Wyss InstituteToxicology – Wyss Institute

AminoX: Making Better Protein Drugs, Quicker and Cheaper

Jessica Leff — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 13:56:00 +0000

A synthetic biology and advanced chemistry platform that efficiently incorporates non-standard amino acids by hacking the ubiquitous protein synthesis process. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University…

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AminoX: Making Better Protein Drugs, Quicker and Cheaper

Jessica Leff — Wed, 01 May 2024 15:40:43 +0000

Protein drugs often offer the most effective way to treat a variety of medical illnesses and conditions. However, many proteins in their naturally occurring forms make poor drugs – they can cause toxicities that force patients to discontinue treatment, and they often have such short half-lives that patients would need to receive a constant infusion of them to see a therapeutic effect. Recently…

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Paper-Based Diagnostics

admin — Wed, 01 May 2024 00:34:41 +0000

With the imminent threat of new pandemics and frequent disease outbreaks exemplified by the recent Ebola and Zika epidemics, there is a growing need for low-cost, easily deployable and simple-to-use diagnostic tools. The Wyss Institute has developed paper-based synthetic gene networks as a next generation diagnostic technology for use in global healthcare crises and patient care. This new type of…

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Coming together to engineer new treatments for serious diseases

Jessica Leff — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 17:14:48 +0000

By Jessica Leff Immunotherapy is often seen as the next frontier in cancer treatment, offering many benefits over traditional therapies like radiation and chemotherapy. Unfortunately, immunotherapy patients frequently experience painful side effects because antibodies affect healthy tissues along with the tumor. What if these drugs could more accurately target cancer cells…

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Adding immunity to human kidney-on-a-chip advances cancer drug testing

Seth Kroll — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 14:57:37 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (Boston) — A growing repertoire of cell and molecule-based immunotherapies is offering patients with indomitable cancers new hope by mobilizing their immune systems against tumor cells. An emerging class of such immunotherapeutics, known as T cell bispecific antibodies (TCBs), are of growing importance with several TCBs that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)…

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Successfully predicting bone marrow failure caused by drugs, radiation, and disease

Jessica Leff — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 15:58:50 +0000

By Lindsay Brownell (BOSTON) — Your bone marrow produces about 300 billion new blood cells every single day – roughly equivalent to the number of stars thought to be in the Milky Way. Being so prolific, however, comes with a price: medical interventions that aim to disrupt cell growth and differentiation, such as chemotherapies and radiation, hit the bone marrow extremely hard…

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Liver-Chip Identifies Distinct Drug Toxicities in Human, Rat, and Dog Models

Jessica Leff — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 18:58:47 +0000

By Lindsay Brownell (BOSTON) — Among the numerous microengineered Organ-on-a-Chip (Organ Chip) models developed at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, the Liver Chip is of special interest to a number of industries because the real-time analysis of complex biochemical interactions could greatly enhance the liver toxicity testing that is ubiquitous in the development of drugs, foods…

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FcMBL: Broad-Spectrum Pathogen Capture for Infectious Disease Diagnosis and Therapy

admin — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 00:35:45 +0000

Infectious diseases have plagued humanity for millennia, and the pathogens that infect and sicken humans are constantly evolving. Severe infections can cause sepsis, a life-threatening condition in which a patient’s immune system overreacts to the infection. The body starts to attack itself, which can lead to tissue damage, organ failure, and death. Sepsis is very common – one out of every three…

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Organ Chips Featured at Barbican Centre in London

Jessica Leff — Thu, 16 May 2019 12:58:43 +0000

By Lindsay Brownell (BOSTON) — Today, a new exhibit called AI: More than Human opens at the Barbican Centre in London, and aims to tell the rapidly developing story of artificial intelligence via a survey of today’s cutting-edge creative and scientific developments that are questioning what it means to be human. Among the projects featured in the exhibit are two human Organ Chips that were…

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Renal reabsorption in living devices

Jessica Leff — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 19:57:05 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) — Every day our kidneys tackle the daunting task of continuously cleaning our blood to prevent waste, salt and excess fluid from building up inside our bodies. To achieve this, the kidneys’ approximately one million filtration units (glomeruli) first remove both waste products and precious nutrients from the blood stream…

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