Heart-on-a-chip may lead to new treatments for heart failure

A cardiac microphysiological system under fluorescent lighting with fluidic tubing.

A team led by Professors Kevin Healy and Niren Murthy have developed a microfluidic heart-on-a-chip, with which they were able to discover a lipid nanoparticle that could penetrate the dense heart muscle and efficiently deliver its cargo of therapeutic mRNA into heart muscle cells. This new drug delivery method and testing platform may pave the way to new cardiac treatments.

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Taner Sen and Colleagues Sequence Complex Oat Pangenome

head and shoulders photo of Sen

Adjunct Professor Taner Sen and his colleagues at the USDA and beyond have assembled and annotated the genomes of 33 wild and domesticated oat lines, along with an atlas of gene expression across in 23 of these lines, which will enable future efforts to even more hardy and productive strains of the popular grain.

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Alumnus Connor Tou named Stat Wunderkind

head photo of tou on green background with Stat Wunderkind text logo

BioE alumnus Connor Tou (B.S. 2020) has been named a 2025 STAT Wunderkind by by STAT News – an award that honors early-career scientists whose creativity and perseverance are helping to reshape biomedical research and health care.

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Fletcher elected to National Academy of Medicine

photo of Fletcher

Professor Dan Fletcher has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine for his contributions to the mechanistic understanding of biological self-assembly and mechanotransduction, and his work developing mobile phone-based microscopy for remote diagnosis of infectious diseases. Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.

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Keasling Named 2025 DOE/NAI Innovator of the Year

head and shoulders photo of Keasling in lab examining a flask of fluid. photo by JBEI

The Department of Energy and the National Academy of Inventors have honored Professor Jay Keasling with their 2025 Innovator of the Year Award, which goes to one DOE employee who has translated research into tangible impacts that have benefited society at large. Keasling is a pioneer in synthetic biology who leads a groundbreaking research program focused on engineering microorganisms to produce advanced biofuels and chemicals.

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