The University of Texas at San Antonio has received a $7 million gift commitment from longtime philanthropic supporter and former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre and his wife Linda Whitacre to advance research, student success and athletics.

The Whitacres have made a transformational $5 million commitment to honor the late William L. Henrich, MD, former president of UT Health San Antonio, whose visionary leadership and unwavering compassion shaped the university for more than a decade.

The gift will advance the institution’s nationally recognized expertise in metabolic health — an area of research and clinical care that includes diabetes, obesity and related conditions that profoundly affect longevity and quality of life. This investment will fuel groundbreaking discovery aimed at confronting the region’s diabetes crisis, where one in six South Texans lives with the disease, and will further strengthen UT Health San Antonio’s role as a leader in improving health outcomes for the communities it serves.

An additional $2 million commitment from the Whitacres will support the Margie and Bill Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design and UTSA Athletics.

Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) are molecules that can eliminate disease-causing proteins, but developing them is often slow and complex, limiting how quickly new candidates can be tested. Now, researchers from Tokyo University of Science have developed a three-step "click chemistry" assembly line that rapidly builds functional PROTACs from simple building blocks. The resulting molecules successfully degraded a target protein in cells, paving the way for faster, more flexible development of protein-targeting therapeutics.

City of Hope will detail a Nature Metabolism study by Dr. Charles Brenner, which uncovered how citrin deficiency (CD) can trigger fat buildup in the liver — even in lean individuals. The research reveals how the liver turns on a hormone that reduces cravings for sweets and alcohol. The findings could lead to new therapies for a variety of health conditions, including fatty liver disease or MASLD, which afflicts more than 1 billion people worldwide and increases the risk for developing type 2 diabetes and liver cancer. 

A large study of rats shows that genes shape the gut microbiome in two ways: directly, by influencing an individual’s own microbes, and indirectly by sharing microbes with others in their living space. The discovery has implications for understanding hows genetic effects on health can ripple through social groups.