Featured Publications

Professor Xiaohu Gao and colleagues have created a new way to target prostate tumors that overcomes past challenges of designing effective drug delivery methods. This versatile nanocarrier design should offer opportunities for the clinical translation of therapies based on intracellularly acting biologics.

Professor Paul Yager's lab has created a method that enables optical-filter free mobile imaging for medical diagnostics, a first step towards enabling a new generation of highly sensitive, point-of-care fluorescence assays.

Professor Albert Folch's lab reports on the formulation, characterization, and SL application of a 3D?printable PDMS resin (3DP?PDMS) based on commercially available PDMS?methacrylate macromers, a high?efficiency photoinitiator and a high?absorbance photosensitizer. 3DP?PDMS resin enables assembly?free, automated, digital manufacturing of PDMS, which should facilitate the prototyping of devices for microfluidics, organ?on?chip platforms, soft robotics, flexible electronics, and sensors, among others.

Research Associate Professor Lara Gamble and colleagues report on a technique for characterizing the distribution and composition of chemical species through complex porous scaffolds. This approach could be widely applicable for ToF-SIMS analysis of scaffolds modified by multiple plasma processing techniques as well as alternative surface modification approaches.

Assistant Professor Ying Zheng and colleagues developed an engineered human vascular marrow niche to examine the three-dimensional cell interactions that direct hematopoietic cell trafficking. The platform provides a tool to advance study of the interactions between endothelial cells, marrow-derived fibroblasts and hematopoeitic cells that comprise the marrow vascular niche, and has potential for use in testing therapeutics and personalized medicine.

BioE faculty Charles Murry, Kelly Stevens and Ying Zheng, and interdisciplinary colleagues from across UW, investigated the properties of endothelial cells (ECs), isolated from four human major organs—the heart, lung, liver, and kidneys—in individual fetal tissues at three months' gestation, at gene expression, and at cellular function levels. Their findings showed the link between human EC heterogeneity and organ development and can be exploited therapeutically to contribute in organ regeneration, disease modeling, as well as guiding differentiation of tissue-specific ECs from human pluripotent stem cells.

Professor Gerald Pollack and colleagues report the formation of a ‘three-dimensional cell-like structured exclusion zone’ in water prepared by two different methods. Based on their findings of an electric potential difference between the heterogeneous structured water and the ordinary water, the researchers propose a new model to explain the relationship between heterogeneous, structured water and its electrical properties.

Research Associate Professor Marta Scatena and a team of collaborators show that raising Sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) levels in adult mice through conditionally deleting or pharmacologically inhibiting S1P lyase, the sole enzyme responsible for irreversibly degrading S1P, markedly increased bone formation, mass and strength and substantially decreased white adipose tissue.

Researchers from Georg Seelig’s (Electrical Engineering, adjunct BioE) and Suzie Pun/Drew Sellers’ labs, and the Allen Institute for Brain Science, have developed a new single-cell RNA sequencing method that can reliably track gene activity in a tissue sample to the individual cell level.

The Bryers labs presents the effects of varying pore size of poly (2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (pHEMA) and poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS, silicone) scaffolds on the maturation and in vivo enrichment of dendritic cells.