wyss institute

There are roughly 120,000 people in the United States on waiting lists for live-saving organ transplants, with only about 30,000 transplants happening every year. To address this great challenge of organ shortages, a team at the Wyss Institute led by Core Faculty member Jennifer Lewis, Sc.D., is developing a method for 3D bioprinting organ tissues with requisite vasculature for eventual organ transplant. In this episode of Disruptive, Jennifer Lewis is joined by Wyss Institute Research Associate Mark Skylar-Scott, Ph.D., and former Wyss Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Kimberly Homan, Ph.D., to talk about the current status of their work, challenges they face, and the next steps in their path to 3D bioprint human organs.

In this episode of Disruptive, David Walt, Wyss Core Faculty member, discusses his lessons learned from founding successful biotech companies and how he incorporates translation-minded thinking early on into his current diagnostic research in his labs at the Wyss Institute and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Walt and collaborators are inventing new diagnostic tools to allow clinicians to better understand and treat some of the most pressing healthcare problems.

The deep ocean is the least explored environment on Earth, and scientists estimate that many thousands of species are yet to be encountered. Marine researchers depend on tools primarily developed for the military or the oil and gas industry to study and capture undersea organisms. Many of them are extremely fragile, some thousands of years old, and too often they are damaged or destroyed by equipment that is hard, bulky, and hard to control. In this episode of Disruptive, Rob Wood, a roboticist and Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute, and David Gruber, a marine biologist at Baruch College, discuss a chance encounter that led them to develop soft robotic tools that enable a new, non-invasive approach to interacting with deep ocean life.

Immunotherapy – treatment that uses the body’s own immune system to help fight disease – has groundbreaking and life-saving implications. In an effort to make immunotherapy more effective, Wyss Institute researches are developing new immuno-materials, which help modulate immune cells to treat or diagnose disease. In this episode of Disruptive, Dave Mooney, Wyss Core Faculty member; Kai Wucherpfennig, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Cancer and Immunology and Virology department chair; and Aileen Li, Wyss Institute and Mooney Lab postdoctoral fellow, discuss their collaboration developing an injectable cancer vaccine. Guests also discuss other immuno-material applications, which could treat infections, diabetes, and addiction.

Wyss Core Faculty member David Mooney presents a talk with Mary Mooney titled Seeing Is Believing: Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines as part of the ArtScience Talks @ Le Lab lecture series at Le Laboratoire, Cambridge. Marshaling a patient’s immune system to recognize and destroy cancerous cells is an exciting strategy to attack cancer, and this talk explores materials that engage the immune system through science and artistic representation. Mary K. Mooney is a Massachusetts artist who spent many years working as a designer in the apparel industry. David Mooney is the Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute. His laboratory designs biomaterials to make cell and protein therapies effective and practical approaches to treat disease.

Listen to Wyss Core Faculty member William Shih’s lecture on how custom molecular shapes can be designed using DNA building blocks and how these minuscule devices could have a profound impact on fields ranging from molecular biophysics to therapeutics to nano-optics for decades to come. Shih’s lecture is part of the ArtScience lecture series at Le Laboratoire in Cambridge, MA. ArtScience @ Le Lab is a free, biweekly evening seminar series organized for the general public in the magical “Honeycomb” of Le Laboratoire Cambridge and Café ArtScience. Artists, designers, scientists, chefs, engineers, perfumers — and more — talk about creativity and culture at the edges of art, science and design. For more information, please visit www.lelaboratoirecambridge.com or wyss.harvard.edu/events.

Biofilms are commonly known as the slime-producing bacterial communities sitting on stones in streams, dirty pipes and drains, or dental plaque. However, Wyss Core Faculty member Neel Joshi is putting to work the very properties that make biofilms effective nuisances or threats in our daily lives. In this episode of Disruptive, Joshi and postdoctoral fellow Anna Duraj-Thatte discuss the development of a novel protein engineering system called BIND, Biofilm-Integrated Nanofiber Display, which uses biofilms to help clean up polluted rivers, manufacture pharmaceutical products, and fabricate new textiles.

The rapid emergence of the Zika virus on the world stage calls for a detection system that is just as quick. In this episode of Disruptive, Wyss Core Faculty member and MIT professor Jim Collins and University of Toronto Assistant Professor Keith Pardee discuss how they developed a low cost, paper-based diagnostic platform that can rapidly detect the Zika virus. The full team, comprising of researchers from several institutions, also developed a workflow that will enable them to use this same platform to respond to future pandemics. In response to an emerging outbreak, a custom tailored diagnostic system could potentially be ready for use in the field within one week.

George Church: Responsibility, art & science of intentional extinction, de-extinction & aging (2/17/16) - Core Faculty from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University discuss how the arts and design are informing the frontiers of science. ArtScience @Le Lab is a free, biweekly evening seminar series organized for the general public in the magical "Honeycomb" of Le Lab Cambridge and Café ArtScience. Artists, designers, scientists, chefs, engineers, perfumers -- and more -- talk about creativity and culture at the edges of art, science and design. For more information, please visit http://www.lelaboratoirecambridge.com or http://wyss.harvard.edu.

In part 1 of the Bioinspired Robotics episode, Wyss Founding Core Faculty Member Radhika Nagpal discusses swarm collectives, as well as the challenges faced by women in the engineering and computer science fields. Our bodies — and all living systems — accomplish tasks far more sophisticated and dynamic than anything yet designed by humans. Many of the most advanced robots in use today are still far less sophisticated than ants that "self-organize" to build an ant hill, or termites that work together to build impressive, massive mounds in Africa. From insects in your backyard, to creatures in the sea, to what we see in the mirror, engineers and scientists at the Wyss Institute are drawing inspiration from nature to design whole new classes of smart swarm, soft, wearable and popup robotic devices. In this three part episode, Wyss Institute Core Faculty Members Radhika Nagpal, Robert Wood and Conor Walsh discuss the high-impact benefits of their bioinspired robotic work, as well as what drove them to this cutting-edge field.

What sorts of breakthroughs are possible by modifying an organism’s genome – something researchers are now able to do ever more cheaply and efficiently? Researchers around the world are already able to program microbes to treat waste water, generate electricity, manufacture jet fuel, create hemoglobin, and fabricate new drugs. What sounds like science fiction to most of us might be a reality in our lifetimes: the ability to build diagnostic tools that live within our bodies, or find ways to eradicate malaria from mosquito lines, or possibly even to make genetic improvements in humans that are passed down to future generations. Wyss Institute Founding Core Faculty Pam Silver and George Church discuss the high-impact benefits of their synthetic biology work, as well as how they manage the potential of unintended consequences.