Biomedicine
The Sensor You Swallow
Thanks to the work of Assistant Professor Rabia Yazicigil (ECE) and her colleagues at MIT, Crohn’s and other bowel disease sufferers might someday skip the arduous annual endoscopy and instead swallow a pill-sized device that would literally shed light on what’s going on inside the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. MIT researchers previously developed a 1.5-inch capsule that contained […]
Synthetic gene sensors and effectors to redirect organoid development
Human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived organoids hold great promise for tissue engineering and personalized drug screening, but obtaining the desired multicellular organization and function from these systems is usually performed in an ad hoc fashion without forward design specification. Recently, we reported successful liver bud formation containing stromal cells, vascular tube-like structures and hematopoiesis-like […]
Gut Health Project Nets Professor Yazicigil Multi-Disciplinary Grant
CISE faculty affiliate Rabia Yazicigil (ECE) is leveraging her skill with hardware design and IoT security in a new direction, for the benefit of human health. Working in collaboration with Professor Tim Lu, of MIT’s EECS & Biological Engineering departments, Professor Yazicigil is developing a new miniaturized bio-electronic device which would make it possible to […]
Collaborative Research: A Workshop on Pre-emergence and the Predictions of Rare Events in Multiscale, Complex, Dynamical Systems
Although pandemics have threatened human civilization since ancient times, how to predict and prevent them remains one of the most pressing challenges, calling out for innovative insights and practices. Pandemics emerge through incidental ‘perfect storms’: molecular changes in pathogens, gradual trends in climate, subtle shifts in ecological interactions among potential hosts, and even individual behavioral […]
Advancing COVID-19 Drug Development via Network Analysis
CISE Faculty Affiliate Mark Crovella (Prof., CS, Bioinformatics) has teamed up with Simon Kasif (Prof., BME, CS, Bioinformatics) and other CS researchers from across the U.S. to advance COVID-19 drug development via Network Analysis. The researchers are co-developing a machine learning methodology to analyze viral and human protein-protein interaction networks. Through this work, the researchers […]
SemiSynBio-II: Hybrid Bio-Electronic Microfluidic Memory Arrays for Large Scale Testing and Remote Deployment
The ability to record events (“memory”) is a crucial part of many complex systems. Recording events allows these systems to modify their behavior based on previous interactions, report on their history, or communicate local information to a global community. Biological systems will benefit greatly from the creation of memory elements. Biological memories in bacterial or […]
A Soft Robotic Sleeve to Enable Safer and Easier Colonoscopy Procedures
Current flexible endoscopes have limited dexterity and sensor feedback, making navigation in colonoscopy a challenging task. These technical limitations make screening procedures poorly tolerated by patients, leading to low rates of compliance with screening guidelines and/or incomplete colonoscopy, that is associated with higher rates of interval proximal colon cancer. Alternative engineering solutions have been proposed […]
A Soft Robotic Sleeve to Enable Safer and Easier Colonoscopy Procedures
Current flexible endoscopes have limited dexterity and sensor feedback, making navigation in colonoscopy a challenging task. These technical limitations make screening procedures poorly tolerated by patients, leading to low rates of compliance with screening guidelines and/or incomplete colonoscopy, that is associated with higher rates of interval proximal colon cancer. Alternative engineering solutions have been proposed […]
ENG Interdisciplinary Team Wins NSF Grant to Create Smart Biosensors
Professors Douglas Densmore (ECE) and Rabia Yazicigil (ECE, CISE faculty affiliate) were awarded a $1.5M grant by the National Science Foundation for project entitled “SemiSynBio-II: Hybrid Bio-Electronic Microfluidic Memory Arrays for Large Scale Testing and Remote Deployment.” Professor Ahmad (Mo) Khalil and Professor Wilson Wong of BME are also Co-PIs on the grant. The award is for a three-year project aiming […]
GCR: Collaborative Research: Fine-grain generation of multiscale patterns in programmable organoids using microrobots
People with diseased or defective vital organs often need organ replacement to survive, but the availability of replacement organs is severely restricted by shortages of suitable tissue-matched donors and complexities such as postmortem organ deterioration and immunological rejection. These problems could be overcome by using high fidelity artificially-grown organs, but achieving that goal faces daunting […]