Penn Engineers’ ‘LADL’ Uses Light to Serve Up On-demand Genome Folding

Every cell in your body has a copy of your genome, tightly coiled and packed into its nucleus. Since every copy is effectively identical, the difference between cell types and their biological functions comes down to which, how and when the individual genes in the genome are expressed, or translated into proteins.

Scientists are increasingly understanding the role that genome folding plays in this process. The way in which that linear sequence of genes are packed into the nucleus determines which genes come into physical contact with each other, which in turn influences gene expression.

LADL combines CRISPR/Cas9 and optogenetics to bring two distant points in a linear gene sequence into physical contact, forming a folding pattern known as a “loop.” Looping interactions influence gene expression, so the researchers envision LADL as being a powerful tool for studying these dynamics.

Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, assistant professor in Penn Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering, is a pioneer in this field, known as “3-D Epigenetics.” She and her colleagues have now demonstrated a new technique for quickly creating specific folding patterns on demand, using light as a trigger.

The technique, known as LADL or light-activated dynamic looping, combines aspects of two other powerful biotechnological tools: CRISPR/Cas9 and optogenetics. By using the former to target the ends of a specific genome fold, or loop, and then using the latter to snap the ends together like a magnet, the researchers can temporarily create loops between exact genomic segments in a matter of hours.

The ability to make these genome folds, and undo them, on such a short timeframe makes LADL a promising tool for studying 3D-epigenetic mechanisms in more detail. With previous research from the Phillips-Cremins lab implicating these mechanisms in a variety of neurodevelopmental diseases, they hope LADL will eventually play a role in future studies, or even treatments.

Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, Ji Hun Kim and Mayuri Rege

Alongside Phillips-Cremins, lab members Ji Hun Kim and Mayuri Rege led the study, and Jacqueline Valeri, Aryeh Metzger, Katelyn R. Titus, Thomas G. Gilgenast, Wanfeng Gong and Jonathan A. Beagan contributed to it. They collaborated with associate professor of Bioengineering Arjun Raj and Margaret C. Dunagin, a member of his lab.

The study was published in the journal Nature Methods.

“In recent years,” Phillips-Cremins says, “scientists in our fields have overcome technical and experimental challenges in order to create ultra-high resolution maps of how the DNA folds into intricate 3D patterns within the nucleus. Although we are now capable of visualizing the topological structures, such as loops, there is a critical gap in knowledge in how genome structure configurations contribute to genome function.”

In order to conduct experiments on these relationships, researchers studying these 3D patterns were in need of tools that could manipulate specific loops on command. Beyond the intrinsic physical challenges — putting two distant parts of the linear genome in physical contact is quite literally like threading a needle with a thread that is only a few atoms thick — such a technique would need to be rapid, reversible and work on the target regions with a minimum of disturbance to neighboring sequences.

The advent of CRISPR/Cas9 solved the targeting problem. A modification of the gene editing tool allowed researchers to home in on the desired sequences of DNA on either end of the loop they wanted to form. If those sequences could be engineered to seek one another out and snap together under the other necessary conditions, the loop could be formed on demand.

Cremins Lab members then sought out biological mechanisms that could bind the ends of the loops together, and found an ideal one in the toolkit of optogenetics. The proteins CIB1 and CRY2, found in Arabidopsis, a flowering plant that’s a common model organism for geneticists, are known to bind together when exposed to blue light.

“Once we turn the light on, these mechanisms begin working in a matter of milliseconds and make loops within four hours,” says Rege. “And when we turn the light off, the proteins disassociate, meaning that we expect the loop to fall apart.”

“There are tens of thousands of DNA loops formed in a cell,” Kim says. “Some are formed slowly, but many are fast, occurring within the span of a second. If we want to study those faster looping mechanisms, we need tools that can act on a comparable time scales.”

As shown in a 2013 Nature Methods paper by fellow Penn bioengineer Lukasz Bugaj, the optical response of the CRY2 protein is a key component of LADL. When the blue light is turned on, CRY2 proteins in cell immediately find one another and bind together into clumps large enough to be seen under magnification. When the light is turned off, the clumps begin to dissolve away.”

Fast acting folding mechanisms also have an advantage in that they lead to fewer perturbations of the surrounding genome, reducing the potential for unintended effects that would add noise to an experiment’s results.

