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.
Math models improve the effectiveness of immunotherapy
Rakesh Jain | Via Science Board | February 4, 2020Scientists working at the intersection of math and medicine propose new strategies based on mathematical modeling and known molecular mechanisms to improve the efficacy of lifesaving immunotherapies for cancerous tumors. The work was published on February 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Cancer cells can evade immune responses by activating negative […]
Coin-sized smart insulin patch, potential diabetes treatment
Zhen Gu | Via Science Daily | February 4, 2020UCLA bioengineers and colleagues at UNC School of Medicine and MIT have further developed a smart insulin-delivery patch that could one day monitor and manage glucose levels in people with diabetes and deliver the necessary insulin dosage. The adhesive patch, about the size of a quarter, is simple to manufacture and intended for once-a-day use. […]
Assessing ‘stickiness’ of tumor cells could improve cancer prognosis
Adam Engler | Via UCSD | February 3, 2020A team of researchers led by the University of California San Diego has created a device that measures how “sticky” cancer cells are, which could improve prognostic evaluation of patient tumors. The device is built with a microfluidic chamber that sorts cells by their physical ability to adhere to their environment. Researchers found that weakly […]
Building SynBio Platforms to Support Practical Apps
Lingchong You | Via Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | February 1, 2020Building a switch doesn’t sound like a spectacular feat of engineering. But when that switch is constructed of DNA and designed to operate within the context of a living cell, it represents a far more impressive accomplishment. The construction of a genetic toggle switch was reported 20 years ago in Nature, in an article contributed […]
Heart-Recovery Device for Infants and Young Children
Jim Antaki | Via Cornell University | January 30, 2020The College of Engineering has announced the winners of the annual Scale-Up and Prototyping Awards, which give teams of engineering faculty and students up to $40,000 to commercialize startup technologies that might otherwise have trouble obtaining funding. … Heart-Recovery Device for Infants and Young Children: James Antaki, Susan K. McAdam Professor of Heart Assist Technology in […]
Molecular Determinants of Nephron Vascular Specialization in the Kidney
Sina Rabbany | Via Hofstra University | January 29, 2020DeMatteis Dean Rabbany Publishes Research in Nature Communications Research conducted by Dr. Sina Rabbany, dean of the DeMatteis School of Engineering and Applied Science and a team of researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, was published this month in Nature Communications. The study, Molecular Determinants of Nephron Vascular Specialization […]
New Discovery About Cathepsins May Improve Drug Research
Manu Platt | Via Georgia Institute of Technology | January 24, 2020Like motley bandits, certain enzymes implicated in cancer and other diseases also annihilate each other. A new study reveals details of their mutual foils in the hopes that these behaviors can be leveraged to fight the enzymes’ disease potential. The bandits are cathepsins, enzymes that normally dispose of unneeded protein in our cells. But in […]
Look What’s Inside: Full-Body Movies From EXPLORER Scanner
Simon Cherry | Via UC Davis | January 22, 2020Positron emission tomography, or PET scanning, a technique for tracing metabolic processes in the body, has been widely applied in clinical diagnosis and research spanning physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology. Now researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Fudan University, Shanghai, have shown how to use an advanced reconstruction method with an ultrasensitive total-body PET […]
Look What’s Inside: Full-Body Movies From EXPLORER Scanner
Jinyi Qi | Via UC Davis | January 22, 2020Positron emission tomography, or PET scanning, a technique for tracing metabolic processes in the body, has been widely applied in clinical diagnosis and research spanning physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology. Now researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Fudan University, Shanghai, have shown how to use an advanced reconstruction method with an ultrasensitive total-body PET […]
SPIE Selects Wolfgang Fink as 2020 Fellow
Wolfgang Fink | Via The University of Arizona College of Engineering | January 21, 2020Professional optics society recognizes University of Arizona professor for his work in artificial vision for the blind and smartphone-based eye exams and disease diagnostics. University of Arizona electrical and computer engineering professor and Edward & Maria Keonjian Endowed Chair Wolfgang Fink is one of the newest Fellows of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, or […]
