Wyss in the News

Interview of Adam Marblestone : PhD Student at Harvard in biophysics 
http://www.adammarblestone.org/
Wyss Institute http://wyss.harvard.edu/

He is also the co-founder of BioBright an open platform to empower biomedecine 
http://www.biobright.org/team.html



Interview on august 15th in Boston

[HYPhDUS] Adam Marblestone " How to generate new types of collaboration in Science"

Donald E. Ingber, Founding Director of the Wyss Institute, Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, talks about his article "Mechanobiology and Developmental Control," which he wrote with Tadanori Mammoto and Akiko Mammoto for the 2013 Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. He discusses the role of physical and mechanical forces in the control of cell development and disease, which he says is as important as chemicals and genes.

Read the associated article online at http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-cellbio-101512-122340.

A Lecture in Cell and Developmental Biology: Mechanobiology and Developmental Control

An-Dinh Nguyen interviews Sriram Kosuri of UCLA on November 11, 2013. Dr. Kosuri will be a keynote speaker during the Engineering Genes, Vectors, Constructs and Clones conference at PepTalk 2014, January 13-17 in Palm Springs, CA.

Topics include the effect of codon usage on protein expression, the reliance on bacteria for biological engineering research, new tools like CRISPR for studying more eukaryotic systems, next-generation gene synthesis, work at the Wyss Institute and more.

PepTalk 2014 | Protein Expression and Biological Engineering

Ali Khademhosseini, MASc, Ph.D., is a Professor at Harvard-MIT's Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.  He also directs a satellite laboratory at the World Premier International-Advanced Institute for Materials Research at Tohoku University, Japan. At the Wyss Institute, his laboratory is developing bioinspired approaches for generating tissue-like structures as well as fabricating combinatorial biomaterials for regenerative medicine applications.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khademhosseini

Scientific Research and Publishing - Prof. Ali Khademhosseini

Music written for a short documentary film for the Mediated Matter's Mushtari piece.

From their Vimeo page:

How can we design relationships between the most primitive and the most sophisticated life forms? Can we design wearables embedded with synthetic microorganisms that can enhance and augment biological functionality? Can we design wearables that generate consumable energy while being exposed to the sun?
We explored these questions through the creation of Mushtari, a 3D printed wearable with 58 meters of internal fluid channels. The wearable is designed to function as a wearable microbial factory that uses synthetic microorganisms to convert sunlight into useful products for the wearer. It does so by engineering a symbiotic relationship between two bacteria: photosynthetic cyanobacteria and E. coli. The cyanobacteria convert sunlight to sucrose and E. coli convert sucrose to useful products, such as pigments, drugs, food, fuel and scents. This form of microorganismic symbiosis is known as co-culture. The wearer would be able to induce the engineered E. coli to begin producing a particular substance – for example a scent, a color pigment, or fuel.
The wearable was designed using generative growth algorithms. These computational form generation processes mimic biological growth by generating recursive forms over many iterations of the algorithm. Initial geometry and parameters defined by the algorithm inform the overall geometry, the local mesh geometry as well as variations in material property by altering the relative strength of relaxation, attraction and repulsion between mesh vertices. For Mushtari, the initial geometry and parameters created a single long channel that grew over numerous iterations into a wearable with 58 meters of inner channels varying in diameter from 1 mm to 2.5 cm. Transparency was graded regionally within the design to create areas of transparency, where cyanobacteria could receive light and photosynthesize.
Mushtari was 3D printed using the Connex3, a multimaterial 3D printer developed by Stratasys. Printing internal channels required an additional innovation. Typically, the Connex3 dispenses a gel-like support material into internal channels that cannot be cleared. To overcome this barrier, the Mediated Matter group collaborated with Stratasys to develop an experimental liquid-based support that could be dispensed into the channels during printing and easily cleared afterwards.
The project was led by Prof. Neri Oxman and the Mediated Matter Group in collaboration with Stratasys. Additional collaborators included Prof. Pamela Silver and Stephanie Hays of Harvard Medical School and Dr. James Weaver of the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Mediated Matter researchers include: Will Patrick, Christoph Bader, Dominik Kolb, Steven Keating and Sunanda Sharma.
Mushtari was designed as part of the Wanderers collection, an astrobiological exploration dedicated to the medieval astronomers who explored the worlds beyond by visiting the worlds within.


Mushtari

On Monday the London Design Museum announced it’s “Design of the Year” award, and for the first time it went to a Medical design. The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University’s “Organs-on-chips” was the overall winner. The chips mimic the functions of human organs for the purpose of medical testing. 

Guest: Tony Bahinski, Lead Senior Staff Scientist at Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

jonmccombshow

Join the Jon McComb Show 5:30a-10a (Mon-Fri) on CKNW AM980 or online at www.cknw.com.