The researchers tested LADL’s ability to create the desired loops using their high-definition 3D genome mapping techniques. With the help of Arjun Raj, an expert in measuring the activity of transcriptional RNA sequences, they also were able to demonstrate that the newly created loops were impacting gene expression.

The promise of the field of 3D-epigenetics is in investigating the relationships between these long-range loops and mechanisms that determine the timing and quantity of the proteins they code for. Being able to engineer those loops means researchers will be able to mimic those mechanisms in experimental conditions, making LADL a critical tool for studying the role of genome folding on a variety of diseases and disorders.

“It is critical to understand the genome structure-function relationship on short timescales because the spatiotemporal regulation of gene expression is essential to faithful human development and because the mis-expression of genes often goes wrong in human disease,” Phillips-Cremins says. “The engineering of genome topology with light opens up new possibilities to understanding the cause-and-effect of this relationship. Moreover we anticipate that, over the long term, the use of light will allow us to target specific human tissues and even to control looping in specific neuron subtypes in the brain.”

The research was supported by the New York Stem Cell Foundation; Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; the National Institutes of Health through its Director’s New Innovator Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, grant no. 1DP2MH11024701, and a 4D Nucleome Common Fund, grant no. 1U01HL1299980; and the National Science Foundation through a joint NSF-National Institute of General Medical Sciences grant to support research at the interface of the biological and mathematical sciences, grant no. 1562665, and a Graduate Research Fellowship, grant no. DGE-1321851.

Originally published on the Penn Engineering Medium blog.

César de la Fuente on 35 Innovators Under 35 List

Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez, PhD

César de la Fuente, assistant professor in the Perelman School of Medicine and in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, was named one of MIT Technology Review’s “35 Innovators Under 35” for 2019.

“It’s part of our ethos that technology can and should be a force for good. Our annual list of 35 innovators under 35 is a way of putting faces on that idea,” reads the 2019 award announcement. “This year’s list shows that even in our hard, cynical world, there are still lots of smart people willing to dedicate their lives to the idea that technology can make a safer, fairer world.”

De la Fuente was named in the list’s “Pioneers” category for his work researching antibiotics with a computational approach. Using algorithms, he creates artificial antibiotics to better understand how bacteria will evolve and how scientists can optimize treatments. De la Fuente, who was also recently featured in GEN’s Top 10 Under 40 list, further expands his search for medical solutions by extensively studying a variety of proteins, searching for molecules to develop into antimicrobials.

Included in the honor of being named on the 2019 Innovators List is an invitation for de la Fuente to speak at the EmTech MIT conference in September, an event that reflects on the potential impacts of the year’s biggest developments.

Read MIT Technology Review’s coverage of de la Fuente’s pioneering work and learn more about de la Fuente’s research on his lab website.

Originally posted on the Penn Engineering Medium Blog.

Lee Bassett and Andrew Tsourkas Awarded Grainger Foundation Grant for Interdisciplinary Research

Lee Bassett and Andrew Tsourkas

By Lauren Salig

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has awarded two Penn Engineers with The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Grant for Advancement of Interdisciplinary Research. Lee Bassett, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, and Andrew Tsourkas, professor and undergraduate chair in the Department of Bioengineering, will be using the $30,000 award to kick-start their research collaboration.

The NAE describes the Frontiers of Engineering program as one that “brings together outstanding early-career engineers from industry, academia, and government to discuss pioneering technical work and leading-edge research in various engineering fields and industry sectors. The goal is to facilitate interactions and exchange of techniques and approaches across fields and facilitate networking among the next generation of engineering leaders.”

Bassett and Tsourkas fit the grant’s description, as their proposed research requires them to combine their different areas of expertise to push the state of the art in engineering. The pair plans to engineer a new class of nanoparticles that can sense and differentially react to particular chemicals in their biochemical environment. This new class of nanoparticles could allow scientists to better study cellular processes and could eventually have important applications in medicine, potentially allowing for more personalized diagnoses and targeted treatment of disease.

To design and create this type of nanoparticle is no small task. The research demands Bassett’s background in engineering quantum-mechanical systems for use as environmental sensors, and Tsourkas’ ability to apply these properties to nanoscale “theranostic” agents, which are designed to target treatments based on a patient’s specific diagnostic test results.

By combining forces, Bassett and Tsourkas hope to introduce a new nanoparticle tool into their fields and to connect even more people in their different areas to promote future interdisciplinary work.

Originally posted on the Penn Engineering Medium Blog.

