Wyss InstituteBiomarker – Wyss Institute

Breaking barriers in brain health

Mariel Schoen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:28:15 +0000

For decades, some of the most urgent challenges in brain health have resisted progress across both academia and the pharmaceutical industry. At the Wyss Institute, we are tackling them head-on. A central focus is overcoming one of the field’s biggest obstacles: delivering drugs effectively to the brain and central nervous system. Today, this process remains inefficient…

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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)…

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Tooling up to diagnose ocean health

Jessica Leff — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:55:24 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Oceanic ecosystems are increasingly threatened by global warming, which causes coral bleaching, species migration, and, through the loss of habitats and biodiversity, food web disruptions on major scales. Also, pollutants such as plastics and other marine debris, wastewater, and chemical runoffs, including oil spills, cause major ecosystem disruptions.

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Can We Stop Stabbing Babies? – Salivary Diagnostics for Sepsis Screening in the Neonate

Jessica Leff — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 20:51:39 +0000

Every day, across the neonatal care unit, babies are being stabbed to collect their blood for sepsis tests. Adding to this dismal situation, diagnostics developed to assess sepsis in blood are very inaccurate, leading to the unnecessary prescription of antibiotics. Researchers at the Wyss Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have created a more accurate diagnostic platform using easily…

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Recapitulating egg and sperm development in the dish

Jessica Leff — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 17:55:46 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — More than one-sixth of adults around the world experience infertility in their lifetime. There is a high unmet need not only for increased access to affordable, high-quality fertility care for those in need but, importantly, also for new biomedical solutions that can address the root causes of infertility. Some of the earliest causes of infertility go back to…

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NeoSense: Sepsis Detection in Newborns

Mariel Schoen — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 15:54:38 +0000

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition, and the third leading cause of neonatal mortality worldwide. In the U.S., there are about 1.75M suspected cases each year, accounting for 60% of NICU admissions. Current sepsis diagnostics rely on painful blood draws that can take days to deliver results – often leading to unnecessary antibiotic use. To address this challenge, we’re creating NeoSense…

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COPDx: Rapid diagnostic to triage acute exacerbations

Seth Kroll — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:12:25 +0000

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affects 15.9 million U.S. adults, and costs $49 billion annually to treat and manage. When COPD patients are exposed to lung irritants like viral or bacterial infections, air pollution, or smoke, it can trigger an acute exacerbation (AE), in which their symptoms quickly become more severe. AE is the leading cause of mortality and emergency hospital…

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Forging a novel therapeutic path for patients with Rett Syndrome using AI

Jessica Leff — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 13:55:03 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Rett syndrome is a devastating, rare genetic childhood disorder primarily affecting girls. Merely 1 out of 10,000 girls are born with it, and much fewer boys. It is caused by mutations in the MeCP2 gene on the X chromosome, leading to a spectrum of cognitive and physical impairments, including repetitive hand motions, speech difficulties, and seizures. However…

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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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Implantable biosensors get a major longevity boost

Jessica Leff — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 14:55:18 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Wearable and implantable biosensors that can accurately detect biological molecules in a non- or minimally invasive manner have vast potential for monitoring patients’ physiology and response to therapies. For example, wearable glucose monitors that measure blood glucose levels and convert these measurements into readily readable and continuously recorded…

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