Professor Liana Lareau is using genome sequencing to study how COVID-19 is spreading around the Bay Area.
Remembering Bertram Lubin, Former President of Children’s Hospital Oakland
The bioengineering and Bay Area communities are mourning the loss of Dr. Bert Lubin, former president and CEO of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland. Lubin was a tireless advocate for bringing the power of engineering to bear on human health, a great champion of the Berkeley-UCSF partnership, and a huge contributor to our campus. He was also a warm and generous person and we are grateful to have known him. The family has asked that donations be made in his name to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Center of Excellence for Immigrant Child and Wellbeing and/or the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Center for Child and Community Health.
Patrick Hsu’s COVID-19 antibody test review featured on 60 Minutes
Early in March, a team of 50 scientists in California did what the FDA had not: they started testing the antibody tests.
Lareau receives LGR Seed Funding award for COVID-19 Project
Prof Liana Lareau and collaborator Stacia Wyman have received one of ten Excellence in Research Awards from the Laboratory for Genomics Research (LGR), a collaboration between UC Berkeley/UCSF (IGI) and GlaxoSmithKline. Their project will explore rapid, low-cost, high-throughput viral and metagenome sequencing of COVID-19 patient samples for outbreak surveillance.
Meet the UC Berkeley scientists using decontamination to tackle COVID-19’s PPE shortage
Bioengineering graduate student Gabriela Lomeli interviewed five scientists, including four from Professor Amy Herr’s lab, who have pivoted their research during COVID-19 to write decontamination guidelines for personal protective equipment.
Head-Gordon receives COVID-19 research award
Congratulations Professor Teresa Head-Gordon, who has just been selected for one of the new C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute’s awards for research projects to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Head-Gordon has been funded for her project, “Scoring Drugs: Small Molecule Drug Discovery for COVID-19 Using Physics-Inspired Machine Learning.”
A new test can see, almost literally, infectious bacteria
Up to 20% of urinary tract infections, caused by a resistant microbe known as ESBL-producing bacteria, don’t respond to conventional antibiotics. Professor Niren Murthy and colleagues have developed a 30-minute, low-tech test, called DETECT, to identify ESBL-producing bacteria on a patient’s first visit to the doctor.
Diluting blood plasma rejuvenates tissue, reverses aging in mice
New research from Professor Irina Conboy found that diluting the blood plasma of old mice has the same or stronger rejuvenation effects on the brain, liver and muscle as surgical pairing with young mice or young blood exchange. This discovery shifts the dominant model of rejuvenation away from young blood and toward the benefits of removing age-elevated, and potentially harmful, factors in old blood.
Head-Gordon leads COVID-19 Drug-Delivery Simulation Repository
The Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI) has launched an open-source website that will allow biomolecular scientists from around the world to share computer-aided drug-testing simulations targeting the protein at the center of COVID-19. Under the leadership of MolSSI co-director Teresa Head-Gordon, a MolSSI team started work on the COVID-19 website in April, after scores of scientists began discussing ways to share simulation modeling data they had on the coronavirus.