Week in BioE (June 28, 2019)

by Sophie Burkholder

Innovations in Vascularization Could Lead to a New Future in Bioprinting

We may be one step closer to 3D-printing organs for transplants thanks to innovations in vascularization from researchers at Rice University and Washington University. Jordan Miller, Ph.D., a Penn Bioengineering alumnus, now an assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice, worked with his colleague Kelly Stevens, Ph.D., an assistant professor of the bioengineering department at Washington, to develop 3D-printed networks that mimicked the vascularized pathways for the transport of blood, lymph, and other fluids in the body. Their work appeared on a recent cover of Science, featuring a visual representation of the 3D-printed vessels in vasculature meant to mirror that of the human lung.

Relying heavily on open source 3D-printing, Miller and Stevens, along with collaborators from a handful of other institutions and start-ups, found ways to model dynamic vasculature systems similar to heart valves, airways systems, and bile ducts to keep 3D-printed tissue viable. The video below demonstrates the way the team successfully modeled vasculature in a small portion of the lung by designing a net-like structure around a sack of air. But Miller, a long-time supporter of open source printing and bioprinting, hopes that this is merely one step closer to what he sees as the ultimate goal of allowing for all organs to be bioprinted. Having that sort of power would reduce the complex issues that come with organ transplants, from organ availability to compatibility, and bring an end to a health issue that affects the over 100,000 people on the organ transplant waiting list.

A Combination of Protein Synthesis and Spectrometry Improve Cell Engineering

One goal of modern medicine is to create individualized therapeutics by figuring out a way to control cell function to perform specific tasks for the body without disrupting normal cell function. Balancing these two goals often proves to be one of the greatest difficulties of this endeavor in the lab, but researchers at Northwestern University found a way to combine the two functions at once in methods they’re calling cell-free protein synthesis and self-assembled monolayer desorption ionization (SAMDI) mass spectrometry. This innovation in the combination of the two methods accelerates the trial and error process that comes with engineering cells for a specific need, allowing researchers to cover a lot more ground in determining what works best in a smaller amount of time.

Leading the study are Milan Mrksich, Ph.D., a Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern, and Michael Jewett, Ph.D., a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence and co-director of the Center for Synthetic Biology at Northwestern. Together, they hope to continue to take advantage of the factory-like qualities of cell operations in order to use cells from any organisms to our advantage as needed. By helping to reduce the amount of time spent on trial and error, this study brings us one step closer to a world of efficient and individualized medicine.

Non-Invasive Sensory Stimulation as New Way of Treating Alzheimer’s

What if we could reduce the effects of Alzheimer’s disease with a non-invasive therapy comprised of only sensory inputs of light and sound? A recent study between Georgia Tech and MIT tries to make that possible. Alzheimer’s patients often have a larger than normal number of amyloid plaques in their brains, which is a naturally occurring protein that in excess can disrupt neurological function. The treatment —  designed in part by Abigail Paulson, a graduate student in the lab of Annabelle Singer, Ph.D., assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University — uses a combination of light and sound to induce gamma oscillations in brain waves of mice with high amounts of these amyloid plaques. Another lead author of the study is Anthony Martorell, a graduate student in the Tsai Lab at MIT, where Singer was a postdoctoral researcher.

This new approach is different from other non-invasive brain therapies for memory improvement, as tests demonstrated that it had the power to not only reach the visual cortex, but that it also had an effect on the memory centers in the hippocampus. An innovation like this could bring about a more widespread form of treatment for Alzheimer’s patients, as the lack of a need for surgery makes it far more accessible. Singer hopes to continue the project in the future by looking at how these sensory stimulations affect the brain throughout a variety of processes, and more importantly, if the therapy can be successfully applied to human patients.

NIH Grant Awarded to Marquette Biomedical Engineering Professor for Metal Artifact Reduction Techniques in CT Scans

Taly Gilat-Shmidt, Ph.D., an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Marquette University, recently received a $1.4 million grant from the National Institute of Health to improve methods for radiation treatment through metal artifact reduction techniques. When patients have some sort of metal that can’t be removed, such as an orthopaedic implant like a hip or knee replacement, it can interfere with the imaging process for CT scans and lead to inaccuracies by obscuring some tissue in the final images. These inaccuracies can lead to difficulty in devising treatment plans for patients who require radiation, as CT scans are often used to assess patients and determine which line of treatment is most appropriate. Gilat-Schmidt hopes to use the grant to implement tested algorithms to help reduce this variability in imaging that comes from metal implants.

