Prof Niren Murthy’s lab, led by postdoc Tara deBoer, has developed a new cheap and simple point-of-care assay for diagnosing bacterial drug resistance. Termed DETECT, the technology can identify bacterial drug resistance directly from patient urine samples. The study appears on the Oct. 18 cover of the journal ChemBioChem.
BioE News
Alumni news: Invasive breast cancers punch tunnels into neighboring tissue
Phd alumnus Ovijit Chaudhuri, now a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, has uncovered a previously unknown mechanism cancerous cells use to break through the basement membrane, allowing the tumor to become invasive.
Alum Artunduaga featured on VentureWell
MTM alumna and founder of startup Respira Labs Maria Artunduaga is featured in the Innovator Spotlight on VentureWell! She invented a device that continuously monitors patients’ lung function and collects lifestyle and other medical data to improve management of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
Arkin Lab disentangles bacterial gene translation
Using a massive set of 244,000 synthetic sequence experiments, Adam Arkin and his collaborators disentangled some of the complex determinants for how bacterial genes are translated. Published today in Nature Biotechnology, their work has made it possible to identify general rules for optimizing protein expression, a fundamental step in understanding living systems, and takes another step toward the efficient design of engineered bacterial gene expression systems.
Million Hands builds an open-source platform for customizable, functional, low-cost prosthetic hands
Learn more about Million Hands, a team-based project that has been making progress in developing 3D-printed prosthetic hands with more robust capability. Four bioengineering MEng students, Aastha Shah, Sina Dabiri, Jose Ramirez, and Aashish Bhardwaj, are members of the team.
4 MTM students win Jacobs Institute Innovation Catalyst grants
One third of patients who survive cardiac arrest suffer from permanent neurological or brain damage. MTM students Robert Schultz, Justin Olshavsky, Aurko Shaw, and Ikennah Browne won a Jacobs Institute Ignite grant to push their project, a brain-saving catheter for use in the field, to the next stage of implementation.
5 students named 2019 Siebel Scholars
PhD students Andrew Bremer, Marc Steven Chooljian, Phillip Kang, Stacey Lee, and Nicole Anne Repina have been named the 2019 UC Berkeley Siebel Scholars in Bioengineering by the Siebel Foundation. The Siebel Scholars program recognizes outstanding graduate students from the world’s most prestigious business, computer science, energy science, and bioengineering graduate schools.
Bioengineering holds steady in Top Ten ranking
The Department of Bioengineering undergraduate program is one again ranked #7 in the United State in the US News & World Report Best Colleges rankings, released today.
Building a diseased heart
To develop useful in vitro model systems for identifying the correlation between genetic deficiencies and environmental stress for cardiomyopathy, Professor Kevin Healy and his lab teamed up with molecular biologists at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases to combine cutting edge tissue engineering and genome editing techniques to create a “diseased heart micro-tissue” model to mimic both the genetic and physical components of cardiomyopathy.