Bioengineering – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Jun 21
2021

NASA inches closer to printing artificial organs in space

In America, at least 17 people a day die waiting for an organ transplant. But instead of waiting for a donor to die, what if we could someday grow our own organs?

Last week, six years after NASA announced its Vascular Tissue Challenge, a competition designed to accelerate research that could someday lead to artificial organs, the agency named two winning teams. The challenge required teams to create thick, vascularized human organ tissue that could survive for 30 days.

The two teams, named Winston and WFIRM, both from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, used different 3D-printing techniques to create lab-grown liver tissue that would satisfy all of NASA’s requirements and maintain their function.

“We did take two different approaches because when you look at tissues and vascularity, you look at the body doing two main things,” says Anthony Atala, team leader for WFIRM and director of the institute.

The two approaches differ in the way vascularization—how blood vessels form inside the body—is achieved. One used tubular structures and the other spongy tissue structures to help deliver cell nutrients and remove waste. According to Atala, the challenge represented a hallmark for bioengineering because the liver, the largest internal organ in the body, is one of the most complex tissues to replicate due to the high number of functions it performs.

Researchers used 3D-printing to create human liver tissue that could soon be tested on the International Space Station.

Continue reading “NASA inches closer to printing artificial organs in space” | >

Jun 17
2021

A Clever Robot Spies on Creatures in the Oceans Twilight Zone

But now a spy swims among them: Mesobot. Today in the journal Science Robotics, a team of engineers and oceanographers describes how they got a new autonomous underwater vehicle to lock onto movements of organisms and follow them around the ocean’s “twilight zone,” a chronically understudied band between 650 feet and 3200 feet deep, which scientists also refer to as mid-water. Thanks to some clever engineering, the researchers did so without flustering these highly sensitive animals, making Mesobot a groundbreaking new tool for oceanographers.

“It’s super cool from an engineering standpoint,” says Northeastern University roboticist Hanumant Singh, who develops ocean robots but wasn’t involved in this research. “It’s really an amazing piece of work, in terms of looking at an area that’s unexplored in the ocean.”

Mesobot looks like a giant yellow-and-black AirPods case, only it’s rather more waterproof and weighs 550 pounds. It can operate with a fiber-optic tether attached to a research vessel at the surface, or it can swim around freely.

Jun 16
2021

Synthetic protein lattices explained

Check out my short video in which I explain some super exciting research in the area of nanotechnology: de novo protein lattices! I specifically discuss a journal article by Ben-Sasson et al. titled “Design of biologically active binary protein 2D materials”.

Here, I explain an exciting nanotechnology paper “Design of biologically active binary protein 2D materials” (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-03120-8).

Though I am not involved in this particular research myself, I have worked in adjacent areas such as de novo engineering of aggregating antimicrobial peptides, synthetic biology, nanotechnology-based tools for neuroscience, and gene therapy. I am endlessly fascinated by this kind of computationally driven de novo protein design and would love to incorporate it in my own research at some point in the future.

I am a PhD candidate at Washington University in St. Louis and the CTO of the startup company Conduit Computing. I am also a published science fiction writer and a futurist. To learn more about me, check out my website: https://logancollinsblog.com/.

Jun 16
2021

CRISPR Test Uses Cell Phone Camera to Detect SARS-CoV-2

Circa 2020

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a rapid test for SARS-CoV-2 that uses an enzyme to cleave viral RNA, initiating a fluorescent signal that can be detected using a smartphone camera, and which can provide a quantitative measurement of the level of viral particles in the sample. The test produce a result in as little as 30 minutes and does not require bulky or expensive laboratory equipment.

Rapid testing is key to measuring and stopping the spread of COVID-19, but current tests, such as PCR, are time consuming and require expensive laboratory equipment, creating a bottleneck in obtaining results. Researchers have been developing alternatives, and this latest technology was rapidly repurposed when the pandemic began. Originally intended to detect HIV in blood samples, the Berkeley researchers have pivoted to allow the device to detect SARS-CoV-2 in nasal swab samples.

The test relies on CRISPR-Cas, originally developed as a gene editing technology. When a pre-programmed Cas13 enzyme is added to the sample, it can cleave RNA sequences from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This results in other nearby sequences being cleaved also, including a probe that releases fluorescent light when cleaved. The device uses a laser to excite this fluorescence and a smartphone camera can then detect the light, providing a quantitative measurement of the viral particles present in the sample.

Jun 15
2021

Exoskeleton | Ballistic Helmet | Military Suits

✅ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pro_robots.

You are on the Pro Robot channel and today we are going to talk about the soldiers of the future. Exoskeletons, ballistic helmets, military suits, chips and more are already being introduced into the armaments of different countries. In this issue we will find out what the super-soldier of the future will be like and what developments are being conducted in the military industry. Watch the video to the end and write your opinion in the comments: will robots replace humans in military service?

