AIMBE
Fellowbook News
AIMBE Fellowbook collects news stories highlighting the members of the AIMBE College of Fellows. Read the latest stories, jump to the College Directory, or search below to find the newest research, awards, announcements and more for the leaders of the medical and biological engineering community.
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic Receives AIMBE’s Highest Award
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic | Via AIMBE | March 22, 2021AIMBE is honored to recognize Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic with its Pierre Galletti Award, the Institute’s highest accolade. Including years of contributions to AIMBE and the BME community, Vunjak-Novakovic is recognized for impactful innovations in technologies to generate, understand and utilize functional human tissues, especially in regenerative engineering, studies of development and disease, while inspiring the next […]
Ultrasound outperforms legacy technique at pinpointing heart arrhythmias
Elisa Konofagou | Via Health Imaging | March 22, 2021A commonly available ultrasound technique proved superior to a long-used approach at spotting abnormal heart rhythms and may help treat patients with this worldwide problem, according to recently published research. The method—electromechanical wave imaging (EWI)—creates a 3D cardiac map to pinpoint electromechanical activity that causes arrhythmias, investigators with Columbia University in New York reported in […]
Vaccination by inhalation
Darrell Irvine | Via MIT | March 19, 2021Delivering vaccines directly to the lungs can boost immune responses to respiratory infections or lung cancer, study finds. Many viruses infect their hosts through mucosal surfaces such as the lining of the respiratory tract. MIT researchers have now developed a vaccination strategy that can create an army of T cells that are ready and waiting […]
Stem Cell Differentiation Triggers Could Aid Development of Regenerative Muscle Therapy
Shankar Subramaniam | Via Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | March 18, 2021A study led by researchers at the University of California (UC) San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering has offered up new insights into the mechanisms of stem cell differentiation that could one day help scientists develop regenerative therapies for muscle disease, injury and atrophy. By studying how easily different pluripotent stem cell lines differentiated into […]
Stanford Researchers Find Culprit In Muscle Aging And How To Knock It Down
Helen Blau | Via Bio IT World | March 17, 2021For well over a decade now, scientists have been experimenting with “couch potato” drugs that could confer the benefits of exercise without having to flex a muscle. The latest candidate is a small molecule inhibitor impeding the degradation of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), recently shown to act directly on mature muscle fibers to prevent deleterious molecular […]
Researchers identify head impact rates in four major high school sports
Kristy Arbogast | Via EurekAlert | March 17, 2021As high school athletes return to practice and games for a variety of sports, the threat of concussions remains. A new study from researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) used head impact sensors in four different sports and studied male and female athletes to determine which of these sports put students at the highest […]
Hybrid Tissue Engineered-Regen Med Heart Valve Can Grow in Recipient
Robert Tranquillo | Via Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | March 17, 2021Researchers led by University of Minnesota Twin Cities scientists from both the College of Science and Engineering and the Medical School said they have demonstrated for the first time that lab-created heart valves implanted in young lambs for a year were capable of growth within the recipient. The valves reportedly also showed reduced calcification and […]
A deep dive into cells’ RNA reality
Edward Boyden | Via EurekAlert | March 17, 2021Human cells typically transcribe half of their roughly 20,000 genes into RNA molecules at any given time. Just like with proteins, the function of those RNA species not only relies on their abundance but also their precise localization within the 3D space of each cell. Many RNA molecules convey gene information from the cell’s nucleus […]
Focusing on Musculoskeletal Research
Millie Sullivan | Via University of Delaware | March 17, 2021UD wins NIH grant for new center with female professors leading the way A pulled muscle, an aching joint. Regrettably, it’s an experience we can all relate to — from the youngster with the sprained ankle, to the centenarian with gnarled fingers throbbing from arthritis, to that excruciating moment when you threw your back out […]
Linda Griffith honored for contributions to biological engineering education
Linda Griffith | Via MIT | March 11, 2021Professors awarded the National Academy of Engineering’s prestigious Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education. The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has announced that two MIT professors have been jointly awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, the most prestigious engineering education award in the […]
Douglas Lauffenburger honored for contributions to biological engineering education
Douglas Lauffenburger | Via MIT | March 11, 2021Professors awarded the National Academy of Engineering’s prestigious Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education. The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has announced that two MIT professors have been jointly awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, the most prestigious engineering education award in the […]
Viruses Mutate, But Treatments Are Static. Is There a Way to Change That?
Leor Weinberger | Via UCSF | March 11, 2021There is a big, global problem: viruses such as HIV and COVID-19 mutate, but treatments for them don’t. For more than 20 years, Leor Weinberger, PhD, has been thinking about how to make vaccines work more efficiently by being adaptive, rather than static. “We’re fighting biology with chemistry,” said Weinberger, director of the Gladstone Center […]
Adhesion, contractility enable metastatic cells to go against the grain
Adam Engler | Via UCSD | March 9, 2021Bioengineers at the University of California San Diego and San Diego State University have discovered a key feature that allows cancer cells to break from typical cell behavior and migrate away from the stiffer tissue in a tumor, shedding light on the process of metastasis and offering possible new targets for cancer therapies. It has […]
Pericardial injection effective, less invasive way to get regenerative therapies to heart
Ke Cheng | Via NC State News | March 5, 2021Injecting hydrogels containing stem cell or exosome therapeutics directly into the pericardial cavity could be a less invasive, less costly, and more effective means of treating cardiac injury, according to new research from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Stem cell therapy holds promise as a way to […]
Immune Cell Profiles Reveal Cancer’s Leading Indicators
Garry Nolan | Via Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | March 4, 2021If you want to understand economics, study market crashes and depressions. If you want to understand immunology, study cancer. It is when systems are tottering on the brink of failure that you may observe stark differences between function and dysfunction. By seizing opportunities to see where systems go wrong, you may find ways to reverse […]
Olin President Gilda Barabino Named AAAS President-Elect
Gilda Barabino | Via Olin College of Engineering | March 3, 2021Gilda A. Barabino, Ph.D., President of Olin College of Engineering, has been selected as president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Barabino was elected as an AAAS Fellow in 2010 and has been a member of the organization since 1987. She began her term on Feb. 24. After serving for one year […]
LNP Delivers CRISPR Directly to Mouse Liver, Dramatically Cuts Cholesterol Levels for Months
Qiaobing Xu | Via Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | March 2, 2021Scientists at Tufts University and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT have developed a lipid nanoparticle (LNP) technology that can package and deliver CRISPR gene editing machinery specifically to the liver. Their studies in mice demonstrated use of the LNP technology to shuttle CRISPR Cas9 mRNA and guide RNA directly to the liver, to […]
Scientists achieve milestone in animal-free production of biologics
Mattheos Koffas | Via Science Board | March 2, 2021For the first time, scientists have successfully produced sugar-based biologic molecules utilizing bacteria, without the need for animal products. The paper, published in Nature Communications on March 2, describes the production of a common designer polysaccharide, chondroitin sulfate (CS). Sulfated glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) are linear polysaccharides consisting of repeating disaccharide units composed of N-acetylhexosamine and uronic […]
Purigen Simplifies Simultaneous Extraction and Purification of DNA and RNA from Challenging FFPE Samples
Juan Santiago | Via Business Wire | March 2, 2021Purigen Biosystems, Inc., a leading provider of next-generation technologies for extracting and purifying nucleic acids from biological samples, today announced the launch of the Ionic® FFPE Complete Purification Kit. Scientists are now able to consistently recover both DNA and RNA (mRNA and miRNA) simultaneously from formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue samples in a single workflow. Purigen […]