Twitter:
www.twitter.com/jonmccomb980
www.twitter.com/CKNW

Facebook:
www.facebook.com/cknw980

Email:
jon@cknw.com

The Jon McComb Show Page:
www.cknw.com/the-jon-mccomb-show/

Science, Your Body, And Testing - The Jon McComb Show - June 25

Audio from sessions at the 2016 Convergence Forum, held in Chatham, Mass. on May 12 and 13, 2016. For more details, visit http://convergenceforum.com

Fireside Chat with George Church of the Wyss Institute

Why do we use mice for medical research? As I-Hub’s Caroline Lester found out, it all started with fancy mice.

For more innovative content, follow us:
twitter.com/IHubRadio
www.facebook.com/InnovationHubradio

4'33" - Discovery Download

The Modest Mouse: Why We Use Mice in Medicine

Robots - The Podcast for News and Views on Robotics

Soft Robotics Toolkit

In this HAA Alumni Education event, Dr. Neel Joshi and Dr. Anna Duraj-Thatte of Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences discussed the intersection between synthetic biology and materials science as an underexplored area with great potential to positively affect our daily lives, with applications ranging from manufacturing to medicine. Dr. Joshi outlined ways that his lab at the Wyss Institute is looking at reprogramming bacteria in a wide variety of purposes such as surface applications, healthcare, and even potential means of environmental cleanup. Dr. Duraj-Thatte reviewed the means that the bacteria she works with can be used for creating biofilms that can have rigid form and could be used to create synthetic biological building materials. Recorded on June 27th, 2017.

Biofilms: Reprogramming Bacteria to Improve Lives

Michael Super, PhD, of the Wyss Institute, shares his story of how the spread of infectious disease throughout South Africa and London inspired him to pursue human health and combat disease.

Protein Engineering: Editing Functionality

Produced for MIT Technology Review
by Kyanna Sutton and Susan Young

Cells grown on the Wyss Institute's organ-on-chip devices behave more like cells in the body. The devices could improve the speed and success of drug discovery and reduce animal testing.

See the audio slideshow:
http://www.technologyreview.com/demo/427992/building-an-organ-on-a-chip/

Building an Organ on a Chip

Harvard Medical School Professor of Systems Biology Pam Silver is engineering organisms that produce fuel and even food. Find out how she's working to build a sustainable future through synthetic biology. Plus, Nancy Keating, an HMS associate professor of health care policy, sheds light on one aspect of the debate over the rising costs of health care. Harvard Medical School Office of Communications and External Relations. Jun 23, 2011. Copyright 2012 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Episode 13: Building a sustainable future

A piece of music written for a documentary film about an installation at MIT's Media Lab.

From their Vimeo Page: (http://vimeo.com/67177328)

The Silk Pavilion explores the relationship between digital and biological fabrication on product and architectural scales.

The primary structure was created of 26 polygonal panels made of silk threads laid down by a CNC (Computer-Numerically Controlled) machine. Inspired by the silkworm’s ability to generate a 3D cocoon out of a single multi-property silk thread (1km in length), the overall geometry of the pavilion was created using an algorithm that assigns a single continuous thread across patches providing various degrees of density.

Overall density variation was informed by the silkworm itself deployed as a biological “printer” in the creation of a secondary structure. A swarm of 6,500 silkworms was positioned at the bottom rim of the scaffold spinning flat non-woven silk patches as they locally reinforced the gaps across CNC-deposited silk fibers. Following their pupation stage the silkworms were removed. Resulting moths can produce 1.5 million eggs with the potential of constructing up to 250 additional pavilions.

Affected by spatial and environmental conditions including geometrical density as well as variation in natural light and heat, the silkworms were found to migrate to darker and denser areas. Desired light effects informed variations in material organization across the surface area of the structure. A season-specific sun path diagram mapping solar trajectories in space dictated the location, size and density of apertures within the structure in order to lock-in rays of natural light entering the pavilion from South and East elevations. The central oculus is located against the East elevation and may be used as a sun-clock.

Parallel basic research explored the use of silkworms as entities that can “compute” material organization based on external performance criteria. Specifically, we explored the formation of non-woven fiber structures generated by the silkworms as a computational schema for determining shape and material optimization of fiber-based surface structures.

Research and Design by the Mediated Matter Research Group at the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with Prof. Fiorenzo Omenetto (TUFTS University) and Dr. James Weaver (WYSS Institute, Harvard University). Mediated Matter researchers include Markus Kayser, Jared Laucks, Carlos David Gonzalez Uribe, Jorge Duro-Royo and Neri Oxman (Director).


Silk Pavilion

A physicist decides that the best way to make progress on his robotics project is to go to Namibia to study termites.

Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: http://storycollider.org/

Justin Werfel is a research scientist at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. He received his PhD at MIT and did postdoctoral work at Harvard and the New England Complex Systems Institute. He works on topics including swarm robotics, evolutionary theory, DNA self-assembly, and cancer modeling, and recently published an invited book chapter about the ecology of Fraggle Rock. He's a two-time MassMouth Big Mouth Off finalist and Audience Choice winner.

Justin Werfel: Robotics lessons from termites

The Wyss Institute uses Nature's design principles to develop bioinspired technologies that will revolutionize medicine and create a more sustainable world.