Bioengineering News
The Master of Translational Medicine team of Daniel Beckerman and Woojoo Kim has receive an Ignite grant to push their project, “3D Printing Anatomical Models for Orthopedic Surgery”, to the next level of development.
Professor John Dueber’s lab has advanced two steps closer to cleaning up the dirty production of indigo dyes. Using synthetic biology they have done away with the wasteful chemical synthesis of indigo, and removed the damaging bleaching stage that converts indigo to leucoindigo.
IEEE Spectrum talks with Professor Amy Herr, founder of Berkeley’s Hacking for Impact course, about the non-technical challenges of pursuing impact.
BioE undergrad alumna Ann Lee-Karlon, later a PhD graduate of UC San Diego, has been elected to the AIMBE College of Fellows Class of 2018. She was recognized for “outstanding leadership in successful drug development and business operations in Genentech and for enhancing diversity of future BME leaders.”
BioE Master of Engineering students Bhardwaj, Dabiri, and Ramirez are working with the Million Hands organization to create customized low-cost prosthetic hands for children with 3D-printing.
Researchers led by Professor David Schaffer have for the first time used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to disable a defective gene that causes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, in mice, extending their lifespan by 25 percent.
Bioengineering and EECS professor Steven Conolly is building a new kind of medical diagnostic technology called magnetic particle imaging (MPI).
Prominent scientist Rama Ranganathan received his undergraduate degree in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley as one of the pioneering students in the Engineering Science BioE program, before the founding of the department. Now Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago, Ranganathan will lead their new center spanning the Division of the Biological Sciences and the Institute for Molecular Engineering.
BioE PhD student Adam Rao is part of the team that designed Tabla, a low-cost device that uses sound waves to detect the presence of pneumonia. Tabla is the winner of the student category of Fast Company‘s 2017 Innovation by Design Awards.
Professor Emeritus and Founding Chair of Bioengineering, Dr. Thomas Budinger, will receive the 2018 Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Professor Budinger is being honored for his “pioneering contributions to tomographic radiotracer imaging,” one of his many contributions to the field of medical imaging.
The Open Philanthropy Project awarded a grant of $5 million over five years to support research on the basic biology of aging-related diseases and impairments, led by Dr. Irina Conboy.
2016 PhD Kunwoo Lee and 2011 MTM Siddarth Satish have been named to the 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30. Lee, a former student in Professor Niren Murthy’s lab and founder of startup GenEdit, developed a way to deliver muscular dystrophy-curing CRISPR edits to the body using nanoparticles. Satish is the founder and CEO of Gauss Surgical, a company that has developed technology to monitor blood loss in the operating room.
In a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Fletcher Lab describes how the LoaScope, a modification their Cellscope, can provide fast and effective testing for Loa loa parasites in the blood. Using the LoaScope to analyze the blood of volunteers from villages in Cameroon, doctors were able to successfully treat more than 15,000 patients with ivermectin without serious complications.
Published in Science today, a review article by Prof. Michael Yartsev on the current decline in the diversity of species used for neuroscience research. The field has converged on a few selected model organisms, but Yartsev proposes that neuroscience might be ready to diversify again, if provided the appropriate support.
Professor Michael Yartsev has been awarded one of only 18 prestigious 2017 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, to pursue new research into how our brains developed the ability to acquire language.
At the heart of the UC Berkeley-UCSF Master of Translational Medicine program is a hands-on capstone project, where student teams work on developing medical technologies from idea to bedside. Learn more about three Surgical Innovations Accelerator projects at UCSF in Spring 2017.
Professors Niren Murthy and Irina Conboy are lead authors on a new study which demonstrates the delivery of CRISPR genome-editing molecules via nanoparticles rather than via viruses. They show that CRISPR components can be packaged around individual gold nanoparticles and wrapped in a protecting polymer, and that the nanoparticles deliver the CRISPR components into a wide variety of cells efficiently.
Prof Irina Conboy’s lab has pioneered a method that paves the way to characterization of proteome alterations in vivo, whether imposed by age or disease.This research was published in Nature Communications.
Professor Amy Herr’s lab has been awarded an R33 grant as part of the 2017 Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot Initiative. The grant will fund their work on “Advanced Cancer Classification via Single-Cell Electrophoretic Cytopathology.”
The National Cancer Moonshot works to accelerate research efforts by enhancing data access and facilitating collaborations among researchers, doctors, philanthropies, patients, patient advocates, and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. The initiative aims to bring about a decade’s worth of advances in five years.
Bioengineering tops the new Forbes’ Best And Worst Master’s Degrees For Jobs In 2017 list! PayScale’s analysis shows that, among those with biomedical engineering master’s degrees, compensation leaps from $70,200 at the early-career stage to $129,300 by mid-career. These graduates also go on to derive high satisfaction and meaning from their jobs.
MTM alumnus Michael Hemati, Senior R&D Engineer at Theranova, has been named one of Medtech’s Rising Stars of 2017. Hematic is currently heading medical device startups Leo Labs and TruKinetics, and was one of the founders of SmartDerm, a startup founded from an MTM project.
BioE keeps climbing — our undergraduate program has moved up another notch in the annual US News & World Report ranking to #7 in the nation!
Professor Amy Herr has been recognized by the City of Berkeley as a Berkeley Visionary for her leadership in innovation, citizenship, and vision. One of only three awardees, Herr is known for her dedication to improving lives through science, technology, engineering and math research and education.
Two startup companies spun out of BioE 192 Senior Capstone Design projects are taking the world of remote health monitoring by storm. Read how the heart and asthma monitoring devices by Eko Devices and Knox Medical Diagnostics are changing the landscape of medicine.
Our Master of Engineering team working on the project “Commercializing Nanocarriers for Neurological Disease” won the Best Capstone Presentation Award at the end-of-year project showcase in May.