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 […]
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 […]
Turning Light into Electrical Current
Material scientists at the Nano/Bio Interface Center have demonstrated the transduction of optical radiation to electrical current in a molecular circuit. The system, an array of nano-sized molecules of gold, responds to electromagnetic waves by creating surface plasmons that induce and project electrical current across molecules, similar to that of photovoltaic solar cells. Dawn Bonnell, […]
Molecules that detect, monitor, and help to treat disease
On the third floor of Skirkanich Hall, Andrew Tsourkas is creating new magnetic nanoparticles that may revolutionize the detection of early cancer cells. By “early,” he means when molecular changes in the disease are occurring, but before any anatomical changes are visible. Detecting Cancer with Nanoparticles Today’s magnetic resonance imaging scans typically only reveal tumors […]
Haptics at Penn: A Class of Touch
Inside the Towne Building’s Haptics Lab, members of Team Kuchenbecker are bent over their work stations, completely absorbed in individual projects. A question is raised from one of the benches and soon the dynamic changes: a diverse and interesting mix of doctoral, master’s, undergraduate, and high school students gather around a central work table to […]