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Ernest Aguinam on understanding the immune system to help patients with radiation injury and chronic Lyme

Jessica Leff — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:13:50 +0000

The Humans of the Wyss (HOW) series features members of the Wyss community discussing their work, the influences that shape them as professionals, and their collaborations at the Wyss Institute and beyond. How is developing therapeutics like writing a song? Ernest Aguinam starts with a hypothesis or a new lyric, tests variables, like tempo or a new compound, and in the end, aims for a certain…

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Reimagining the treatment of mental health: Maria Carolina Bittencourt Gonçalves

Jessica Leff — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:17:45 +0000

By Jessica Leff Listen to Maria tell her story | Wyss Institute · Maria C. B. Gonçalves – Reimagine the World Maria Carolina Bittencourt Gonçalves, Ph.D., grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, the largest city by population in South America. It’s comparable to New York, but with a tropical climate. “I knew I wanted to be a scientist from the first time I looked into a microscope when I was 11…

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Reducing plastic, increasing impact

Jessica Leff — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:45:44 +0000

By Jessica Leff Laboratories generate up to 5.5 billion kilograms, which is more than 12 billion pounds, of plastic waste each year. That’s nearly 12 times more waste per square foot than is produced in office spaces. The reasons make sense: single-use plastic is sterile, safe, and efficient. Often, labs don’t have the infrastructure needed to separate contaminated plastic and uncontaminated…

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Building big with DNA gets a software upgrade

Jessica Leff — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:55:09 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — 44 years ago, Nadrian Seeman published his groundbreaking ideas on using DNA as a structural material, expanding DNA’s significance way beyond that as a carrier of genetic information. Since then, the steadily growing field of DNA nanotechnology has seen numerous innovations. One of them was the DNA origami technique, which enables researchers to fold a single…

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Wyss Awarded ARPA-H Contract to End the Guesswork in Fetal Distress

Mariel Schoen — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:30:02 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Awarded a contract for up to $12M from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, across several of its Technology Platforms and faculty labs, have joined forces to address a critical unmet need in maternal and women’s health: clinicians’ inadequate ability to monitor oxygen support of…

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Jennifer (Jen) Bays on building a therapy to repair vascular barriers

Jessica Leff — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:30:01 +0000

The Humans of the Wyss (HOW) series features members of the Wyss community discussing their work, the influences that shape them as professionals, and their collaborations at the Wyss Institute and beyond. Jen Bays loves building things. At home, that might mean assembling LEGO bricks or IKEA furniture. At work, it means transforming an observation into a complete scientific story concluding…

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Pulling carbon into seawater using engineered bacteria

Jessica Leff — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:00:14 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Rock weathering, the breakdown and dissolving of rocks and minerals caused by their exposure to water, air, and biological life, is a major regulator of Earth’s atmospheric CO2 levels and climate. Throughout Earth’s history, rock weathering has been faster during warm periods with increased atmospheric CO2 levels. Dissolved minerals ultimately wash into the…

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Researchers clear major obstacle in genetic engineering of proteins

Jessica Leff — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:13:59 +0000

By STEPHANIE DUTCHEN / Harvard Medical School Communications (BOSTON) — Scientists have been hard at work for more than 20 years to instruct biological systems, such as E. coli cells, to produce proteins they don’t naturally do. Success could mean faster, cheaper, innovative solutions for medicine, agriculture, materials science, environmental remediation, and other industries.

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Visions of the Wyss: 2026

Jessica Leff — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:21:24 +0000

At the Wyss, we are committed to breaking down silos and barriers between disciplines and industries, enabling unique collaborations between researchers and clinicians, mechanical engineers and cell biologists, chemists and nanotechnologists, and more. By leveraging their unique expertise and Nature’s own ideas and genius, they create solutions to the Grand Challenges facing patients and our…

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Chemist’s fix for a stubborn biomanufacturing problem? Engineer the liquid, not the machine

Jessica Leff — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:57:11 +0000

By Yahya Chaudhry, Harvard Staff Writer (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) – In the race to build a biomanufacturing economy, one of the most stubborn obstacles is surprisingly mundane: getting enough gas into a tank of liquid. From pharmaceuticals to alternative proteins, many technologies depend on microbes that need to breathe oxygen or consume other gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

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