Stanford University will name a new home for bioengineering and chemical engineering in recognition of gifts from university trustee Kavitark "Ram" Shriram and his wife, Vidjealatchoumy "Vijay" Shriram. The couple have provided $57 million in support for the new Shriram Center for Bioengineering & Chemical Engineering, the fourth and final building in the university's new Science and Engineering Quad. The Shrirams also will endow the departmental chair in the Department of Bioengineering, bringing their total philanthropic support in this area to $61 million.
Stanford University researchers have devised a noninvasive way to detect heart-transplant rejection weeks or months earlier than previously possible. The test, which relies on the detection of increasing amounts of the donor’s DNA in the blood of the recipient, does not require the removal of any heart tissue.
The debilitating effects of repeated concussions on NFL players have been well documented. What scientists still don't clearly know is whether those injuries are the result of thousands of tiny impacts or singular crushing blows to the brain.
A group of bioengineers at Stanford is working to understand the head trauma that footballers experience during a game and is making steps toward developing technology that reports dangerous hits in real time.
Think of the human body as an intricate machine whose working parts are proteins: molecules that change shape to enable our organs and tissues to perform tasks such as breathing, eating or thinking.
Of the millions of proteins, 500 in the kinase family are particularly important to drug discovery. Kinases are messengers: They deliver signals that regulate and orchestrate the actions of other proteins. Proper kinase activity maintains health. Irregular activity is linked to cancer and other diseases. For this reason many drugs seek either to boost or suppress kinase activity.
A team of Stanford University investigators has linked a particular brain circuit to mammals’ tendency to interact socially. Stimulating this circuit – one among millions in the brain – instantly increases a mouse’s appetite for getting to know a strange mouse, while inhibiting it shuts down its drive to socialize with the stranger.
Last year Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, announced a new way of peering into a brain – removed from the body – that provided spectacular fly-through views of its inner connections. Since then laboratories around the world have begun using the technique, called CLARITY, with some success, to better understand the brain's wiring.
In a talk at TEDx Stanford, Drew Endy, associate professor of bioengineering talks about the potential of bioengineering and the challenge of deciding how to use it.
In every cell in your body, tiny protein motors are toiling away to keep you going. Moving muscles, dividing cells, twisting DNA – they are the workhorses of biology. But there is still uncertainty about how they function. To help biologists in the quest to know more, a team of Stanford bioengineers has designed a suite of protein motors that can be controlled remotely by light.
Technology Review has named Manu Prakash, assistant professor of bioengineering, to its annual TR35 list honoring the year’s top young innovators. The magazine honored Prakash for greatly reducing the cost of scientific exploration through his numerous inventions such as a 55-cent folding microscope and a $5 chemistry lab.
