All living things require proteins, members of a vast family of molecules that nature "makes to order" according to the blueprints in DNA.
Through the natural process of evolution, DNA mutations generate new or more effective proteins. Humans have found so many alternative uses for these molecules – as foods, industrial enzymes, anti-cancer drugs – that scientists are eager to better understand how to engineer protein variants designed for specific uses.
Ever since Stanford Engineering and Stanford Medicine joined together to create the Bioengineering Department in 2002, the ultimate plan was to begin with a Master’s and PhD program and eventually add an undergraduate major.
The Faculty Senate brought this plan to fruition during the last academic year by approving Bioengineering an undergraduate major in perpetuity. Faculty Senate President Russell Berman described the new major as a milestone in Stanford’s academic life.
Stanford researchers have ripped the guts out of a virus and totally redesigned its core to repurpose its infectious capabilities into a safe vehicle for delivering vaccines and therapies directly where they are needed.
The study reported today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences breathes new life into the field of targeted delivery, the ongoing effort to fashion treatments that affect diseased areas but leave healthy tissue alone.
Amid growing concern about sports-related concussions, some athletes are beginning to wear head-mounted sensors that gauge the speed and force of impacts they receive during competition. Scientists are still working on identifying baseline parameters for injury, but research suggests that certain skull motions can contribute to concussions, and constant in-game monitoring of those motions promises to help limit injuries.
A miniature device that combines optogenetics – using light to control the activity of the brain – with a newly developed technique for wirelessly powering implanted devices is the first fully internal method of delivering optogenetics.
The device dramatically expands the scope of research that can be carried out through optogenetics to include experiments involving mice in enclosed spaces or interacting freely with other animals. The work is published in the Aug. 17 edition of Nature Methods.
When modern football helmets were introduced, they all but eliminated traumatic skull fractures caused by blunt force impacts. Mounting evidence, however, suggests that concussions are caused by a different type of head motion, namely brain and skull rotation.
Now, a group of Stanford engineers has produced a collection of results that suggest that current helmet-testing equipment and techniques are not optimized for evaluating these additional injury-causing elements.
Computers and water typically don't mix, but in Manu Prakash's lab, the two are one and the same. Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, and his students have built a synchronous computer that operates using the unique physics of moving water droplets.
In the 1950s, computers were giant machines that filled buildings and served a variety of arcane functions. Today they fit into our pockets or backpacks, and help us work, communicate and play.
"Biotechnology today is very similar to where computing technology used to be," said Ingmar Riedel-Kruse, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford.