Ultrafast Camera Takes 1 Trillion Frames Per Second of Transparent Objects and Phenomena
Lihong Wang | Via Caltech | January 17, 2020A little over a year ago, Caltech’s Lihong Wang developed the world’s fastest camera, a device capable of taking 10 trillion pictures per second. It is so fast that it can even capture light traveling in slow motion. But sometimes just being quick is not enough. Indeed, not even the fastest camera can take pictures […]
Improved brain chip for precision medicine
Metin Akay | Via EurekAlert | January 16, 2020The Akay Lab biomedical research team at the University of Houston is reporting an improvement on a microfluidic brain cancer chip previously developed in their lab. The new chip allows multiple-simultaneous drug administration, and a massive parallel testing of drug response for patients with glioblastoma (GBM), the most common malignant brain tumor, accounting for 50% […]
A new model of metabolism draws from thermodynamics and ‘omics’
Vassily Hatzimanikatis | Via EurekAlert | January 13, 2020All living things are made of carbon, and sugars, e.g. glucose, are a very common source of it. Consequently, most cells are good at eating sugars, using enzymes to digest them through a series of chemical reactions that transform the initial sugar into a variety of cell components, including amino acids, DNA building blocks, and […]
Robotic Trainer Helps Paraplegics Sit More Stably
Sunil Agrawal | Via HospiMedica | January 13, 2020A new study shows how a robotic device can assist and train people with spinal cord injuries (SCIs) to sit more stably by improving their trunk control. Developed at Columbia University (New York, NY, USA), the Trunk-Support Trainer (TruST) is based on a motorized-cable belt placed around the torso that helps determine the individual postural […]
Chromatin organizes itself into 3D forests in single cells
Igal Szleifer | Via Northwestern University | January 10, 2020A single cell contains the genetic instructions for an entire organism. This genomic information is managed and processed by the complex machinery of chromatin — a mix of DNA and protein within chromosomes whose function and role in disease are of increasing interest to scientists. A Northwestern University research team — using mathematical modeling and […]
Nanoparticle Slips Suicide Gene into Pediatric Brain Cancer Cells
Jordan Green | Via GenengNews | January 8, 2020If you dispatch a suicide gene, you want to make sure that it bypasses healthy cells on its way to harmful cells, such as cancer cells. What’s more, you want to make sure that the suicide gene is sent via a delivery system that treads lightly—especially if the suicide gene is meant to treat pediatric […]
Disorderly DNA helps cancer cells evade treatment
Igal Szleifer | Via Northwestern University | January 8, 2020Each cell in the human body holds a full two meters of DNA. In order for that DNA to fit into the cell nucleus — a cozy space just one hundredth of a millimeter of space — it needs to be packed extremely tight. A new Northwestern University study has discovered that the packing of […]
Temozolomide in Combination With NF-κB Inhibitor Significantly Disrupts the Glioblastoma Multiforme Spheroid Formation
Metin Akay | Via IEEE | December 30, 2019Impact Statement: Drug test on cancer spheroids in improved brain-chip demonstrate that the combined effect of temozolomide and NF-κB inhibitor on disrupting GBM spheroid formation outperforms each of the drugs alone. Abstract: Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most common malignant primary brain tumor, accounting for 50% of all cases. GBM patients have a five-year survival […]
For CRISPR, tweaking DNA fragments before inserting yields highest efficiency rates yet
Huimin Zhao | Via Science Daily | December 23, 2019By chemically tweaking the ends of the DNA to be inserted, the new technique is up to five times more efficient than current approaches. The researchers saw improvements at various genetic locations tested in a human kidney cell line, even seeing 65% insertion at one site where the previous high had been 15%. Led by […]
New treatment Strategy may thwart deadly brain tumors
Rakesh Jain | Via EurekAlert | December 23, 2019Immune checkpoint inhibitors are important medications that boost the immune system’s response against certain cancers; however, they tend to be ineffective against glioblastoma, the most deadly primary brain tumor in adults. New research in mice led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the University of Florida reveals a promising strategy that makes glioblastoma […]