Beth Winkelstein and Andrew Tsourkas Receive CSRS Award
Macrophage as a Potential Biomarker for Imaging Radicular Pain, a paper co-authored by Beth Winkelstein and Andrew Tsourkas, has been selected as the First Place Basic Science Research Award Paper by the Cervical Spine Research Society’s (CSRS) Research Committee. The research was performed by students Dan Hubbard (Ph.D. ’08) and Christine Weisshaar in Winkelstein’s Spine […]
Cracking the code inside a worm’s brain
Christopher Fang-Yen, assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering, studies worms. Specifically, Caenorhabditis elegans (or C. elegans in short). These transparent, one-millimeter-long creatures have just 302 neurons, and their study allows Fang-Yen to combine his training as a physicist, optical engineer and neurobiologist. Interested in bringing his expertise in imaging devices to biology, Fang-Yen states, […]
Teaching Discovery Through Smart Experimentation
John Crocker studies “squishy stuff.” A researcher at the nexus of soft-matter physics and cell biology, Crocker employs various methods to develop new materials, to determine how soft (or squishy) a material is, and in the case of living cells, to learn how they determine the squishiness of their own surroundings. As an associate professor […]
Global Citizenship: Serving to Learn, Learning to Serve
Penn Engineering’s commitment to “global citizenship” provides many opportunities for undergraduates to travel and serve abroad. A concept founded in the idea that each person has a responsibility to both local and international communities, “global citizenship” enables Penn Engineering undergraduates to undertake various hands-on projects that engage them with local citizens and leaders to provide […]
Two Approaches to Tissue Engineering Converge
Recently, Jason Burdick and Robert Mauck talked about their collaborations on cartilage and meniscus regeneration and engineered biomaterials. Q. What projects do the two of you work on together? Jason: Rob and I are primarily working on two projects in collaboration, both related to musculoskeletal tissue engineering. The first project is to develop strategies for […]
Can We Help to Heal Injures Without Causing Scarring?
By transplanting injured fetal sheep tendon tissue into an adult environment, Lou Soslowsky and his colleagues in the McKay Orthopaedic Research Laboratory, have astonishingly shown that tendons can heal in a scar-less, regenerative manner rather than through a scar-filled, reparative mechanism, a finding that would greatly benefit our tendons when injured. Scar tissue formed during […]
Building Better Building Blocks
Designer Proteins, Molecular Networks, and Cells One of the ongoing challenges in cancer detection and therapy is to target imaging agents and deliver toxic drugs only to tumor cells and not to normal cells. To achieve this critical selectivity, Casim Sarkar, assistant professor of bioengineering, is targeting protein antigens that are uniquely or abundantly expressed […]
Understanding Cancer
Drug Efficacy and Development of the Oncosimulator “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Ravi Radhakrishnan. “We don’t even know what we are looking for.” What he wants to know sounds simple: why a drug therapy for non-small cell lung cancer and glioblastoma (cancer of the brain) works in only about 5 […]
Translational Research
From Bench to Bedside and Back Again in Pediatric Brain Injury Susan Margulies and her colleagues used to study a brain or lung injury in vivo in the lab and only record what happened. If an animal stopped breathing, they observed. If its blood pressure fell, they waited. But clinicians who are integral members of […]
Soul of Invention: Brian Litt’s Quest to Bring Moore’s Law to Therapeutic Devices
Though his work promises to transform medical care for the brain and heart, Brian Litt is motivated by a less scientific realm: his soul. Memories of patients with epilepsy whose lives were tragically altered by uncontrollable and unpredictable seizures drive Litt’s determination to find new therapeutics. Recalling, for example, the mother who drowned in the […]