Category Archives: BioEngineering

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 13-Aug-2014 Contact: Jessica Meade nibibpress@mail.nih.gov 301-496-3500 NIH/National Institute of Biomedical Imaging & Bioengineering Four winning teams were announced in the Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) challenge, a biomedical engineering design competition for teams of undergraduate students. The judging was based on four criteria: the significance of the problem being addressed; the impact on clinical care; the innovation of the design; and the existence of a working prototype. The first place team will receive $20,000, second $15,000 and the two teams that tied for third will both receive $10,000 in a ceremony at the annual Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) conference in October. The challenge was managed by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), which is a part of the National Institutes of Health. The first place winning project, AccuSpine, addresses the problem of postoperative neurological or vascular complications that result from the more than 20 percent of screws placed incorrectly along the spine during the nearly 500,000 spinal fusion surgeries performed each year in the United States. The undergraduate team of seven students from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, designed an improved pedicle probe, a device used to create a path for the screws, aimed … Continue reading →

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 11-Aug-2014 Contact: Margot Kern nibibpress@mail.nih.gov 301-496-3500 NIH/National Institute of Biomedical Imaging & Bioengineering Bioengineers have created three-dimensional brain-like tissue that functions like and has structural features similar to tissue in the rat brain and that can be kept alive in the lab for more than two months. As a first demonstration of its potential, researchers used the brain-like tissue to study chemical and electrical changes that occur immediately following traumatic brain injury and, in a separate experiment, changes that occur in response to a drug. The tissue could provide a superior model for studying normal brain function as well as injury and disease, and could assist in the development of new treatments for brain dysfunction. The brain-like tissue was developed at the Tissue Engineering Resource Center at Tufts University, Boston, which is funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) to establish innovative biomaterials and tissue engineering models. David Kaplan, Ph.D., Stern Family Professor of Engineering at Tufts University is director of the center and led the research efforts to develop the tissue. Currently, scientists grow neurons in petri dishes to study their behavior in a controllable environment. Yet neurons grown in two dimensions … Continue reading →

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 10-Aug-2014 Contact: Catherine Hockmuth chockmuth@ucsd.edu 858-822-1359 University of California - San Diego Bioengineers at the University of California, San Diego have proven that when it comes to guiding stem cells into a specific cell type, the stiffness of the extracellular matrix used to culture them really does matter. When placed in a dish of a very stiff material, or hydrogel, most stem cells become bone-like cells. By comparison, soft materials tend to steer stem cells into soft tissues such as neurons and fat cells. The research team, led by bioengineering professor Adam Engler, also found that a protein binding the stem cell to the hydrogel is not a factor in the differentiation of the stem cell as previously suggested. The protein layer is merely an adhesive, the team reported Aug. 10 in the advance online edition of the journal Nature Materials. Their findings affirm Engler's prior work on the relationship between matrix stiffness and stem cell differentiations. "What's remarkable is that you can see that the cells have made the first decisions to become bone cells, with just this one cue. That's why this is important for tissue engineering," said Engler, a professor at the UC San … Continue reading →

Dr. Russ Altman, Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, and Computer Science Stanford University 2014 ASE BIGDATA/SOCIALCOM/CYBERSECURITY Conference, Stanford University, May 27-31, 2014 Speaker: Dr. Russ Altman Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, ... By: ASE Stream Line … Continue reading →

Bioengineering: How Far is Too Far? (Group Speech) Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. 106 and 17 U.S.C. 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any... By: speaking2inform … Continue reading →

By Shara Tonn Protein filaments (green and red) glide on the surface of a microscope coverslip, their motion driven by engineered molecular motors. The motors shift gears when illuminated with blue light, causing the motion to slow down. In every cell in your body, tiny protein motors are toiling away to keep you going. Moving muscles, dividing cells, twisting DNA they are the workhorses of biology. But there is still uncertainty about how they function. To help biologists in the quest to know more, a team of Stanford bioengineers has designed a suite of protein motors that can be controlled remotely by light. "Biology is full of these nanoscale machines that can perform complex tasks," said Zev Bryant, an assistant professor of bioengineering and leader of the team. "We want to understand how they can convert chemical energy into mechanical work and perform their specific tasks in cells." Bryant's team, including doctoral student Muneaki Nakamura, designed blueprints for protein motors that would respond to light. Splicing together DNA from different organisms such as pig, slime mold and oat the oat had the light-detecting module the bioengineers created DNA codes for each of their protein motors. The remote-controlled nanomotors are described … Continue reading →

