

In 2011, Watkins’ lab published a study suggesting that the CGIC—a sugar-cube-sized cluster of cells hidden deep within the folds of a portion of the human brain called the insula—plays an important role in allodynia. Human studies have also shown that chronic pain patients have an over-active CGIC.

But for a long time, the only way to manipulate the CGIC was to remove it—an impractical approach for human treatments.

For the new study, the team used novel fluorescent proteins to observe which cells in the central nervous system light up when a rat sustains a sciatic nerve injury. The team then used cutting-edge “chemogenetic” tools to switch on or off genes inside specific populations of neurons.

The researchers discovered that while the CGIC plays a minimal role in processing acute pain, it plays a vital role in making pain persist.

According to the study, the CGIC signals the brain’s pain processing center, or somatosensory cortex, which in turn tells the spinal cord to keep the pain going.

“We found that activating this pathway excites the part of the spinal cord that relays touch and pain to the brain, causing touch to now be perceived as pain, as well,” said Ball.

Disabling the chronic pain circuit

When the team turned off cells within this pathway immediately after injury, the rat’s pain from injury was short-lived. In animals already experiencing chronic allodynia, disabling this pathway made the pain cease.

“Our research presents a clear case that specific brain pathways can be directly targeted to modulate sensory pain,” said Ball.

It’s still unclear what prompts the CGIC to start sending chronic pain signals. And more research is necessary before these lessons learned could be applied to help humans.

But Ball imagines a not-too-distant future in which medical professionals treat pain with injections or infusions that target specific brain cells without the systemic side effects and dependency risk that come with opioids. He also believes brain-machine interfaces, either implanted in or attached to the skull, could play a similar role in treating severe chronic pain. Numerous startups are now rushing to get to market first, he said.

“Now that we have access to tools that allow you to manipulate the brain, not based just on a general region but on specific sub-populations of cells, the quest for new treatments is moving much faster,” he said. “I’m betting my career that in the near future we are going to see amazing medical uses for these technologies.”

New research shows that a little-known brain pathway plays a critical role in making pain last after tissue heals. The findings could help pave the way for new brain-machine interfaces and medications that ease suffering without the use of opioids.

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CU Boulder joins Medtronic in strategic partnership to drive breakthrough health innovations

Megan M Rogers — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 21:06:29 +0000

CU Boulder joins Medtronic in strategic partnership to drive breakthrough health innovations Megan M Rogers Thu, 01/22/2026 - 14:06

The �Թ�� of Colorado (CU) and Medtronic, a global leader in health care technology, have entered into a strategic research agreement to accelerate the development of transformative health technologies. CU was selected from a nationwide search for its strength in advancing disruptive innovation.

“This is an incredible collaboration across the breakthrough innovation ecosystem at CU Boulder, clinical excellence at CU Anschutz, and enhancements in patient care delivered by Medtronic,” said Bryn Rees, associate vice chancellor for innovation and partnerships at CU Boulder. “We are excited to contribute to improving health care through this university-industry alliance."

The long-term partnership will focus on artificial intelligence, robotics and sustainability, aiming to move technologies from lab to bedside faster and deliver real benefits to patients worldwide. The collaboration spans CU Boulder, CU Anschutz and CU Denver, leveraging each campus’s unique expertise.

“Together, we will explore new frontiers critical to the future of health care,” said Jim Peichel, chief technology officer at Medtronic.

The alliance launched at a summit on the CU Anschutz campus, where priority research projects were identified. CU Anschutz brings deep clinical research capabilities, while CU Boulder contributes cutting-edge innovation and entrepreneurial strength.

Learn more about CU Boulder’s innovation initiatives.

CU Boulder and two other CU campuses have been chosen from a nationwide search to partner with Medtronic—a global leader in health care technology—in a strategic research agreement aimed at accelerating transformative health innovations.

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Donated blood has a shelf life. A new test tracks how it's aging

Daniel William Strain — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 22:15:37 +0000

Donated blood has a shelf life. A new test tracks how it's aging Daniel William… Wed, 01/21/2026 - 15:15

Daniel Strain

A new, fast and easy test could revolutionize blood transfusions—giving blood centers and hospitals a reliable way to monitor the quality of red blood cells after they sit for weeks in storage.

The project is a collaboration between engineers and medical researchers at CU Boulder and CU Anschutz.

A new device can fit in the palm of your hand and is capable of measuring the quality of red blood cells. (Credit: Xiaoyun Ding)

The team’s device hasn’t yet been approved for use. But the group hopes that it could one day help the United States better manage its precious blood supply.

The entire test also fits on a single chip, said Xiaoyun Ding, associate professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder.

“Our vision is to have a chip the size of a dime that you can plug into your cell phone,” he said. “It could use your phone’s camera and an app to read out the results in just two minutes.”

Ding and his colleagues published their findings in the latest issue of the journal Lab on a Chip.

The project focuses on a little-known problem in the medical world.

Every year, roughly 6.8 million people donate blood in the United States alone, helping save millions of lives, according to the American Red Cross. But just like groceries sitting on store shelves, red blood cells age over time.

