BioE News – Page 31 – UC Berkeley Department of Bioengineering

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.

MEng teams win project awards

Congratulations to the MEng teams who have won end-of-year capstone awards! The Biomimetic Hydrogels to Enhance Tissue Modelling of Brain Cancer team of Jonathan Evans and Julia Lanoha won the Technical Leadership Capstone Award, the Precision Freezing 3D Bioprinter for Large Scale Tissue Engineering team of Alex Wolcott [BIOE], Martin Banet-Rivet [ME], Pablo Amor [ME] and Ruobin Liu [ME], and the Novel Implant for Regulating Excessive Eye Pressure in Glaucoma Patients team of Charit Mehta [ME], Aishwarya Pamula [BIOE], Sheila Sharifzad [BIOE], won the MEng Alumni Award for the Most Innovative Project.

Scientists pivot to COVID-19 research, hoping for quick results to deal with pandemic

Professors Patrick Hsu and Niren Murthy are featured with the emergency funding they have received for urgent COVID-19 research. Hsu is working to apply new CRISPR tools he has discovered to a faster and better diagnosis of COVID-19 infection and potentially new therapeutics, while Murthy is looking for weaknesses in the SARS-CoV-2 proteins that could be leveraged by a small molecule, hopefully knocking out the virus.

Congratulations 2020 Graduates

Please join us in celebrating all of our 2020 graduates, who have showed so much dedication and perseverance getting through this wild year. We are so proud of all of you!

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