People and Places

Activities for Community Education in Science (ACES), founded by Penn chemistry graduate students in 2014, aims to inspire interest and provide a positive outlook in STEM for kids and their families. The biannual event provides students grades 3–8 with an afternoon of demonstrations, experiments, and hands-on activities focused on physics and chemistry.

After an explosive opening demonstration, more than 70 students made their way between experiments in small groups, each participating in different experiments based on their age.

Read the rest of this story on Penn Today.

The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) is a non-profit organization serving as one of the world’s largest advocates for women in engineering and technology over the past six decades. With a mission to empower women to become the next leading engineers of the world, SWE is just one of many agents hoping to bring more diversity to the field. Our chapter of SWE at Penn focuses particularly on professional development, local educational outreach, and social activities across all general body members. In a new article from SWE Magazine, the organization collected social media responses from the public on the women engineers we should all know. With a diverse list of engineers from both the past and present, the article helps bring to light just how much even a handful of women contributed to the field of engineering already.

 

Chip Diagnostics receives the JPOD @ Philadelphia QuickFire Challenge Award

By Erica K. Brockmeier

Chip Diagnostics is the awardee of the JPOD @ Philadelphia QuickFire Challenge sponsored by Johnson & Johnson Innovation — JLABS. The Challenge was designed to accelerate healthcare innovation and commercialization within the greater Philadelphia area.

David Issadore (center) was announced as the awardee of the JPOD @ Philadelphia QuickFire Challenge by Katherine Merton (right), head of JLABS New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia, at last week’s BIO 2019 International convention. (Photo: Johnson & Johnson Innovation)

Chip Diagnostics is a Philadelphia-based device company founded in 2016 based on research from the lab of David Issadore, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. The startup combines microelectronics, microfluidics, and nanomaterials with the aim to better diagnose cancer. The company is developing technologies and digital assays for minimally-invasive early cancer detection and screening that can be done using mobile devices.

There has been a long interest in diagnosing cancer using blood tests by looking for proteins, cells, or DNA molecules shed by tumors, but these tests have not worked well for many cancers since the molecules shed tend to be either nonspecific or very rare.

Issadore’s group aims to target different particles called exosomes: Tiny particles shed by cells that contain similar proteins and RNA as the parent cancer cell. The problem, explains Issadore, is that because of the small size of the exosomes, conventional methods such as microscopy and flow cytometry wouldn’t work. “As an engineering lab, we saw an opportunity to build devices on a nanoscale that could specifically sort the cancer exosomes versus the background exosomes of other cells,” he explains.

After Issadore was approached by the IP group at PCI Ventures in the early stages of their research, Chip Diagnostics has since made huge strides as a company. Now, as the awardee of the JPOD @ Philadelphia QuickFire Challenge, Chip Diagnostics will receive $30,000 in grant funding to further develop the first-in-class, ultra-high-definition exosomal-based cancer diagnostic. The award also includes one year of residency at Pennovation Works as well as access to educational programs and mentoring provided by Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies global network of experts.

Originally posted on the Penn Engineering Medium Blog. Continue reading at Penn Today.

Replicating fetal bone growth process could help heal large bone defects

Joel Boerckel, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Bioengineering

To treat large gaps in long bones, like the femur, which result from bone tumor removal or a shattering trauma, researchers at Penn Medicine and the University of Illinois at Chicago developed a process that partially recreates the bone growth process that occurs before birth. A bone defect of more than two centimeters is considered substantial, and current successful healing rates stand at 50% or less, with failure often resulting in amputation. The team hopes that their method, which they’ve developed in rodent models to mimic the process of rapid fetal bone growth, can substantially improve success rates. Their findings are published in Science Translational Medicine. 

Watercolor- A watercolor image depicting the embryonic bone development process, endochondral ossification, featuring cartilage and bone. Credit: Joel Boerckel

“When bones are originally formed in the embryo, they’re first generated from cartilage, like a template,” says senior author Joel Boerckel, an assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery and bioengineering. “In order to regenerate bone within defects that otherwise won’t heal in grown people, we are seeking to recreate the embryonic bone development process.”

To do that, the researchers’ process begins with the delivery of specially engineered stem cells (called a condensation of mesenchymal cells) to the rodents’ bone defect, which sparks endochondral ossification, the specific term for embryonic bone development.

Read more at Penn Medicine News.

