Wyss InstituteToxicology – Wyss Institute

Toward engineering a human kidney collecting duct system

Jessica Leff — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:50:56 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — The human kidney filters about a cup of blood every minute, removing waste, excess fluid, and toxins from it, while also regulating blood pressure, balancing important electrolytes, activating Vitamin D, and helping the body produce red blood cells. This broad range of functions is achieved in part via the kidney’s complex organization. In its outer region…

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Charles Park named 2025 STAT Wunderkind

Seth Kroll — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 18:57:05 +0000

By Seth Kroll (BOSTON) — The Wyss Institute is proud to announce that Charles Park, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Wyss’ Immuno-Materials Platform with Wyss Core Faculty member Samir Mitagotri, Ph.D., has been named a 2025 STAT Wunderkind by STAT News. The STAT Wunderkinds are annual awards that honor early-career scientists whose creativity and perseverance are helping to reshape…

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Precision oncology Organ Chip platform accurately and actionably predicts chemotherapy responses of patients suffering from esophageal adenocarcinoma

Jessica Leff — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 13:20:57 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC), one of two major forms of esophageal cancer, is the sixth most deadly cancer worldwide for which no effective targeted therapy exists. Patients need to rely on chemotherapy as a standard-of-care, which is started ahead of surgical interventions as a so-called “neoadjuvant chemotherapy” (NACT) in the hope to shrink or control tumors.

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AminoX: Making Better Protein Drugs, Quicker and Cheaper

Jessica Leff — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 13:56:00 +0000

A synthetic biology and advanced chemistry platform that efficiently incorporates non-standard amino acids by hacking the ubiquitous protein synthesis process. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University…

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AminoX: Making Better Protein Drugs, Quicker and Cheaper

Jessica Leff — Wed, 01 May 2024 15:40:43 +0000

Protein drugs often offer the most effective way to treat a variety of medical illnesses and conditions. However, many proteins in their naturally occurring forms make poor drugs – they can cause toxicities that force patients to discontinue treatment, and they often have such short half-lives that patients would need to receive a constant infusion of them to see a therapeutic effect. Recently…

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Paper-Based Diagnostics

admin — Wed, 01 May 2024 00:34:41 +0000

With the imminent threat of new pandemics and frequent disease outbreaks exemplified by the recent Ebola and Zika epidemics, there is a growing need for low-cost, easily deployable and simple-to-use diagnostic tools. The Wyss Institute has developed paper-based synthetic gene networks as a next generation diagnostic technology for use in global healthcare crises and patient care. This new type of…

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Coming together to engineer new treatments for serious diseases

Jessica Leff — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 17:14:48 +0000

By Jessica Leff Immunotherapy is often seen as the next frontier in cancer treatment, offering many benefits over traditional therapies like radiation and chemotherapy. Unfortunately, immunotherapy patients frequently experience painful side effects because antibodies affect healthy tissues along with the tumor. What if these drugs could more accurately target cancer cells…

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Adding immunity to human kidney-on-a-chip advances cancer drug testing

Seth Kroll — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 14:57:37 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (Boston) — A growing repertoire of cell and molecule-based immunotherapies is offering patients with indomitable cancers new hope by mobilizing their immune systems against tumor cells. An emerging class of such immunotherapeutics, known as T cell bispecific antibodies (TCBs), are of growing importance with several TCBs that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)…

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Successfully predicting bone marrow failure caused by drugs, radiation, and disease

Jessica Leff — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 15:58:50 +0000

By Lindsay Brownell (BOSTON) — Your bone marrow produces about 300 billion new blood cells every single day – roughly equivalent to the number of stars thought to be in the Milky Way. Being so prolific, however, comes with a price: medical interventions that aim to disrupt cell growth and differentiation, such as chemotherapies and radiation, hit the bone marrow extremely hard…

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Liver-Chip Identifies Distinct Drug Toxicities in Human, Rat, and Dog Models

Jessica Leff — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 18:58:47 +0000

By Lindsay Brownell (BOSTON) — Among the numerous microengineered Organ-on-a-Chip (Organ Chip) models developed at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, the Liver Chip is of special interest to a number of industries because the real-time analysis of complex biochemical interactions could greatly enhance the liver toxicity testing that is ubiquitous in the development of drugs, foods…

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