Tag: Bioengineering
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Nation & World
Fruit fly bouts show gender-specific styles
Fighting like a girl or fighting like a boy is hardwired into fruit fly neurons, according to a study in the Nov. 19 Nature Neuroscience advance online publication by a…
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Nation & World
Research reveals how stem cells build a heart
Master cells that give rise to the three main cell types in a human heart have been discovered by Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists working independently at two Harvard-affiliated hospitals.…
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Nation & World
Growth of spinal nerves is improved
Nerves that control the highest level of voluntary movements have been isolated and secrets of their growth revealed for the first time. During development, these nerves extend themselves from the…
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Nation & World
Researchers discover mechanism that regulates bone growth
Harvard researchers have identified a protein that helps regulate bone growth and may lead to new drug targets to fight osteoporosis, the bone loss condition that the National Institutes of…
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Nation & World
HMS researchers isolate nerve growth compound
Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston have isolated a molecule that stimulates the regrowth of damaged adult nerve fibers, providing new hope for those suffering from nerve…
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Nation & World
Engineering Idol
The winner of this year’s ES100-100hf senior engineering design project course competition aimed straight for the heart by recording an electrical “ballad.” The runners-up (a tie for second), meanwhile, worked…
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Nation & World
Seven children doing well with laboratory-grown organs
Three boys and four girls treated at Children’s Hospital Boston are the first people in the world to receive laboratory-grown organs. The children, aged 4 to 19, received bladders grown…
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Nation & World
Researchers create pigs that produce omega-3 fatty acids
Researchers report they have created pigs that produce omega -3 fatty acids, which are known to improve heart function and help reduce the risks for heart disease, representing the first…
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Nation & World
Transplanted cells regenerate muscles
Biological engineering, which once excited the medical community, has been fraught with the difficulties of keeping transplanted cells alive and getting them to integrate with a host’s body. Researchers at…
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Nation & World
Synthetic molecule blocks exit from cell organelle
The ubiquitous, small GTPases are a family of signal transduction molecules that play crucial roles in numerous biological processes, including cell motility and division. Though scientists have eyed these proteins…
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Nation & World
Schepens scientists regenerate optic nerve for the first time
In earlier research, Dr. Dong Feng Chen, lead author of the study, assistant scientist at Schepens Eye Research Institute and an assistant professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical school, and…
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Nation & World
Scientists discover “master switch” that triggers insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes
“We zeroed in on a factor called NF-kB,” said principal investigator Steven E. Shoelson, M.D., Ph.D., Helen and Morton Adler Chair and head of the Section on Cellular and Molecular…
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Nation & World
Sperm cells made in lab can fertilize eggs
Scientists injected laboratory-created sperm into eggs, and the resulting embryos grew to the point where they would normally be implanted into a womb. The experiment was done with mouse stem…
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Nation & World
Scientists create lab model of human pancreatic cancer
Currently, nearly all the 30,000 cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed annually are fatal within a matter of months because they are too advanced to remove surgically by the time they…
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Nation & World
War stories of a soldier/scientist
Kevin Kit Parker’s 9 mm pistol lay on the table next to the laptop as he typed. He was stripped to the waist in the 130-degree heat, sweating and writing while he waited for a flight home from Afghanistan.
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Nation & World
Seeing the hole truth
Folding is a big deal in biology. It not only changes a molecule’s shape but its function. Take the proteins made by genes. Folded one way, they can activate processes…
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Nation & World
Researchers regenerate zebrafish heart muscle
A research team led by Mark T. Keating showed that zebrafish can regenerate heart muscle within two months after a severe injury. The team, from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute…
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Nation & World
Combined kidney and bone marrow transplantation allows patients to discontinue anti-rejection drugs
Megan Sykes, head of the bone marrow transplantation section of the Massachusetts Transplantation Biology Research Center and professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, recently described how infusing kidney transplant…
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Nation & World
Medical student engineers protein to dissolve blood clots
Heart attacks and strokes are caused by blood clots called thrombi that block blood flow in the arteries of the heart and of the brain. Body tissues become deprived of…
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Nation & World
Researchers use therapeutic cloning to create functional tissue in cows
In a study, researchers obtained cow oocytes (donor eggs from cow ovaries) and removed and discarded the nuclei, which contain the cells’ genetic material, leaving behind just the shell. A…
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Nation & World
New tool speeds study of mammalian protein function
A new technology developed by Harvard Medical School researchers in the laboratory of Yang Shi, associate professor of pathology, extends the range of possibilities of selective interference of gene expression…
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Nation & World
Study finds embryonic stem cells can repair heart muscle
Heart failure develops when the heart stops pumping effectively due to the destruction of muscle cells, known as cardiomyocytes. Damage inflicted during a heart attack causes massive loss of cardiomyocytes,…
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Nation & World
Amniotic cells may be source of new tissue
Babies born with congenital defects often require surgery. Surgeons face a problem, however — in adults, tissue for repair is borrowed from other areas of the body, but babies don’t…
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Nation & World
Inflammatory villain turns do-gooder
Many drugs try to tame inflammation by inhibiting molecular events occurring at the beginning of the body’s own immune response. But that may thwart the body’s attempt to heal. A…
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Nation & World
Growth factor seen to reverse loss of muscle from aging, disease
Previous work by Nadia Rosenthal of Harvard Medical School and her colleagues showed that injection of a virus directing the expression of a molecule known as insulin-like growth factor I…
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Nation & World
Tissue engineering produces an artificial gland
Your thymus is a walnut-sized gland that sits just above your heart. The master gland of the immune system, one of the thymus’ chief functions is to produce T lymphocytes,…
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Nation & World
Potent cancer drugs made from sea squirts
In May 2000, researchers at Harvard University announced that they had succeeded in synthesizing a complex anti-tumor drug that is more powerful than any other known drug. The drug, ecteinascidin,…
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Nation & World
Birth of new brain cells induced in birds
Stem cells that are naturally present in the brains of finches were induced to replace lost cells and restore the birds’ ability to sing their distinctive song. “Our results represent…
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Nation & World
Researchers switch cancer off and on in mice
An antibiotic added to the drinking water of mice stops the progress of leukemia. Harvard researcher Claudia Huettner cannot do the same thing in humans, unfortunately, but through such experiments…