Week in BioE (June 14, 2019)

by Sophie Burkholder

Bio-inspiration Informs New Football Helmet Design from IUPUI Students

Art, design, biology, and engineering all interact with each other in a recent design for a football helmet from two students one of media arts and the other of engineering at the Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis. Directed by Lecturer in Media Arts and Science Zebulun Wood, M.S., and Associate Professor of Mechanical and Energy Engineering and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Andres Tovar, Ph.D., the students found inspiration in biological structures like a pomelo peel, nautilus shell, and woodpecker skull to create energy-absorbing helmet liners. The resulting design took these natural concussion-reducing structures and created compliant mechanism lattice-based liners the replace the foam traditionally placed in between two harder shells of a typical helmet. Their work not only exemplifies the benefits of bio-inspiration, but demonstrates the way that several different domains of study can overlap in the innovation of a new product.

Study of Mechanical Properties of Hyaluronic Acid Could Help Inform Current Debates Over Treatment Regulation for Osteoarthritis

Arthritis is an extremely common condition, especially in older patients, in which inflammation of the joints can cause high amounts of stiffness and pain. Osteoarthritis in particular is the result of the degradation of flexible tissue between the bones of a joint, which increases friction in joint motion. A common treatment of this form of arthritis is the injection of hyaluronic acid, which is meant to provide joint lubrication, and decreases this friction between bones. Recently, however, there has been a debate over hyaluronic acid’s classification by the FDA and whether it should remain based on the knowledge of the mechanical actions of the acid in treatment for osteoarthritis or if potential chemical action of the acid should be considered as well.

Because of limited ways of testing the mechanical properties of the acid, many researchers felt that there could be more to hyaluronic acid’s role in pain relief for arthritic patients. But Lawrence Bonassar, Ph.D., the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the Meinig School of Bioengineering of Cornell University, had another idea. With his lab, he created a custom-made tribometer to measure the coefficient of friction of a given lubricant by rubbing a piece of cartilage back and forth across a smooth glass plate. The research demonstrated that hyaluronic acid’s ability to reduce the coefficient of friction aligned with patients’ pain relief. Bonassar and his team hope that these results will demonstrate the heavy contribution of mechanical action that hyaluronic acid has in osteoarthritis treatment, and help bring an end to the debate over its FDA classification.

A New Way of Mapping the Heart Could Lead to Better Understanding of Contractile Activity

Though reduced contractions in certain regions of the heart can be an indicator of a certain condition, there is currently no way to directly measure contractile activity. This is why Cristian Linte, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Kate Gleason College of Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), hopes to create a map of the heart that can quantify contraction power. In collaboration with Niels Otani, Ph.D., an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics at RIT, Linte plans to use an $850,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the heart through both medical imaging and mechanical modeling. The group hopes that their approach will lead to not only a better way to diagnose certain heart conditions and diseases, but also open up understanding of active contraction, passive motion, and the stresses within the heart walls that underlie each.

Celebrity Cat Lil Bub Helps Penn and German Researchers Draw Public Attention to Genetics

Lil Bub’s unique appearance has garnered millions of online fans, and now, an avenue for researchers to talk about genetics. (Photo Courtesy of Mike Bridavsky)

In 2015, a group of curious researchers set out to sequence the genome of a celebrity cat named Lil Bub. They were hoping to understand the genetics behind Lil Bub’s extra toes and unique skeletal structure, which contribute to her heart-warming, kitten-like appearance. However, an equally important goal of their “LilBUBome” project was to invite the general public into the world of genetics.

Orsolya “Uschi” Symmons, a postdoctoral researcher at Penn in Associate Professor of Bioengineering Arjun Raj’s lab, led the research team along with Darío Lupiáñez at the Max-Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, and Daniel Ibrahim at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Geneticsin Berlin. Lil Bub’s owner, Mike Bridavsky, also contributed to the project.

Because of Lil Bub’s online fame, the project garnered attention from her fans and the media, all hoping to discover the secret to Lil Bub’s charm. As early as 2015, Gizmodo’s Kiona Smith-Strickland reported on the team’s intentions to sequence Lil Bub’s genome, and, since then, many have been awaiting the results of the LilBUBome.

To read more of this story, visit Penn Engineering’s Medium Blog.