Aug 06, 2014 by Shara Tonn (Phys.org) In every cell in your body, tiny protein motors are toiling away to keep you going. Moving muscles, dividing cells, twisting DNA they are the workhorses of biology. But there is still uncertainty about how they function. To help biologists in the quest to know more, a team of Stanford bioengineers has designed a suite of protein motors that can be controlled remotely by light. "Biology is full of these nanoscale machines that can perform complex tasks," said Zev Bryant, an assistant professor of bioengineering and leader of the team. "We want to understand how they can convert chemical energy into mechanical work and perform their specific tasks in cells." Bryant's team, including doctoral student Muneaki Nakamura, designed blueprints for protein motors that would respond to light. Splicing together DNA from different organisms such as pig, slime mold and oat the oat had the light-detecting module the bioengineers created DNA codes for each of their protein motors. The remote-controlled nanomotors are described by Nakamura, Bryant and their colleagues in a paper that appeared online Aug. 3 in Nature Nanotechnology.When exposed to light, the new protein motors change direction or speed. "It's pretty fine … Continue reading →

Singapore, August 1, 2014 Researchers and doctors at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS) have co-developed the first molecular test kit that can predict treatment and survival outcomes in kidney cancer patients. This breakthrough was recently reported in European Urology, the worlds top urology journal. According to IBN Executive Director Professor Jackie Y. Ying, By combining our expertise in molecular diagnostics and cancer research, we have developed the first genetic test to help doctors prescribe the appropriate treatment for kidney cancer patients based on their tumor profile. Dr. Min-Han Tan, who is IBN Team Leader and Principal Research Scientist and a visiting consultant at the Division of Medical Oncology NCCS, shared his motivation, As a practicing oncologist, I have cared for many patients with kidney cancer. I see the high costs of cancer care, the unpredictable outcomes and occasional futility of even the best available drugs. This experience inspired our development of this assay to improve all these for patients. The study was conducted retrospectively with tissue samples collected from close to 280 clear cell renal carcinoma patients who underwent surgery at SGH between 1999 and 2012. High quality … Continue reading →

By Public Affairs, UC Berkeley | July 21, 2014 UC Berkeley professor and synthetic-biology pioneer Jay Keasling was on Capitol Hill Thursday, stressing the need for a federal strategy to ensure continued U.S. leadership in a field he said can yield significant medical benefits for people throughout the world, and even save lives. Keasling, right, chats with San Diego Rep. Scott Peters, who serves on the Science, Space and Technology Committee. (Photo by Michelle Moskowitz) Keasling, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of bioengineering and senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, led a team of scientists in engineering a microbial production process for artemisinin, an effective but, in many parts of the world, prohibitively expensive therapy for malaria. The disease takes nearly a million lives each year, mostly children under the age of 5. His teams synthetic-biology process has been licensed to Sanofi-Aventis, which has scaled the process to industrial levels and is on track, he said, to meet roughly half the worlds need for the drug by next year. Keasling who also serves as director of the National Science Foundation-funded Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, and as CEO of the Energy Department-funded Joint BioEnergy Institute … Continue reading →

LIVERMORE -- Deep inside Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's Center for Bioengineering, scientist Sat Pannu and his research team are hard at work crafting spaghetti noodle-sized devices with a mundane appearance but an audacious goal: To rewire damaged human brains. Fitted with dozens of tiny microelectrodes, each of these brain implants is intended to monitor the electrical activity of brains devastated by physical injury or mental illness -- and provide the precise stimuli to help minds compensate for what they've lost. It sounds fanciful, like something out of Hollywood. But building on technology more than a decade in the making, center director Pannu and his associates envision a time, not too many years away, when advanced, so-called deep-brain stimulation implants combat the ravages of post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, even chronic pain or addiction. "This technology allows us to interface with the brain using hundreds, if not thousands, of electrodes," Pannu said. "If you had these devices implanted in the brain, you could record (neural activity) and see how therapies are working in real time." Pannu's $5.6 million project -- which is in the early stages of animal testing -- is part of an array of brain research underway at Lawrence … Continue reading →