Welcome to "Ask the Expert," a UTHealth Houston newsroom series where our leading physicians examine pressing health challenges. In this edition, we address oral cancer, symptoms, diagnosis and treatment, and the research at UTHealth Houston.

Artemis II, NASA's first crewed mission to the moon in more than 50 years, represents a shift from short visits toward sustained exploration, where understanding lunar geology and resources become as important as the engineering that gets astronauts there. Artemis II is currently scheduled to launch Wednesday, April 1 at 6:24 p.m. EDT, with backup launch opportunities through early April if needed. 

Lindsay Podjasek, a doctoral student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, studies the moon’s mineral composition. She discusses both Apollo-era science and the emerging goals of Artemis.

A new app developed by Yun Huang, associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, aims to make navigating conferences less work and more fun, so that attendees can meet others, discover fresh ideas, and “experience academic life as an exciting adventure.” The app, PapersClaw.fun, will debut at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), which will be held from April 13-17 in Barcelona, Spain.

Adelaide researchers are putting the call out to Australian adults living with multiple myeloma or smouldering myeloma to take part in a new national program designed to give people facing this incurable disease the tools to build their wellbeing.

When Amy Aungst was growing up, she saw nearly every person on her mother’s side of the family struggle with Huntington’s disease. This included her grandfather, mother and three uncles.

In 2015, at age 26, she found out that she has the genetic mutation that causes Huntington’s disease, but has yet to experience symptoms. This clarity helped her plan for a family and guided her decision to participate in research studies, which have been supported in part by the National Institutes of Health, to help investigators better understand the condition and move closer to identifying new types of treatment to help people like her live better and longer.

“I really want a different outcome for Huntington’s disease,” says Aungst. “I’ve seen it affect my whole family my whole life.”

New technology coming out of Ateneo de Manila University is helping reveal ancient technologies from the deep past of the Philippine archipelago.

Leaders and patients today marked a transformative expansion of one of Oregon’s largest hospitals with a ribbon-cutting for the new Vista Pavilion at Oregon Health & Science University. The building, entirely dedicated to treating people with cancer, will open for patients on Tuesday, April 7.

Purdue University researcher Andrea Kasinski is leading work on the relationship between microRNAs — small, non-coding segments of RNA — and cancer, including developing a modified microRNA that curbs at least three genes known to drive cancer and therapy resistance. MicroRNAs can block multiple molecular paths that cancer cells use to grow and spread, a substantial advantage over the most advanced medicines available. Kasinski is developing the modified microRNA she designed in the lab and through LigamiR Therapeutics (a company she founded to advance RNA therapeutics) to target for triple-negative breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and non-small cell lung cancer. 

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will share their discoveries and innovations at DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Energy Innovation Summit in San Diego, California, April 7-9. ARPA-E funds high-risk, high-impact energy technologies that can be quickly and meaningfully advanced to catalyze bleeding-edge energy research.