Technologies search results
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Catalytic Materials: Cheaper, Better Air Purification for a Healthier World
Our catalytic materials are inspired by the nanostructure of butterfly wings and enable affordable air purification for a variety of applications. -
DNA Nanostructures for Drug Delivery
Researchers at the Wyss Institute have developed two methods for building arbitrarily shaped nanostructures using DNA, with a focus on translating the technology towards nanofabrication and drug delivery applications. One proprietary nanofabrication technique, called “DNA-brick self-assembly,” uses short, synthetic strands of DNA that work like interlocking Lego® bricks. It capitalizes on the ability to program... -
Tunable ECMs for more effective T cell therapies
Tunable hydrogels that enhance the efficacies of adoptively transferred immune cells during their manufacturing by mimicking target tissue biomechanics. -
Metabolically Labeled CAR-T Cells Against Cancer
Through a simple and effective metabolic labeling approach, patient-derived T cells engineered to carry immune-enhancing cytokines on their surfaces could help expand adoptive T cell therapies to treatment of solid tumors and improve blood cancer therapies. -
Single-Cell Encapsulation for Improved Cell Therapies
The Problem Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) are valued for their ability to secrete compounds that modulate the body’s immune system, making them an attractive solution for existing problems with cell therapies including host-vs-graft disease and organ transplant rejections. However, MSCs are rapidly cleared from the body and can come under fire from the immune system.... -
Circe: Transforming Greenhouse Gases into Biodegradable Products
Circe is a platform technology that uses engineered microbes to produce valuable, biodegradable synthetic polymers from greenhouse gases, minimizing the environmental impact of manufacturing. Potential applications include biodegradable plastics and packaging, energy-efficient agriculture, clean personal care products, and more. Circe is a platform technology that uses engineered microbes to produce valuable, biodegradable synthetic polymers from greenhouse gases, minimizing the environmental impact of manufacturing. Potential applications include biodegradable plastics and packaging, energy-efficient agriculture, clean personal care products, and more. -
Manufacturing Mini Surgical Robots
Project 1985 is commercializing the Wyss Institute’s Pop-Up MEMS technology to quickly and cheaply develop tiny robotic tools for minimally invasive surgery. -
Nanoarchitectures for Air Purification
Metalmark is using the Wyss Institute's butterfly-inspired nanoarchitecture coating to create air purification technology that can destroy airborne pollutants including chemicals, viruses, and smog at a fraction of the cost of current catalytic converter systems. -
Circe: Tailored Fats for Food Applications
Circe Bioscience spun out of the Wyss Institute in 2023 to commercialize their gas-fermentation-based technology that uses engineered microbes to convert greenhouse gases into fats for use in food products without the use of plants or animals. -
Low-Cost Tactile Displays for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Age-related medical conditions are responsible for most cases of blindness and visual impairment worldwide. In 2015, there were an estimated 36 million blind people in the world, with an additional 217 million suffering from moderate to severe vision impairment. Over 80% of the visually impaired were older than 50, and this percentage is expected to... -
MM3D: Multimaterial Multinozzle 3D Printing
3D printers are revolutionizing manufacturing by allowing users to create any physical shape they can imagine on-demand. However, most extrusion-based printers available commercially are only able to build objects from a single nozzle at a time. Those that can deposit multiple inks are even slower due to the additional time required to switch between materials.... -
Smart Tools: RFID Tracking for Surgical Instruments
Surgeons can use up to 250 different tools during a surgical procedure to perform tasks like cutting, grasping, cauterizing, suturing, suctioning, and reducing bleeding. Each tool must be manually counted by hospital staff both before and after surgery to ensure that none of them have gone missing, which is a tedious and time-consuming process. This... -
FOAMs: Soft Robotic Artificial Muscles
Soft robots, similar to living organisms, are made from compliant materials that allow them great flexibility and adaptability for tasks at the human-robot interface and elsewhere. To enable soft robotic missions in different industrial, exploratory, and medical settings, engineers are trying to equip them with artificial muscles that could enable them to move smoothly, efficiently... -
Liquid-Infused Tympanostomy Tubes
Novel ear tubes coated with proprietary liquid-infused medical-grade polymers that form a frictionless, biofouling-resistant layer inside the tube, dramatically reducing the adhesion of biofluids, human cells, and common ear infection-causing bacterial strains by about 99% when compared with conventional tympanostomy tubes. -
Flexible Embedded Liquid Sensors
As we shift from carrying electronic devices in our pockets and purses to wearing them on our bodies, those devices need to be able to move and stretch with us, and to sense our movements in order to better do so. Such sensors must remain functional when stretched to several times their resting length, resist... -
Toehold Switches for Synthetic Biology
The burgeoning field of synthetic biology is designing artificial gene circuits that recognize molecules in their environment and respond by regulating genes with desired activities. In the future, such capabilities could allow the engineering of cells as diagnostic or therapeutic devices, factories for the production of clinically or industrially coveted molecules, and as specialized devices... -
Toehold Probes for Nucleic Acid Detection
The accurate detection of specific DNA or RNA sequences is important for many research and diagnostic applications, and unspecific detection of similar sequences that can differ by only a single nucleotide can give false positive results. In addition, researchers and clinicians would like to accurately test for presence or absence of multiple single base changes... -
Flexible Force Sensors for Microrobotics
