Category Archives: BioEngineering

Bioengineering IISc 2014 This is the batch of Bioengineering students at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore who've joined in 2014. By: queeny dasgupta … Continue reading →

The bioengineering pioneer Leroy Hood has seen vast changes in medicine over his decades in the biz, in part thanks to his own work on automated DNA sequencing. But he's not much for looking back he's too busy envisioning a future model of medicine. "Contemporary medicine is all about disease, and not about wellness," he says. Hood says the medical profession must learn to measure and maximize wellness, and he's happy to show the way. At the annual meeting of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Hood presented his vision for "P4 medicine," which is predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory. In a keynote speech, he described the 100K Wellness Project he launched this year as president of the Institute for Systems Biology. The ambitious study aims to enroll 100,000 participants and track their biometrics over 20 years (funding permitting). Hood wants to quantify wellness, and also to provide "actionable information" to the participants. In March, the project enrolled 108 healthy people to take part in the pilot study. At the end of 2014 the project will scale up to 1000 participants, with the big steps to 10,000 and then 100,000 people expected in the next few years. Each … Continue reading →

bioengineering,the application of engineering knowledge to the fields of medicine and biology. The bioengineer must be well grounded in biology and have engineering knowledge that is broad, drawing upon electrical, chemical, mechanical, and other engineering disciplines. The bioengineer may work in any of a large range of areas. One of these is the provision of artificial means to assist defective body functionssuch as hearing aids, artificial limbs, and supportive or substitute organs. In another direction, the bioengineer may use engineering methods to achieve biosynthesis of animal or plant productssuch as for fermentation processes. Before World War II the field of bioengineering was essentially unknown, and little communication or interaction existed between the engineer and the life scientist. A few exceptions, however, should be noted. The agricultural engineer and the chemical engineer, involved in fermentation processes, have always been bioengineers in the broadest sense of the definition since they deal with biological systems and work with biologists. The civil engineer, specializing in sanitation, has applied biological principles in the work. Mechanical engineers have worked with the medical profession for many years in the development of artificial limbs. Another area of mechanical engineering that falls in the field of bioengineering is the … Continue reading →

By Tom Abate, Stanford School of Engineering A decade-long effort in genetic engineering is close to creating yeast that makes palliative medicines in stainless steel vats. For centuries poppy plants have been grown to provide opium, the compound from which morphine and other important medicines such as oxycodone are derived. Now bioengineers at Stanford have hacked the DNA of yeast, reprograming these simple cells to make opioid-based medicines via a sophisticated extension of the basic brewing process that makes beer. Led by Associate Professor of Bioengineering Christina Smolke, the Stanford team has already spent a decade genetically engineering yeast cells to reproduce the biochemistry of poppies with the ultimate goal of producing opium-based medicines, from start to finish, in fermentation vats. We are now very close to replicating the entire opioid production process in a way that eliminates the need to grow poppies, allowing us to reliably manufacture essential medicines while mitigating the potential for diversion to illegal use, said Smolke, who outlines her work in the August 24th edition of Nature Chemical Biology. In the new report Smolke and her collaborators, Kate Thodey, a post-doctoral scholar in bioengineering, and Stephanie Galanie, a doctoral student in chemistry, detail how they … Continue reading →

By Tom Abate Stanford bioengineer Christina Smolke has been on a decade-long quest to genetically alter yeast to "brew" opioid medicines in stainless steel vats, eliminating the need to raise poppies. For centuries poppy plants have been grown to provide opium, the compound from which morphine and other important medicines such as oxycodone are derived. Now bioengineers at Stanford have hacked the DNA of yeast and reprogrammed these simple cells to make opioid-based medicines via a sophisticated extension of the basic brewing process that makes beer. Led by bioengineering Associate Professor Christina Smolke, the Stanford team has already spent a decade genetically engineering yeast cells to reproduce the biochemistry of poppies, with the ultimate goal of producing opium-based medicines, from start to finish, in fermentation vats. "We are now very close to replicating the entire opioid production process in a way that eliminates the need to grow poppies, allowing us to reliably manufacture essential medicines while mitigating the potential for diversion to illegal use," said Smolke, who outlines her work in the Aug. 24 edition of Nature Chemical Biology. In the new report, Smolke and her collaborators, Kate Thodey, a postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering, and Stephanie Galanie, a doctoral student … Continue reading →