0:00 In this video.
0:30 Combat glasses.
2:26 Devtac Ronin Kevlar ballistic helmet.
3:00 STILE smart fabric.
3:42 Stealth Cloak.
4:10 Future Soldier System Full Suit.
5:15 Sotnik Suit.
5:55 Exoskeleton Military.
6:32 PowerWalk current generator exoskeletons.
7:00 Human Universal Load Carrier exoskeleton with hydraulic drive.
7:24 A Flying Suit for Military.
7:48 Jetpack.
8:09 Invasive chips and genetic engineering.
9:02 Man-Made Lightning.

Heart on a chip: Micro-nanofabrication and microfluidics steering the future of cardiac tissue engineering

Circa 2019

The evolution of micro and nanofabrication approaches significantly spurred the advancements of cardiac tissue engineering over the last decades. Engineering in the micro and nanoscale allows for the rebuilding of heart tissues using cardiomyocytes. The breakthrough of human induced pluripotent stem cells expanded this field rendering the development of human tissues from adult cells possible, thus avoiding the ethical issues of the usage of embryonic stem cells but also creating patient-specific human engineered tissues. In the case of the heart, the combination of cardiomyocytes derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells and micro/nano engineering devices gave rise to new therapeutic approaches of cardiac diseases. In this review, we survey the micro and nanofabrication methods used for cardiac tissue engineering, ranging from clean room-based patterning (such as photolithography and plasma etching) to electrospinning and additive manufacturing. Subsequently, we report on the main approaches of microfluidics for cardiac culture systems, the so-called “Heart on a Chip”, and we assess their efficacy for future development of cardiac disease modeling and drug screening platforms.

Jun 14
2021

Scientists Grew Human Cells in Monkey Embryos, and Yes, Its an Ethical Minefield

The way the team made the human–monkey embryo is similar to previous attempts at half-human chimeras.

Here’s how it goes. They used de-programmed, or “reverted,” human stem cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These cells often start from skin cells, and are chemically treated to revert to the stem cell stage, gaining back the superpower to grow into almost any type of cell: heart, lung, brain…you get the idea. The next step is preparing the monkey component, a fertilized and healthy monkey egg that develops for six days in a Petri dish. By this point, the embryo is ready for implantation into the uterus, which kicks off the whole development process.

This is where the chimera jab comes in. Using a tiny needle, the team injected each embryo with 25 human cells, and babied them for another day. “Until recently the experiment would have ended there,” wrote Drs. Hank Greely and Nita Farahany, two prominent bioethicists who wrote an accompanying expert take, but were not involved in the study.

Jun 11
2021

New research in protein sequencing poised to transform medicine

While DNA provides the genetic recipe book for biological form and function, it is the job of the body’s proteins to carry out the complex commands dictated by DNA’s genetic code.

Stuart Lindsay, a researcher at the Biodesign Institute at ASU, has been at the forefront of efforts to improve rapid DNA sequencing and has more recently applied his talents to explore the much thornier problem of sequencing protein molecules, one molecule at a time.

In a new overview article, Lindsay’s efforts are described along with those of international colleagues, who are applying a variety of innovative strategies for protein sequencing at the single-cell, and even single-molecule level.

Jun 10
2021

Researchers create self-sustaining, intelligent, electronic microsystems from green material

A research team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has created an electronic microsystem that can intelligently respond to information inputs without any external energy input, much like a self-autonomous living organism. The microsystem is constructed from a novel type of electronics that can process ultralow electronic signals and incorporates a device that can generate electricity “out of thin air” from the ambient environment.

The groundbreaking research was published June 7 in the journal Nature Communications.

Jun Yao, an assistant professor in the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and an adjunct professor in biomedical engineering, led the research with his longtime collaborator, Derek R. Lovley, a Distinguished Professor in microbiology.

Jun 10
2021

Latest tests on 6G return surprising results

Imagine you’re a fisherman living by a lake with a rowboat. Every day, you row out on the calm waters and life is good. But then your family grows, and you need more fish, so you go to the nearby river. Then, you realize you go farther and faster on the river. You can’t take your little rowboat out there—it’s not built for those currents. So, you learn everything you can about how rivers work and build a better boat. Life is good again…until you realize you need to go farther still, out on the ocean. But ocean rules are nothing like river rules. Now you have to learn how ocean currents work, and then design something even more advanced that can handle that new space.

Communication frequencies are just like those water currents. And the boats are just like the tools we build to communicate. The challenge is twofold: learning enough about the nature of each frequency and then engineering novel devices that will work within them. In a recent paper published in Proceedings of the IEEE, the flagship publication of the largest engineering society in the world, one USC Viterbi School of Engineering researcher has done just that for the next generation of cellular networks—6G.

Andy Molisch, professor of electrical and computer engineering at USC Viterbi and the holder of the Solomon Golomb—Andrew and Erna Viterbi Chair, together with colleagues from Lund University in Sweden, New Zealand Telecom, and King’s College London, explained that we have more options for communications at 6G frequency than previously thought. Think of it as something like early explorers suddenly discovering the gulf stream.