Wyss InstituteMicrofluidics – Wyss Institute

Human cervix modeled in microfluidic organ chip fills key women’s health gap

Jessica Leff — Fri, 31 May 2024 14:55:29 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Bacterial Vaginosis (BV) has been identified as one of the many unmet needs in women’s health and affects more than 25% of reproductive-aged women. It is caused by pathogenic bacteria that push the healthy microbiomes in the female vagina and cervix – the small gatekeeper canal that connects the uteruns and vagina – into a state of imbalance known as dysbiosis.

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Mice Don’t Menstruate: Reimagining Women’s Health Using Organ Chips with Dr. Donald Ingber

Jessica Leff — Wed, 08 May 2024 13:05:03 +0000

In this episode, host Sharon Kedar, Co-Founder of Northpond Ventures, is joined by Dr. Donald Ingber, Founding Director at Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Dr. Ingber’s commitment to following his passion has led him to countless medical and technological breakthroughs, including Organ Chip technology. These incredible chips recreate the structure and…

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AquaPulse: Portable Off-the-Grid Water Purification

admin — Wed, 01 May 2024 05:48:43 +0000

Globally, more than 2 billion people are forced to use a drinking water source that is contaminated with bacteria, parasites, and other pathogens, and an estimated 502,000 people die each year from diarrhea as a result of unsafe water. While a majority of the world has access to improved water sources, many are often contaminated; thus, a need for effective water treatment at the point of…

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Passive Directional Valve Technology: Towards More User-friendly and Accessible Microfluidic Devices for Diagnostic and Research Applications

Jessica Leff — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 17:42:46 +0000

Automated fluid-transporting and processing systems that function on the scale of micrometers (microfluidic systems) are becoming increasingly important for advancing various diagnostic, drug fabrication and delivery, and tissue engineering applications. Efforts to create smaller microfluidic devices with functionalities realized at larger scales rely heavily on valves to enable the regulated…

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Reimagining personalized medicine for each patient: Alican Ozkan

Jessica Leff — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 16:00:51 +0000

By Jessica Leff Listen to Alican tell his story. | Wyss Institute · Alican Ozkan Reimagine The World On the banks of the Aegean Sea sits Izmir, the third-most-populous city in Turkey. It’s geographically part of Asia, but culturally seems more at home in Europe. This is also the city where Alican Ozkan grew up. His parents, both chemical engineers, met at their university.

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Wyss Institute at Harvard University wins BARDA contract to leverage human Organ Chips to advance knowledge and drug discovery for broad range of health security threats

Jessica Leff — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 14:58:29 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), partnered with the Wyss Institute at Harvard University to support the Institute in advancing its human Organ Chip platform and drug discovery capabilities to…

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Human Lung Chip leveraged to faithfully model radiation-induced lung injury

Jessica Leff — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 16:58:18 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — The lung is one of the tissues most sensitive to radiation in the human body. People exposed to high radiation doses following nuclear incidents develop radiation-induced lung injury (RILI), which affects the function of many cell types in the lung, causing acute and sustained inflammation, and in the longer term, the thickening and scarring of lung tissue known…

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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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Bridging science, engineering, and art: from mechanobiology to Human Organs-on-Chips

Jessica Leff — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 17:49:31 +0000

In this Marsilius Lecture, Wyss Founding Director Don Ingber shares his personal path from a serendipitous experience in an undergraduate art class that led to his discovery of how living cells are constructed using “tensegrity” architecture and how this contributed to the birth of the field of Mechanobiology to his more recent work on human Organ Chips, which offer the possibility of replacing…

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How do we make safer and more effective drugs?

Jessica Leff — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:14:20 +0000

Wyss researchers are using an ever-growing number of human tissue-mimicking Organ Chips to improve and accelerate the drug development process for a wide number of unmet diseases – and understand what causes them to erupt. More recently, they added a human Vagina Chip and personalized Barrett’s esophagus Chip to their arsenal, and created in vitro models of inflammatory bowel disease in children…

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