Wyss InstituteDisease Model – Wyss Institute

Decoding inflammatory bowel disease – on a chip

Jessica Leff — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:30:43 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which comprises the inflammatory conditions Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, affects about 1.6 million Americans, many of whom cannot be effectively treated. This is mostly due to a lack of understanding of what exactly causes the increased inflammation, fibrosis, and compromised intestinal barrier that underlie this…

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Multidisciplinary Wyss team receives 2026 Lush Prize Science Award

Jessica Leff — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:30:48 +0000

(BOSTON) — The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University is proud to announce that the Biosensing, Microfluidics, and Microsystems team, led by Wyss Senior Engineer Adama Sesay, Ph.D., together with the Female Reproductive Health team, has received the 2026 Lush Science Prize. The prize recognizes their work developing next-generation, sensor-integrated human Organ…

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Materializing safe, on-demand living therapeutics

Jessica Leff — Thu, 14 May 2026 17:55:55 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Patient recovery from many debilitating conditions and diseases could be sped up significantly and be more effective if drugs and therapeutic molecules were delivered right to where they are needed in the body, over the entire regenerative process, and in doses finely tuned to therapeutic needs. An intriguing way to achieve this is the use of implantable…

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Katharina Meyer on improving our understanding and treatment of bipolar disorder

Jessica Leff — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:10:58 +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. Katharina Meyer is exceptionally welcoming in both her personal and professional life. At home, this takes the form of studying and improving hosting skills by experimenting with cooking and…

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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.

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Transforming cancer treatments through bioinspired engineering and translation

Jessica Leff — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:59:03 +0000

Despite major advances in personalized medicine, targeted drugs, and immunotherapies, many cancers remain difficult – or impossible – to treat. Even when therapies work, they can trigger serious secondary health risks that may themselves become life-threatening. Wyss Institute researchers are tackling these challenges head-on by developing new therapies that more powerfully activate the immune…

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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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20-ish Questions with Ellen Roche

Jessica Leff — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 14:00:10 +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 Ellen Roche, an Associate Faculty member of the Wyss Institute as well as the Latham Family Career Development Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science…

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Unravel: from tools for studying pathogen tolerance to hope for rare disease patients

Jessica Leff — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 17:49:56 +0000

Part of the Wyss Institute’s series on the positive, life-altering impact of federal research funding By Jessica Leff There are approximately 350 million people in the world with a rare disease, including 25-30 million Americans. About 80% of the disorders are genetic, and 95% of them have no FDA-approved treatments. Finding an effective drug is no small task; after an expensive and long…

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Beating cancer cells at their own game by stepping on their cGAS

Jessica Leff — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 17:30:44 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Cancer cells develop various strategies to paralyze immune cells to evade their attack in the complex tumor microenvironment (TME). Using one such strategy, they cripple their own production of a small signaling molecule known as cGAMP, which, if released into the TME, can be taken up by immune cells that then build up a first line of defense against cancer…

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