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.
Researcher unraveling SARS-CoV-2 spike protein through music
Markus Buehler | Via Phys.org | April 10, 2020The proteins that make up all living things are alive with music. Just ask Markus Buehler: The musician and MIT professor develops artificial intelligence models to design new proteins, sometimes by translating them into sound. His goal is to create new biological materials for sustainable, non-toxic applications. In a project with the MIT-IBM Watson AI […]
Making sense of scents: 3D videos reveal how the nose detects odor combinations
Elizabeth Hillman | Via Science Daily | April 9, 2020Every moment of the day we are surrounded by smells. Odors can bring back memories, or quickly warn us that food has gone bad. But how does our brain identify so many different odors? And how easily can we untangle the ingredients of a mixture of odors? In a new study in mice published today […]
Black Health in America
Cato Laurencin | Via UConn | April 8, 2020An important research focus for Dr. Laurencin and his team is to explore the emerging issues around Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. Dr. Laurencin is the Editor-In-Chief for the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities which reports on the scholarly progress of work to understand, address, and ultimately eliminate health disparities based on race […]
Gel smooths cells’ ride through syringes in regenerative therapy
Sarah Heilshorn | Via Stanford University | April 8, 2020An innovative delivery technology vastly improves the viability of tissue regenerating cells, and enhances strength and coordination in animals with spinal-cord injury. In a study published in Science Advances, Stanford neurosurgical researcher Giles Plant, PhD, and materials engineer Sarah Heilshorn, PhD, and their colleagues report that a customized gel — developed in Heilshorn’s lab as […]
UConn Researchers Find Blacks Are Disproportionately Impacted By COVID-19
Cato Laurencin | Via CT News Junkie | April 8, 2020The team led by Dr. Cato T. Laurencin, former dean of the UConn School of Medicine, analyzed and reviewed the Department of Public Health’s data on COVID-19 outcomes and found that Blacks have a higher rate of infection and death in comparison to the percentage of the population they represent in the state. However, the […]
Off-the-Shelf Artificial Cardiac Patch Repairs Heart Attack Damage in Rats, Pigs
Ke Cheng | Via NCSU | April 8, 2020Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed an “off-the-shelf” artificial cardiac patch that can deliver cardiac cell-derived healing factors directly to the site of heart attack injury. In a rat model of heart attack, the freezable, cell-free patch improved recovery. The researchers also found similar effects in a pilot study involving a pig model […]
Hybrid Microscope Creates Digital Biopsies
Rohit Bhargava | Via Lab Manager | April 7, 2020Bioengineers at the University of Illinois funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) have combined standard microscopy, infrared light, and artificial intelligence (AI) to assemble digital biopsies that identify important molecular characteristics of cancer biopsy samples without dyes or labels. The standard for cancer biopsies is treating the tissue to be […]
UArizona professor submits designs for 3 low-cost ventilator prototypes to DOD
Marvin Slepian | Via KGUN9 | April 6, 2020The University of Arizona continues to contribute to the fight against COVID-19 with low-cost ventilator prototypes. The team submitted three designs to the Department of Defense one using something nearly everyone has lying around, a basketball. Director Uarizona center accelerated biomedical innovation Marvin Slepian, MD said “For the more seriously ill patient we needed to… […]
‘Smart toilet’ monitors for signs of disease
Sam Gambhir | Via Stanford University | April 6, 2020A disease-detecting “precision health” toilet can sense multiple signs of illness through automated urine and stool analysis, a new Stanford study reports. There’s a new disease-detecting technology in the lab of Sanjiv “Sam” Gambhir, MD PhD, and its No. 1 source of data is number one. And number two. It’s a smart toilet. But not […]
The heartbeats from space
Jonathan Himmelfarb | Via University of Washington | April 6, 2020Heart tissues returned to UW researchers after a month at the International Space Station Engineered heart muscle tissues, contained inside a chip smaller than a cellphone, took a “splashdown” near Long Beach, California, on April 6 after its launch to the International Space Station (ISS) in a SpaceX CRS-20 rocket a month prior. Mechanical engineering […]
Racial Profiling Is a Public Health and Health Disparities Issue
Cato Laurencin | Via Springer Link | April 6, 2020Racial profiling is a public health and health disparities issue through its disparate and adverse health impact on those targeted by this practice, as well as members of their communities. We discuss six ways police profiling and racial discrimination adversely impact Black American health. We identify four direct and two indirect ways. Four direct ways […]
Spectrally Combined Encoding for Profiling Heterogeneous Circulating Tumor Cells Using a Multifunctional Nanosphere-Mediated Microfluidic Platform
Dai-Wen Pang | Via Wiley Online Library | April 4, 2020A spectrally combined encoding strategy was proposed for multiplex biomarker profiling of heterogeneous circulating tumor cells (CTCs) using a multifunctional nanosphere-mediated microfluidic platform. Different cellular biomarkers simultaneously encoded with both magnetic tags and distinct optical signatures, enabled efficient isolation and in situ on-chip spectrally combined encoding of heterogeneous CTCs at single-cell resolution… Continue reading.
Cell-free Biotechnology Could Help Accelerate COVID-19 Therapeutics
Michael Jewett | Via Northwestern University | April 2, 2020When it comes to fighting a fast-spreading pandemic, speed is critical. Researchers at Northwestern Engineering and Cornell University have developed a new platform that could produce new therapies more than 10 times faster than current methods. The secret behind the platform’s unmatched speed is an unlikely tool: bacteria. After taking the molecular machinery out of […]
MIT initiates mass manufacture of disposable face shields for Covid-19 response
Elazer Edelman | Via MIT | April 1, 2020The shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) available to health care professionals has become increasingly problematic as Covid-19 cases continue to surge. The sheer volume of PPE needed to keep doctors, nurses, and their patients safe in this crisis is daunting — for example, tens of millions of disposable face shields will be needed nationwide […]
New sensors could offer early detection of lung tumors
Sangeeta Bhatia | Via MIT | April 1, 2020Study shows that a simple urine test can reveal the presence of lung cancer in mice. People who are at high risk of developing lung cancer, such as heavy smokers, are routinely screened with computed tomography (CT), which can detect tumors in the lungs. However, this test has an extremely high rate of false positives, […]
Solving the Ventilator Shortage with Windshield Wiper Parts
Thomas Milner | Via The University of Texas at Austin | April 1, 2020Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin are building a new type of ventilator made of cheap, widely available materials to help fill the demand created by the spread of COVID-19 for these critical devices that help patients breathe. Ventilators become necessary when patients can’t breathe on their own, physically pumping oxygen into their […]
Artificial intelligence helps researchers find new antibiotics
James Collins | Via Science Board | March 31, 2020To address antibiotic resistance, researchers have developed a machine-learning approach that can search millions of known chemicals to find potential new antimicrobial compounds. This research, published in Cell on February 20, uncovered several promising antibiotic candidates that will move into clinical testing. After training a deep neural network to identify potential antibiotics that kill bacteria […]