Wyss InstituteCell Biology – Wyss Institute

Growing liver tissue on demand directly in the body

Jessica Leff — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:55:10 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — In patients developing end-stage liver disease, the damage has become too severe for the liver’s normally extraordinary regenerative capacity to repair or compensate for it. Once this “point of no return” has been reached, the only option is an organ transplant. However, getting a liver transplant is extremely difficult due to high demand and limited supply…

Source

Wyss Institute technologies enable breakthrough in astronaut health research aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission

Jessica Leff — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:55:20 +0000

By Alexandra Jirstrand (BOSTON) – Launched on April 1, 2026, Artemis II is a historic, approximately 10-day lunar flyby mission that is sending four astronauts farther into space than any humans have traveled since the Apollo era, marking a critical step toward sustained lunar exploration and future missions to Mars. The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard…

Source

Toward autonomous self-organizing biological robots with a nervous system

Mariel Schoen — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:30:42 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Biobots, whose growing line of variants started with Xenobots, are fascinating tiny self-powered living robots built exclusively using frog embryonic cells. Originally developed in the laboratories of Wyss Institute Associate Faculty member and Tufts University Professor Michael Levin, Ph.D. and his collaborators at University of Vermont…

Source

Nucleic Acid Delivery Consortium

Mariel Schoen — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:13:09 +0000

Nucleic acid therapies are emerging as a revolutionary class of medicines. Using engineered DNA or RNA molecules, they treat diseases at their genetic source, thus offering potential cures for a large variety of disorders, ranging from genetic disorders to cancers and infectious diseases. Different technologies, including mRNA, short interfering RNAs (siRNA), antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs)…

Source

Building protection against infectious diseases with nanostructured vaccines

Mariel Schoen — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:56:44 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — The COVID-19 pandemic brought messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines to the forefront of global health care. After their clinical trial stages, the first COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was administered on 8 December 2020 and mathematical models suggest that mRNA vaccines prevented at least 14.4 million deaths from COVID-19 in the first year alone.

Source

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…

Source

Wyss Institute-led collaboration awarded by ARPA-H PRINT program to engineer off-the-shelf, universal, transplant-ready graft for liver failure

Jessica Leff — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:55:47 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — The majority of human illnesses are caused by damage to a single organ, like the liver, whose failure accounts for 2M deaths worldwide every year. Orthotopic transplants are the only curative therapy available, but the severe shortage of donor organs, which are reserved for the most severe cases, leaves millions of patients without an accessible solution.

Source

First-in-human clinical trial of personalized, biomaterial-based cancer vaccine demonstrates feasibility, safety, and immune activation

Jessica Leff — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:11:46 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — The first-in-human phase I clinical trial assessing the feasibility and safety of WDVAX, an immunostimulatory biomaterial-based cancer vaccine, in a cohort of 21 patients with stage 4 metastatic melanoma, was concluded with positive outcomes that encourage future vaccine developments and trials to test them in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitor…

Source

Biomaterial vaccines to make implanted orthopedic devices safer

Jessica Leff — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 19:55:42 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Patients with implanted medical devices like orthopedic joint replacements, pacemakers, and artificial heart valves run a small but significant risk that these devices get infected with bacterial pathogens. This starts them on a burdensome path requiring “redo” (revision) surgeries, prolonged antibiotic treatments, or in severe cases amputation.

Source

20-ish Questions with Michael Levin

Jessica Leff — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:05:20 +0000

20-ish Questions shows a different side of Wyss Institute faculty, touching on aspects of their personal life, hobbies, interests, as well as their research. This round follows Michael Levin, an Associate Faculty member of the Wyss Institute, as well as the Director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, and a Distinguished Professor…

Source