As researchers hunt for a solution to the coronavirus outbreak, Daniel A. Hammer, Alfred G. and Meta A. Ennis Professor in Bioengineering and in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), is bringing lessons from the fight for a vaccine to the classroom.
Hammer will offer a course on COVID-19 and the coronavirus pandemic during Penn’s Summer II session, which will be held online this year. The course will be co-taught with Miriam Wattenbarger, senior lecturer in CBE.
The course, “Biotechnology, Immunology, and COVID-19,” will culminate with a case study of the coronavirus pandemic including the types of drugs proposed and their mechanism of action, as well as the process of vaccine development.
“Obviously, the pandemic has been a life-altering event, causing an immense dislocation for everyone in our community, especially the students. Between me and Miriam, who has been trumpeting the importance of vaccines for some time in her graduate-level CBE courses, we have the expertise to inform students about this disease and how we might combat it,” says Hammer.
For more than ten years, Wattenbarger has run courses and labs focused on drug delivery and biotechnology, key elements of the vaccine development process.
“I invite both researchers and industry speakers to meet with my students,” Wattenbarger says, “so that they learn the crucial role engineers play in both vaccine development and manufacturing.”
Beyond studying the interactions between the immune system and viruses — including HIV, influenza, adenovirus and coronavirus — students will cover a variety of biotechnological techniques relevant to tracking and defending against them, including recombinant DNA technology, polymerase chain reaction, DNA sequencing, gene therapy, CRISPR-Cas9 editing, drug discovery, small molecule inhibitors, vaccines and the clinical trial process.
Students will also learn the mathematical principles used to quantify biomolecular interactions, as well as those found behind simple epidemiological models and methods for making and purifying drugs and vaccines.
“We all have to contribute in the ways that we can. Having taught biotechnology to freshmen for the past decade, this is something that I can do that can both inform and build community,” says Hammer. “Never has it been more important to have an informed and scientifically literate community that can fight this or any future pandemic.”
Originally posted on the Penn Engineering blog. Media contact Evan Lerner. For more on BE’s COVID-19 projects, read our recent blog post.
Some medical conditions, like diabetes or limb amputation, have the potential to result in wounds that never heal, affecting patients for the rest of their lives. Though normal wound-healing processes are relatively understood by medical professionals, the complications that can lead to chronic non-healing wounds are often varied and complex, creating a gap in successful treatments. But biomedical engineering faculty from the University of Connecticut want to change that.
A blood test may be able to detect the most common form of pancreatic cancer while it is still in its early stages while also helping doctors accurately stage a patient’s disease and guide them to the appropriate treatment. A multidisciplinary study found the test—known as a liquid biopsy—was more accurate at detecting disease in a blinded study than any other known biomarker alone, and was also more accurate at staging disease than imaging is capable of alone. The team, which includes researchers from the 
