The Department of Bioengineering is excited to announce that Dr. Derfogail Delcassian will be joining our faculty as an Assistant Professor in January 2021.  Delcassian received her Ph.D. in the Department of Materials, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London, where she performed research under the mentorship of Dr. Iain Dunlop and Professor Molly Stevens. After […]

Professor Liana Lareau is using genome sequencing to study how COVID-19 is spreading around the Bay Area.

The bioengineering and Bay Area communities are mourning the loss of Dr. Bert Lubin, former president and CEO of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland. Lubin was a tireless advocate for bringing the power of engineering to bear on human health, a great champion of the Berkeley-UCSF partnership, and a huge contributor to our campus. He was also a warm and generous person and we are grateful to have known him. The family has asked that donations be made in his name to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Center of Excellence for Immigrant Child and Wellbeing and/or the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Center for Child and Community Health.

Early in March, a team of 50 scientists in California did what the FDA had not: they started testing the antibody tests.

Prof Liana Lareau and collaborator Stacia Wyman have received one of ten Excellence in Research Awards from the Laboratory for Genomics Research (LGR), a collaboration between UC Berkeley/UCSF (IGI) and GlaxoSmithKline. Their project will explore rapid, low-cost, high-throughput viral and metagenome sequencing of COVID-19 patient samples for outbreak surveillance.

Bioengineering graduate student Gabriela Lomeli interviewed five scientists, including four from Professor Amy Herr's lab, who have pivoted their research during COVID-19 to write decontamination guidelines for personal protective equipment.

Congratulations Professor Teresa Head-Gordon, who has just been selected for one of the new C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute's awards for research projects to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Head-Gordon has been funded for her project, "Scoring Drugs: Small Molecule Drug Discovery for COVID-19 Using Physics-Inspired Machine Learning."

Up to 20% of urinary tract infections, caused by a resistant microbe known as ESBL-producing bacteria, don’t respond to conventional antibiotics. Professor Niren Murthy and colleagues have developed a 30-minute, low-tech test, called DETECT, to identify ESBL-producing bacteria on a patient’s first visit to the doctor.

New research from Professor Irina Conboy found that diluting the blood plasma of old mice has the same or stronger rejuvenation effects on the brain, liver and muscle as surgical pairing with young mice or young blood exchange. This discovery shifts the dominant model of rejuvenation away from young blood and toward the benefits of removing age-elevated, and potentially harmful, factors in old blood.

The Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI) has launched an open-source website that will allow biomolecular scientists from around the world to share computer-aided drug-testing simulations targeting the protein at the center of COVID-19. Under the leadership of MolSSI co-director Teresa Head-Gordon, a MolSSI team started work on the COVID-19 website in April, after scores of scientists began discussing ways to share simulation modeling data they had on the coronavirus.

Congratulations to the MEng teams who have won end-of-year capstone awards! The Biomimetic Hydrogels to Enhance Tissue Modelling of Brain Cancer team of Jonathan Evans and Julia Lanoha won the Technical Leadership Capstone Award, the Precision Freezing 3D Bioprinter for Large Scale Tissue Engineering team of Alex Wolcott [BIOE], Martin Banet-Rivet [ME], Pablo Amor [ME] and Ruobin Liu [ME], and the Novel Implant for Regulating Excessive Eye Pressure in Glaucoma Patients team of Charit Mehta [ME], Aishwarya Pamula [BIOE], Sheila Sharifzad [BIOE], won the MEng Alumni Award for the Most Innovative Project.

Professors Patrick Hsu and Niren Murthy are featured with the emergency funding they have received for urgent COVID-19 research. Hsu is working to apply new CRISPR tools he has discovered to a faster and better diagnosis of COVID-19 infection and potentially new therapeutics, while Murthy is looking for weaknesses in the SARS-CoV-2 proteins that could be leveraged by a small molecule, hopefully knocking out the virus.

Please join us in celebrating all of our 2020 graduates, who have showed so much dedication and perseverance getting through this wild year. We are so proud of all of you!

Congratulations to our 2020 undergraduate award winners: Eric Hu, Departmental Citation, Connor Tou and Hasan Ahmad, Chair’s Award in Bioengineering, and Elizabeth Zhang, Bioengineering Service Award. Outstanding work by all! The Departmental Citation This is long-standing award is given to one bioengineering major for their exceptional academic performance, in addition to impressive achievements in other […]

Sanjay Kumar’s lab has identified a mechanism used by tumor cells to adhere to and migrate through a nanoporous, three-dimensional extracellular matrix characteristic of brain tissue. In this mechanism, cells engage hyaluronic acid, a key component within the brain matrix, by assembling “microtentacles” that can extend tens of micrometers from the cell body and adhere […]

Professor Hsu appeared on CNN Tonight April 29 to explain the results of his work on COVID-19 antibody test validation with the Covid Testing Project.

Professor Dan Fletcher's lab is partnering with researchers at the Gladstone Institutes to develop a fast, inexpensive field test for COVID-19 that uses mobile phone technology and RNA analysis.

Just published in Science Advances, bioengineers have developed more new tools for understanding mammalian development. As explained by first author and recent PhD Elisabet Rosàs-Canyelles, "During the very first days of life a fertilized egg, a zygote, grows from a single cell into a multi-cellular embryo, while the cells that make up the embryo begin to differentiate into specialized cells that will compose the different tissues and organs of the body. To help understand how the complex process of differentiation occurs, we developed a multi-modal microfluidic device capable of measuring two important molecules- mRNA molecules, which act as instructions for the cell, and proteins, which are like the actuators that carry out the functions of the cell- at the resolution of a single embryos."

A consortium of national labs has formed five teams to conduct R&D to help improve the nation’s COVID-19 testing capabilities. Professor Adam Arkin leads a team developing computational approaches to develop and optimize COVID-19 diagnostic tests, detection methods, and other applications.

Prof. Hsu is one of the leaders of a round-the-clock effort to validate the accuracy of 14 of the many COVID-19 antibody test kits now on the market. Although the results are promising, they are also complex and show much room for improvement, especially in the area of false positives. The team will continue to validate the increasing variety of tests to inform medical testing procedures. Their pre-publish results are available online.