Professor Christopher Chen Presents DeLisi Distinguished Lecture
Professor Christopher S. Chen (BME, MSE), recipient of the 2019 Charles DeLisi Award and Distinguished Lecture, presented “How Complex is Simple Enough? Engineering 3D Culture Models of Physiology and Disease” on April 1. The award recognizes faculty members with extraordinary records of well-cited scholarship and outstanding alumni who have invented and mentored transformative technologies that impact quality of life.
Strength in Numbers
Elaborate molecular networks inside living cells enable them to sense and process many signals from the environment to perform desired cellular functions. Synthetic biologists have been able to reconstruct and mimic simpler forms of this cellular signal processing. But now, a new toolset powered by self-assembling molecules and predictive modeling will allow researchers to construct the complex computation and signal processing found in eukaryotic organisms, including human cells.
How Light Turns Ordinary Hydrogen Peroxide into a MRSA Treatment
ENG researchers invent blue light therapy that kills MRSA without antibiotics. Perhaps what’s most promising is that blue light phototherapy doesn’t affect healthy cells of the body, so the technique could be used to treat MRSA infections without harming any surrounding tissue or skin.
A New Way to Count
With a new method developed by Professor M. Selim Ünlü’s lab, researchers can determine a much more exact measurement by continually observing molecular reactions throughout the test. Their work has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Postdoc Receives Fellowship to Study the Impact of Poor-Quality Medicines for Tuberculosis on Antimicrobial Resistance
By Liz Sheeley Carly Ching, a postdoctoral associate, has been awarded The USP Quality Institute Fellowship in Quality Medical Products. She will continue to study the role of poor-quality medicines in fostering antimicrobial resistance, which, her advisor, Professor Muhammad Zaman (BME), says “continues to be one of the greatest public health challenges of our time.” […]
How Bad Drugs Turn Treatable Diseases Deadly
Low-quality and counterfeit antibiotics drive drug-resistant infections By Art Jahnke Muhammad Zaman learned at an early age that one did not shop for medicine at the convenient neighborhood pharmacy. In Pakistan, where he grew up, the safer thing to do was walk the extra mile to a pharmacy whose drugs were known to be high […]
How Cells Remember
In new research published in Cell, Assistant Professor Ahmad ‘Mo’ Khalil, graduate student Minhee Park and colleagues engineered a fully synthetic epigenetic system to better understand, study, and control its behaviors. Using synthetic biology, they constructed molecular modules that mimic features of natural epigenetic systems and found that they were able to induce epigenetic activities in mammalian cells, such as storing cellular memory.
$3.3M Awarded to ENG Researchers under NIH BRAIN Initiative
Their research proposal has three specific aims, but overall plans to deliver a systematic understanding of the effects of a non-invasive brain stimulation technique, ultrasound neuromodulation.
Merck Global Health Invests in ENG Drug Testing Technology
Professor Muhammad Zaman and his team at Boston University are partnering with Merck Global Health to further develop PharmaChk, a user-friendly, portable device for testing drugs of questionable quality.
Antibiotic Resistance Without the Antibiotics
Antibiotic resistance is a global threat that leads to more than 23,000 deaths each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Over exposure to antibiotics has long been blamed, but Assistant Professor Mary Dunlop is flipping that idea on its head, finding that bacteria can also develop resistance without being exposed to antibiotics.