To track that aging process, Ding and study co-author Angelo D’Alessandro, an expert on red blood cells, turned to an unusual property: vibrations.

The team’s device, known as a surface acoustic wave hemolysis assay (SAW-HA), jiggles red blood cells until they break apart—revealing valuable information about the health of those cells.

Think of it a bit like shaking a jar of salad dressing to break up clumps.

“We envision that this technology could help allocate higher-quality units to vulnerable patient populations, such as pediatric patients and patients with sickle cell disease who receive regular transfusions,” said D’Alessandro, professor in the School of Medicine at CU Anschutz.

Xiaoyun Ding

Angelo D'Alessandro

Expiration date

When you donate blood, technicians will first separate your red blood cells from the rest of your blood, including the plasma and white blood cells. They then store your red blood cells at near-freezing temperatures.

Over time, some red blood cells lose their healthy, rounded shape and begin to look spikey. Eventually, they die and burst open through a phenomenon called hemolysis.

In the United States, blood centers can only store red blood cells for 42 days. But, D’Alessandro noted, blood from some donors ages faster than blood from other donors—potentially compromising the effectiveness of transfusions.

“Despite the central role of transfusion in modern medicine, routine quality control of red blood cell products after regulatory approval is remarkably limited,” D’Alessandro said.

Shaken not stirred

The group’s device is modeled around surface acoustic waves, or SAWs. They are similar to sound waves but move only over the topmost layer of a material. (Earthquakes, for example, generate waves that reverberate across the planet’s surface and can cause serious damage).

The team first deposits a thin layer of metallic electrodes on top of a wafer made from a material called lithium niobate. The researchers then add a tiny drop of blood. When they pass an electric current through the device, the lithium niobate begins to vibrate wildly—shaking the blood.

Those vibrations cause the red blood cells to heat up, and they eventually undergo hemolysis, dumping their contents into the surrounding solution.

The researchers suspect that older blood cells burst faster and at lower temperatures.

“When cells get older and older, their membranes become weaker and weaker,” Ding said.

For the new study, the researchers tested the device by shaking real red blood cells from donors.

Some blood samples, they found, hemolyzed at lower temperatures. Those samples also contained higher or lower levels of certain molecules, known as metabolites, that previous research has shown are associated with aging cells.

The team still has a lot of work to do before it can be used as a reliable indicator of red blood cell quality in real blood centers. But Ding noted that these “labs on a chip” could also help to screen human patients for a variety of diseases of the blood, including sickle cell disease.

“We can potentially measure anything that affects red blood cells or protein levels in the blood,” Ding said.

Beyond the story

Our bioscience impact by the numbers:

Top 7% university for National Science Foundation research funding
No. 30 global university system granted U.S. patents
89-plus biotech startups with roots at CU Boulder in past 20 years

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A new device, designed by researchers at CU Boulder and CU Anschutz, jiggles red blood cells until they break apart—revealing valuable information about their quality.

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Tom Cech to Davos: RNA research is 'still a big deal'

Lisa Marshall — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:02:26 +0000

Tom Cech to Davos: RNA research is 'still a big deal' Lisa Marshall Tue, 01/20/2026 - 10:02

Lisa Marshall

Nobel laureate Tom Cech will address political leaders, CEOs and tech pioneers from around the globe at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland this week. His message: RNA research is critical for human health and good for the global economy.

“The potential of RNA therapeutics right now is phenomenal,” said Cech, a distinguished professor of biochemistry at CU Boulder who won the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his RNA research. “But unfortunately, we are living at a time when RNA has become politicized.”

Tom Cech on the CU Boulder campus.

Cech will join RNA researcher and 2024 Nobel Prize winner Victor Ambros for a Wednesday morning talk titled “RNA: Why it is still a big deal.” He’ll also participate in a luncheon titled “Stories of Courage and Discovery.”

His visit comes as misinformation about the molecule abounds on social media, and public funding for some RNA-related research is under threat. In August, the U.S. Department of Health and Human services moved to cancel nearly $500 million in contracts that funded mRNA (messenger RNA) vaccine development.

This week’s WEF meeting is expected to draw 3,000 leaders from 130 countries, including 400 top political leaders—President Donald Trump among them—and 850 top CEOs.

Cech said he hopes his visit can help shed light on the rich history and great promise of the long-overlooked molecule that has inspired 11 Nobel prizes and nearly 400 new drugs.

“This is not a new-fangled invention to be frightened of,” said Cech. “These are proven technologies built through science over the course of six decades, and they have the potential to save millions of lives.”

A national leader

In December, the analytics platform ScholarGPS ranked Cech No. 1 in the world for lifetime RNA research and CU Boulder as No. 1 in the study of ribosomal RNA. Fourteen of the top 100 RNA researchers listed are either at CU or trained at CU and are now professors elsewhere.

