Wyss InstituteBiomarker – Wyss Institute

KeepSmilin4Abbie Foundation to drive early detection and treatment of anaphylaxis

Mariel Schoen — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:25:25 +0000

1 in 20 American, or almost 20 million people, are at risk of anaphylaxis. The only treatment for an anaphylactic reaction is epinephrine. A reaction may escalate quickly with symptoms that can be variable and fast moving. Tragedy strikes when epinephrine treatment is not administered early in the reaction. The death of Abbie Benford illustrates this disastrous outcome. Due to the fast…

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Ultrasensitive test detects biomarkers for specific form of dementia

Mariel Schoen — Tue, 05 May 2026 13:55:08 +0000

By MGB Communications (BOSTON) — Dementia affects over 57 million people worldwide, a number expected to nearly double in the next 20 years. This permanent loss of cognitive abilities affects daily function and can be caused by multiple brain pathologies, including well known ones like Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Right now, biomarkers permit diagnosis of AD but not rarer pathologies like…

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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…

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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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