Biomaterials
Recent news:
An in-depth look at research by Professor Phil Messersmith, who draws on biology to develop cutting-edge materials for medicine. His lab creates adhesives and therapies designed to work with the human body, offering new ways to repair tissues, heal wounds and treat disease.
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.
Berkeley startup AsparaGlue, founded on science by Professor Phil Messersmith and postdoc Subhajit Pal, won an East Bay Innovation Award for their bioinspired surgical superglue.
Bioengineering Chair Phillip Messersmith has been named to the 2024 class of fellows elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals.
MuscleMatrix and their hydrogel scaffold for muscle loss injuries is part of LSEC’s 2nd cohort of Venture Grant startups.
Researchers in Professor Phillip Messersmith’s lab have demonstrated that treatment with DPCA, an enzyme inhibitor molecule shown to trigger regeneration in mammals, can protect against and repair colon damage in a mouse model of colitis. This work suggests that short-term use of this small molecule drug could someday provide a restorative therapy for patients with IBD — and a path to remission.