Bioengineering News
The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub has announced it’s inaugural class of 47 faculty investigators from UC Berkeley, UCSF and Stanford, including three Berkeley Bioengineers. Professors Dan Fletcher, Amy Herr and Aaron Streets are among the 13 Berkeley faculty who will receive up to $1.5 million each over the next five years to conduct cutting-edge biomedical research.
Professor Steven Conolly’s lab has won the 2017 Excellence in Laboratory Safety Award in the Large Physical Sciences Lab category. Winners were selected based on consideration of the lab’s safety inspection results, internal safety communications, and collaboration with EH&S and Department Safety Coordinators.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab began construction of the Integrative Genomics Building (IGB), which will house researchers from the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute with those from the Systems Biology Knowledgebase under one roof. Bioengineering professors Adam Arkin, Director of Kbase, and Jay Keasling, Biosciences Associate Laboratory Director, were on hand for the groundbreaking.
Research from Professor Mohammad Mofrad’s lab, “Bacterial Networks on Hydrophobic Micropillars”, made the cover of the journal ACS Nano this issue.
Healy Lab’s heart-on-a-chip technology is the subject of a video feature at Futurism.
Professor Amy Herr has been named the the inaugural faculty director of the Bakar Fellows Program at UC Berkeley. The program fosters faculty entrepreneurship in the STEM+ fields including Engineering, Computer Science, Chemistry, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Architecture, to help professors translate their ground-breaking discoveries into practical solutions and contribute to Berkeley’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Herr was a member of the first class of Bakar Fellows in 2012.
Bioengineering MEng students Sneha Balan and Nick Engel are featured on page 4 of the Winter MEng newsletter, for their Early Cancer Detection project and Alumni Innovation Award. Nick is also on the cover.
After severe trauma, some patients in shock develop impaired coagulation. This is difficult to diagnose in crisis and makes blood transfusions dangerously challenging to manage. Professor Adam Arkin and collaborators have used dynamic modeling to demonstrate a method for calculating each patient’s transfusion requirements using only laboratory values that can be easily and quickly obtained in the emergency setting. This personalized information could help hospitals save lives at risk from acute traumatic coagulopathy and massive transfusion mortality.
Congratulations 2013 PhD Tim Downing and 2009 BS Tim Wang, both named to the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30!
Downing, now a professor at UC Irvine, was recognized for his work examining how extracellular signals can influence the final fate of cells. Wang, now a PhD student at MIT, is the cofounder of KSQ Therapeutics, a drug company that uses his work with the gene-editing technology CRISPR to look for new drugs.
Lygos, a synthetic biology company founded by BioE PhD alumni Jeffrey Dietrich and Eric Steen, was featured in a New York Times article on the resurgence of companies using biology to produce cheap, safe and natural materials for fuel, cosmetics and other goods.
Master of Engineering student Nicholas Engel won the Alumni Innovation Award at this year’s Fall Capstone Expo!
Lygos Biotech, founded by PhD alumni Jeffrey Dietrich and Eric Steen, has raised $13 million in Series A funding to continue their work producing high-value specialty chemicals through synthetic biology. Their process uses domestic sugars instead of petroleum for chemical production, and has already resulted in the world’s first bio-based production of malonic acid.
Professor Amy Herr has been elected a 2016 Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. She joins only eleven other Berkeley faculty ever elected. Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. Congratulations!
For the #1 spot in their annual Top 10 Innovations of the year, The Scientist magazine has chosen Milo, the commercial version of the single-cell Western blot technology invented in Professor Amy Herr’s lab. Originally developed for market by BioE PhD alumna Kelly Gardner for their startup Zephyrus Biosciences, acquired by BioTechne, Gardner now runs commercialization of the product for ProteinSimple.
The CellScope, a cellphone-based microscope from Professor Dan Fletcher’s lab, was featured in the latest issue of the Berkeley Science Review.
Lief Therapeutics has designed a smart patch that helps people manage their stress through heart rate variability biofeedback. Co-founder Billy Frese is a 2015 BioE MEng alum. Check them out on Kickstarter.
A new study from Professor Irina Conboy’s lab found that tissue health and repair dramatically decline in young mice when half of their blood is replaced with blood from old mice. This adds further detail to the complex study of aging and suggest that young blood alone will not reverse the aging process.
Gauss Surgical, a startup formed by MTM alumnus Siddarth Satish, was listed as one of “80+ Companies Reinventing Medicine” by venture analysis group CB Insights.
Check out this great video on the CellScope Loa.
New research from Professor Mohammad Mofrad’s lab shows how gateway proteins can recognize and block aberrant strands of genetic code from exiting the nucleus – a form of quality control for the transport of genetic information.
John Waldeisen, CEO and Co-founder of Diassess, talks with Wired about the diagnostic tech landscape post-Theranos.
This award from the New York Stem Cell Foundation provides Yartsev with support to study the neurobiological basis of language learning in the mammalian brain using an unusual model system: the bat.
Professor Amy Herr has been named to the 2016 power list of Top 50 most influential women in the analytical sciences by The Analytical Scientist. Herr was also named to the Top 100 Most Influential People in the Analytical Sciences in their 2015 Power List.
Professor Michael Yartsev will receive a NIH New Innovator award, designed to stimulate highly innovative research and support promising new investigators. Yartsev was recognized for his research studying the “First Mammalian Model System for Studying Vocal Learning: A Behavioral and Neurophysiological Approach.”
Alumni startup Knox Medical was featured in the Fall 2016 California Magazine, for their child-friendly portable spirometer.