People and Places

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded a six-year grant to Barnard College and Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science to support graduate education for women in engineering. The funding will go towards a new five-year program that enables Barnard students to attain both a B.A. and M.S. in one year after their traditional four years of undergraduate education. The program will offer M.S. degrees in chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, and industrial engineering and operations research, and is one of the first of its kind for women’s colleges.

We would like to congratulate Jean Paul Allain, Ph.D., on being named the first head of the new Ken and Mary Alice Lindquist Department of Nuclear Engineering at Penn State. Allain, who is currently a Professor and head of graduate programs in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering, conducts research in models of particle-surface interactions. In addition to being head of the new department at Penn State, Allain will also hold a position as a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the university.

We would also like to congratulate Andrew Douglas, Ph.D., on his appointment as the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Douglas currently holds the position of Vice Dean for Faculty at the Whiting School of Engineering, and has joint appointments in Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering. Douglas’s research at Hopkins focuses on mechanical properties and responses of compliant biological tissue and on the nonlinear mechanics of solids, with a focus on soft tissues and organs like the heart and tongue.

Dan Huh’s Organs-on-Chips and Organoids: Best of Both Worlds

By Lauren Salig

Dan Huh, the Wilf Family Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering, focuses his research on creating organs-on-chips: specially manufactured micro-devices with human cells that mimic the natural cellular processes of organs. Huh’s lab has engineered chips that approximate the functioning of placentas and lung disease, some of which were launched into space in May. Most recently, Huh published a review of organ-on-a-chip technology in the journal Science with graduate students Sunghee Estelle Park and Andrei Georgescu.

The June 2019 issue of Science is a special issue centered around the science of growing human organ models in the laboratory. Such in vitro organs are known as organoids; they grow and develop much like organs do in the body, as opposed to Huh’s organs-on-chips, in which cells from the relevant organs are grown within a fabricated device that imitates some of the organ’s functions and natural environment.

In a video accompanying the review article, Huh explains how organoid and organ-on-a-chip technologies differ and the advantages that accompany each approach:

Unlike Organ-on-a-Chip, which are heavily engineered man-made systems, organoids allow us to mimic the complex of the human body in a more natural way. So organoids represent a more realistic model, but they have problems because they develop in a highly variable fashion and it’s not very easy to control their environment. So we think that Organ-on-a-Chip Technology is a promising solution to many of these problems.

Read Huh, Park, and Georgescu’s review article at Science.

Originally posted on the Penn Engineering Medium blog.

César de la Fuente Named One of GEN’s ‘Top 10 Under 40’

Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez, PhD

César de la Fuente, assistant professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine and the Department of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been listed as one of the top 10 emerging professionals in his field under the age of 40 by GEN, a publication that covers genetic engineering and biotechnology news. The list recognizes up-and-coming leaders in the field of life sciences, both in industry and academia.

De la Fuente, who started at Penn earlier this year, was recognized because he “is pioneering the computerization of biological systems for the development of transformative biotechnologies designed to solve societal grand challenges such as antibiotic resistance.”

Read the full story at the Penn Engineering Medium blog.

BE Freshmen Present Their Final Projects

On May 8, 2019, first year Bioengineering students at the University of Pennsylvania gathered together for a marathon two-hour session in which no fewer than twenty-one groups presented the results of their final projects. These projects were the culmination of two semesters’ work in the courses BE 100 and 101, the department’s year-long introduction to Bioengineering. The topics were as diverse and creative as the students, ranging from medical devices and pediatric monitors to plant-care and diagnostic apps. They covered a variety of issues and needs, including tools to help the blind; lockboxes that incorporate breathalyzers (to stop you getting to your keys when intoxicated); mechanisms to sense epileptic seizures and monitor heart rate; and more. Each group had only four minutes to present the research, concept, and results of their project and give a brief demonstration.  In the end, the entire class voted and two clear winners emerged. In first place was Group R7 with Heart Guide, a heart-shaped ultrasonic collision device for the blind. Group R3 came in second place with Pulsar the Robot, an adorable pediatric heart rate monitor. The course’s instructor, Dr. Michael Rizk, ended by saying that all of the students should be very proud of their work and that these final projects and the skills learned in year one are the foundation on which the rest of their BE curriculum will be based.

Congratulations to all of our first years on their amazing work. Check out some photos of their impressive work below! For more information on the Penn Bioengineering Undergraduate Curriculum, visit the department website. Most BE student projects are created in the George H. Stephenson Foundation Education Laboratory and “Bio-MakerSpace”, the department’s primary teaching lab.