Wyss InstituteDiabetes – Wyss Institute

How can we feed the world?

Jessica Leff — Thu, 11 May 2023 17:14:54 +0000

The current agricultural methods of feeding the world are not sustainable and already have dire consequences that will worsen as the Earth’s population continues to grow. Researchers at the Wyss Institute are working on various solutions that could help provide food for our future needs with a lower environmental impact. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University…

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Adama Sesay on Solving Problems with Sensors and Microsystems

Jessica Leff — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 13:07:13 +0000

The Humans of the Wyss (HOW) series features members of the Wyss community discussing their work, the influences that shape them as scientists, and their collaborations at the Wyss Institute and beyond. If you had asked Adama Sesay as a child what she wanted to be when she grew up, the answer would have been a doctor, an architect, and a firefighter. Now a Senior Engineer specializing in…

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Vaskar Gnyawali on Bringing Science to Life

Jessica Leff — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 14:04:54 +0000

The Humans of the Wyss (HOW) series features members of the Wyss community discussing their work, the influences that shape them as scientists, and their collaborations at the Wyss Institute and beyond. Early in his professional life, Vaskar Gnyawali realized he wasn’t content sitting in front of a computer screen all day, so he shifted from software engineering to microsystems engineering. Now…

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Rapid Metabolite-Sensing System for Blood Lactate

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 20:58:10 +0000

In emergency medicine, blood lactate levels are a reliable real-time indicator of the severity and mortality risk of conditions that occur as a result of poor blood circulation and oxygen supply to organs and tissues (hypoperfusion), such as in patients with sepsis, cardiac arrest, stroke, major trauma, cystic fibrosis and other conditions. Lactate levels also provide an early measure for the…

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Combination gene therapy treats multiple age-related diseases in mice

Jessica Leff — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 19:56:01 +0000

By Lindsay Brownell (BOSTON) — As we age, our bodies tend to develop diseases like heart failure, kidney failure, diabetes, and obesity, and the presence of any one disease increases the risk of developing others. In traditional drug development, a drug usually only targets one condition, largely ignoring the interconnectedness of age-related diseases, such as obesity, diabetes…

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Discovery of performance-enhancing bacteria in the human microbiome

Jessica Leff — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 14:58:38 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) – The human microbiome, the vast collection of microbes that colonize the surfaces lining many of our organs and our skin – is a critical pillar sustaining our general health. At any one time, 500 to 1,000 different species of bacteria inhabit us, which together contain far more genes than our human genome. Researchers have also come to realize that no two…

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Renal reabsorption in living devices

Jessica Leff — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 19:57:05 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) — Every day our kidneys tackle the daunting task of continuously cleaning our blood to prevent waste, salt and excess fluid from building up inside our bodies. To achieve this, the kidneys’ approximately one million filtration units (glomeruli) first remove both waste products and precious nutrients from the blood stream…

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Delivering insulin in a pill

Mariel Schoen — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 18:59:01 +0000

By Leah Burrows, SEAS Communications (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) — Given the choice of taking a pill or injecting oneself with a needle, most of us would opt to regulate a chronic health condition by swallowing a pill. But for the millions of people living with type 1 diabetes, a painful needle prick once or twice daily is the only option for delivering the insulin that their bodies cannot produce on…

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Disruptive: Cancer Vaccine and Immuno-Materials

Lucy Thomas — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 13:50:47 +0000

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 researchers 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…

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Introducing ‘Immuno-Materials’ to immunotherapy

Mariel Schoen — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 13:34:07 +0000

Dysfunction of the immune system underlies many diseases, including cancer and autoimmune disease. Further, it is increasingly recognized that immune cells actively regulate tissue regeneration. Advances in our understanding of the human innate and adaptive immune systems thus promise to revolutionize the treatments of many diseases. However, strategies to effectively program an immune response…

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