Tune in

Tune in

Who: Livestream open to general public; in-person open only to conference attendees
What: "RNA, Why it is Still a Big Deal" featuring Nobel laureates Tom Cech and Victor Ambros
When: 2:30 a.m. MST (10:30 a.m. CET); session will also be recorded
Where: Livestream of the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland

“Our No. 1 ranking is a reflection of all the talented students and post docs who have come through here,” said Cech.

Since its discovery in 1953, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) has become a household word. But many people would be hard-pressed to identify what RNA stands for (ribonucleic acid).

“DNA has been in the spotlight and RNA has been in the shadows,” Cech said.

RNA is, essentially, a copy of one of the two strands in DNA. For years, it was viewed as a messenger, ferrying genetic instructions from DNA to tell the cell to make certain proteins.

Cech’s Nobel-winning discovery revealed that RNA could also be a catalyst on its own, igniting chemical reactions necessary for life to exist.

“It was one of the moments in science when people woke up to thinking they had underestimated RNA, and they should keep their eyes open for new things it could do,” he said.

New therapies for rare diseases

Since then, RNA research has spawned a host of medical breakthroughs.

In 2020, �Թ�� of California Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who completed her postdoctoral training in Cech’s lab, won the Nobel Prize for developing CRISPR. The gene-editing tool uses RNA to guide “molecular scissors” to specific positions on the genome to make cuts. The discovery is already leading to new therapies for genetic diseases, including an FDA-approved treatment for sickle cell disease.

Building sustainable food systems

Zia Mehrabi, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies, is also attending this week's WEF meeting, where he will discuss how to build more sustainable food systems.

Mehrabi was recently named an international champion of the Frontiers Planet Prize, which celebrates breakthroughs in Earth system and planetary science that address urgent environmental challenges.

As the leader of the Better Planet Lab, Mehrabi has revealed the widespread environmental and human costs of global food systems.

Ambros won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for discovering “micro-RNAs,” which can work like a dimmer switch to turn genes up and down. In all, about 500 microRNAs have been identified in people, with some implicated in cancer, congenital hearing loss, and eye and skeletal disorders. Tens of thousands of patients, including children with rare diseases, are already being treated with therapies related to micro-RNAs.

By far the most well-known, and controversial, application of RNA research has been for vaccine development.

In 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s new COVID-19 vaccine, which uses messenger RNA to instruct the body to make the COVID “spike protein,” inducing an immune response.

By some estimates, these vaccines saved nearly 20 million lives in the first year of their use.

Because RNA-based therapies are easy to repurpose to prevent or treat different diseases, Cech believes the new frontier of RNA-based therapies has only just begun.

But he acknowledges that confusion abounds among non-scientists.

Contrary to popular belief, he says, mRNA-based vaccines cannot “change people’s genes,” and they are not based on new science.

As he heads to the world’s most famous economic forum, Cech stresses another benefit of funding a broad array of RNA research.

“The cost to society, of dealing with extremely ill children and adults, is a huge burden. If we can diagnose and treat disease more effectively, we will not only aid human happiness, but we will also have a huge economic impact.”

The Nobel laureate and CU Boulder professor, recently ranked #1 globally for RNA research, will speak at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland Wednesday.

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Flags fly over Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum meeting. CU Boulder Professor Tom Cech will be there, to present a talk on the importance of RNA research.

CU Boulder pre-seed investment fuels cancer 'moonshot' spinout Illumen Therapeutics

Megan M Rogers — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:31:50 +0000

CU Boulder pre-seed investment fuels cancer 'moonshot' spinout Illumen Therapeutics Megan M Rogers Mon, 01/05/2026 - 11:31

In an ongoing effort to bridge a pervasive investment gap in innovation funding, CU Boulder has awarded pre-seed funding to Illumen Therapeutics, developing cancer treatments based on discoveries from startup co-founder Roy Parker's lab at CU Boulder.

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Research charts the pathway from thought to emotion

Megan M Rogers — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:02:35 +0000

Research charts the pathway from thought to emotion Megan M Rogers Mon, 12/22/2025 - 12:02

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

CU Boulder scientist Roselinde Kaiser and research colleagues seek to understand the connection between executive functioning and mood problems.

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Murder and the microbiome

Megan M Rogers — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:29:46 +0000

Murder and the microbiome Megan M Rogers Tue, 12/16/2025 - 13:29

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

A paper co-authored by CU Boulder researcher Christopher Lowry draws upon the infamous "Twinkie defense" to explore the relationship between ultra-processed foods and human behavior.

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As community spaces disappear, research warns of health, equity risks

Megan M Rogers — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:18:58 +0000

As community spaces disappear, research warns of health, equity risks Megan M Rogers Thu, 12/11/2025 - 09:18

New CU Boulder research reveals that the closing of third places across the United States is a growing social and public health concern, especially for underrepresented communities.

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Health

The other ‘Alzheimer’s protein’: The quest to prevent toxic tau buildup in the brain

A good protein gone bad

A "vaccine" for brain cells

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What heart health statistics have you found most significant in your work?

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Could you share any steps that CU Boulder or your lab has taken to address these challenges?

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