As robots have gotten smaller, softer, and more maneuverable, they’ve opened up myriad possibilities for interacting with objects on a tiny scale, including on and in the human body. However, human hands still have a major advantage over robots: the ability to feel. Researchers at the Wyss Institute are using the Pop-Up MEMS manufacturing technique... -
milliDelta: Millimeter-Scale Delta Robot
Delta robots are deployed in many industrial processes, including pick-and-place assemblies, machining, welding, and food packaging. Three individually controlled lightweight arms enable fast and accurate motion of an output platform in three directions. Roboticists have reduced the size of Delta robots for tasks in limited workspaces, but so far, using conventional manufacturing techniques and components,... -
HAMR: Versatile Crawling Microrobot
Small or difficult-to-access spaces such as areas covered with rubble, or narrow pipes and engines can pose obstacles to search-and-rescue missions, repair works, or environmental and industrial monitoring. One solution for these problems could be small-sized robots that are able to navigate such spaces, transport payload, sense, and communicate. Wyss Institute researchers have developed a... -
Microfluidic Drug Encapsulation
Because of their large molecular sizes and properties, biologic drugs, be it in the form of monoclonal antibodies that target disease-associated molecules or active proteins and enzymes that may correct deficiencies in the human body, have proven difficult to deploy in many cases. Their therapeutic effects on target cells and tissues often require high and... -
Focused Rotary Jet Spinning for Heart Implants
Focused rotary jet spinning (FRJS) is a manufacturing technique that can rapidly spin polymers into long fibers that are easily shaped into heart valves for treating a variety of cardiac diseases in children and adults. -
Cell-Free Biomolecule Manufacturing
Wyss Institute researchers have developed a biomolecular manufacturing method that can quickly and easily produce a wide range of vaccines, antimicrobial peptides and antibody conjugates while doing so anywhere, even in places without access to electrical power or refrigeration. The breakthrough could provide a life-saving workaround for making modern interventions available in remote areas. Today... -
Dynamic Daylight Control System
In the U.S. alone, commercial and residential buildings account for more than 40 percent of the total energy consumption – mostly for lighting. What’s more, the deep building layouts that are typical in the U.S. have led to a complete reliance on artificial lighting systems that are less desirable than natural daylight. Many of the... -
Bioplastics
Humans have produced roughly 8,300 million metric tons of plastic since the 1950s, the vast majority of which has been thrown out as waste. Only about 9% of that plastic waste has been recycled and 12% has been incinerated, leaving 79% of it to accumulate on our land and oceans, harming the environment, the food... -
Liquid-Gated Membranes for Filtration
Just like pores in living organisms that control the absorption and excretion of fluids, gases and solids in response to their environments, flow-gating membranes have proved very useful for many mechanical systems, such as gas and liquid separators, dialysis machines, or open heart bypass pumps. But conventional approaches to create synthetic “gated pores” within those... -
Programmable Robot Swarms
Collective behaviors enable animals like ants to achieve remarkable, colony-level feats through the distributed actions of millions of independent agents. These collective behaviors are inspiring engineers at the Wyss Institute to build simple mobile robots that harness the demonstrated power of the swarm, performing collective tasks like transporting large objects or autonomously building human-scale structures.... -
Pop-Up MEMS: Origami-Inspired Micromanufacturing
Recent decades have seen rapid development in the manufacture of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) at the micrometer scale, mostly based on silicon wafer processing techniques, with characteristic length scales of millimeters to nanometers. However, standard MEMS techniques are often inappropriate for producing machines with complex 3D topologies and varied constituent materials at the mesoscale, at sizes... -
4D Printing of Shapeshifting Devices
Organisms, such as flowers and plants, have tissue compositions and microstructures creating dynamic morphologies that can shapeshift in response to changes in their environments. Researchers at the Wyss Institute have mimicked a variety of such dynamic shape changes like those performed by tendrils, leaves, and flowers in response to changes in humidity or temperature with... -
3D Bioprinting of Living Tissues
Progress in drug testing and regenerative medicine could greatly benefit from laboratory-engineered human tissues built of a variety of cell types with precise 3D architecture. But production of greater than millimeter sized human tissues has been limited by a lack of methods for building tissues with embedded life-sustaining vascular networks. In this video, the Wyss... -
DNA Data Storage
The genetic material DNA has garnered considerable interest as a medium for digital information storage because its density and durability are superior to those of existing silicon-based storage media. For example, DNA is at least 1000-fold more dense than the most compact solid-state hard drive and at least 300-fold more durable than the most stable... -
SLIPS: Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces
The need for an inexpensive, super-repellent surface cuts across a vast swath of societal sectors—from refrigeration and architecture, to medical devices and consumer products. Most state-of-the-art liquid repellent surfaces designed in the last decade are modeled after lotus leaves, which are extremely hydrophobic due to their rough, waxy surface and the physics of their natural... -
MAGE: Multiplex Automated Genomic Engineering
Developed at the Wyss Institute, the multiplex automated genome engineering (MAGE) technology harnesses the natural principles of evolution to do all the heavy lifting of genome design and automates these steps to dramatically shorten the time scale required to produce microbes with specialized functionalities for manufacturing, sensing and therapeutic applications. Genome engineering has a wide...