Three BU Research Teams Win First Kilachand Fund Awards

$100 million fund will continue to honor cutting-edge researchers in life sciences and engineering By Chuck Leddy Originally featured on The Brink In 2018, BU trustee Rajen Kilachand (Questrom’74, Hon.’14) made the largest gift in Boston University’s history: $115 million. From that gift, $100 million established an endowment, the Rajen Kilachand Fund for Integrated Life […]

BU Biomedical Engineer Ed Damiano Raises $126 Million for Bionic Pancreas

Investors bank on socially minded public benefit corporation and its medical device for people with type 1 diabetes Ed Damiano’s journey to help the millions of people who suffer from type 1 diabetes—which began nearly 20 years ago, when his infant son, David, was diagnosed with the disease—took a huge leap forward this week. The […]

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.