Auckland Bioengineering Institute Laboratory for Animate Technologies When it comes to learning, there's nothing quite like the mind of a young child. When they are born, their brain is still developing, and continues to do so for years to come. Although the human brain never stops changing throughout our lifetimes, in those early formative years, it's basically a machine for soaking up information and experiences. For this reason -- and because brain activity is famously hard to recreate artificially -- it might just be the perfect starting point for AI. So the toddler brain is the perfect subject for an experiment by a team led by Mark Sagar, director at the Laboratory for Animate Technologies at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and former Weta Digital special projects supervisor. Called BabyX, the toddler simulation can mimic facial expressions, read basic words, recognise basic symbols, and respond to positive feedback. She also gets distracted, much like a real child, losing her focus to stare at the camera in the room. "BabyX is an interactive animated virtual infant prototype," the description reads on the Auckland Bioengineering Institute website. "BabyX is a computer generated psychobiological simulation under development in the Laboratory of Animate Technologies and … Continue reading →

The Flashlite system will support research efforts in astrophysics The University of Queensland will spend up to $2.4 million on its latest high performance computer for intensive data crunching across multiple research areas, including astrophysics, climate change, geonomics, and computational chemistry. The university issued an invitation to offer on Thursday for the supply of a Flashlite system, which will be housed at its Polaris data centre in Springfield. Last month, the university asked vendors to bid for a contract to supply a high performance parallel Phi Cluster to support research at the Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. Flashlite will be designed specifically for data-intensive scientific research and support applications that need very high performance secondary memory and large amounts of main memory. It will maximise input output operations per second (IOPS) while achieving competitive floating point operations per second (FLOPS) ratings, the university said. This will produce a balanced system for applications that exploit parallelism, high-speed arithmetic, and high performance IO, the university said. The machine will incorporate novel software and/or hardware mechanisms that provide seamless access to data regardless of its location, making it easier to build new data-intensive applications, while supporting legacy codes using familiar techniques. Read … Continue reading →

Micromeritics Instrument Grant Committee has recently selected its latest grant recipient. A 3Flex Surface Characterization Analyzer has been awarded to the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. According to Professor Dr. Javier Prez-Ramrez, Principal Investigator, Our research focuses on the fundamental design and technical development of new catalytic materials and reactor engineering concepts, favoring the more efficient and sustainable manufacture of chemicals and fuels. The 3Flex, a top-notch tool for the precise assessment of porous properties of solids, will give us the ability to measure three samples simultaneously and the upgrade from meso- to micropore will be essential in providing the required resolution for our research work with zeolites, metal-organic frameworks, and carbons. The vapor option is highly advantageous to evaluate the sorption properties of microporous materials. We are very thankful to Micromeritics for the donation of this instrument, which will contribute to the continued development of our research program. Prof. Prez-Ramrez has been Full Professor of Catalysis Engineering at ETH Zurich since January 2010 and in 2012 became the head of the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences. He has delivered more than 150 lectures in conferences, universities, research … Continue reading →

Jonathan Coleman, a professor of chemical physics at TCD. He led the research into wearable sensors using graphene and rubber bands. Irish scientists have discovered a new method of creating wearable sensors, by adding graphene to shop-bought rubber bands. The scientists, part of the Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research (Amber) centre, infused rubber bands with graphene, a wonder material derived from pencil lead. Graphene is 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, incredibly flexible and harder than a diamond. While rubber does not normally conduct electricity, the addition of graphene made the rubber bands electrically conductive without degrading their mechanical properties. Tests by the team, led by Jonathan Coleman, a professor of chemical physics at TCD, showed any current flowing through the graphene-infused rubber bands was very strongly affected if the band was stretched. As a result, if the band is attached to clothing, the tiniest movements such as breath and pulse can be sensed. Prof Coleman said the discovery opens up possibilities for the development of wearable sensors from rubber, which could be used to monitor blood pressure and respiration, or as an early warning system for cot death and sleep apnoea. The sensors could also … Continue reading →

TUESDAY, Aug. 12, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers who created functional 3-D brain-like tissue say it could help scientists find new treatments for brain injuries and diseases and improve knowledge about normal brain function. The tissue, which can be kept alive in the laboratory for more than two months, is structurally similar to tissue in a rat's brain. It's also functionally like brain tissue. In early experiments with the tissue, researchers used it to study chemical and electrical changes that occur immediately after brain injury and the changes that occur in response to a drug. The tissue was developed at Tuft University's Tissue Engineering Resource Center, which is funded by the U.S. National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). The research is described in an article published online Aug. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This work is an exceptional feat," Rosemarie Hunziker, program director of Tissue Engineering at NIBIB, said in an agency news release. "It combines a deep understand of brain physiology with a large and growing suite of bioengineering tools to create an environment that is both necessary and sufficient to mimic brain function." This tissue offers advantages over using live animals … Continue reading →