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Urara Hasegawa, assistant professor at Penn State, demonstrates thermogels, special materials that can turn from a liquid into a solid when triggered by heat. New thermogels developed by Hasegawa and her team show promise as a next-generation biomaterials.     Credit: Urara Hasegawa. All Rights Reserved.

‘Patchy’ thermogels show next-gen biomedical material potential, scientists say

Special biomedical materials that can be injected as a liquid and turn into a solid inside our bodies — called thermogels — could provide a less-invasive way to deliver drugs or treat wounds. Scientists at Penn State have developed a new design for these materials that further improves their properties and may hold particular promise for use in tissue regeneration, the researchers said.

Researchers found that orally administered sevelamer — a dialysis drug — can bind off-target antibiotics, shown being injected into the arm here, in the gut. Off-target antibiotics, or antibiotics that end up in the body away from the point of infection, can contribute to bacteria evolving to develop antibiotic resistance.  Credit: Provided by Amir Sheikhi. All Rights Reserved.

FDA-approved dialysis drug may help fight against antimicrobial resistance

The study, conducted in mice, revealed that sevelamer can successfully remove off-target antibiotics from the gut.

Photo: Kate Myers, Penn State College of Engineering

Could 3D-printed air revolutionize bioprinting?

A novel technique for creating voids and channels within bioprinted living tissues could help break the vascularization barrier, unlocking the next generation of medical applications for the technology.

Camelia Kantor, associate director of strategic initiatives at the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and associate research professor at Penn State, will give the talk, “Bridging Worlds: How Geography and Nematology Research Converge Through Stakeholder Input,” at 4 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 24, in 112 Walker Building at Penn State University Park. Credit: Camelia Kantor. All Rights Reserved.

Feb. 24 EarthTalks: Cross-disciplinary collaboration employing stakeholder input

Camelia Kantor, associate director of strategic initiatives at the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and associate research professor at Penn State, will give the talk, “Bridging Worlds: How Geography and Nematology Research Converge Through Stakeholder Input,” at 4 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 24, in 112 Walker Building at Penn State University Park. Talk will also be available via Zoom.

A new biomaterial developed by Penn State engineers mimics a key building block of human tissue, extracellular matrices, which act like scaffolding and enable cells to heal after damage. Credit: Sheikhi Research Group/Penn State. All Rights Reserved.

Novel ‘living’ biomaterial aims to advance regenerative medicine

A biomaterial that can mimic certain behaviors within biological tissues could advance regenerative medicine, disease modeling, soft robotics and more, according to researchers at Penn State.

Researchers printed a centimeter cube cartilage construct via high-throughput Integrated Tissue Fabrication System for Bioprinting (HITS-Bio).  Credit: Courtesy of Ozbolat Lab at Penn State / Penn State. Creative Commons

New bioprinting technique creates functional tissue 10x faster

The novel high-throughput-bioprinting technique opens the door for tissue fabrication with high cell density at scale.

Biomedical engineer to use $2M NIH grant to improve human tissue repair

A team of Penn State researchers led by Wang was recently awarded a four-year, $2.02 million National Institutes of Health grant to explore how to safely add growth factors to collagen used by doctors for tissue repair.

Huck Leadership Fellows selected for 2024-25

For the 2024-2025 academic year, Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences has appointed Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Scott Medina, Professor of Statistics Lingzhou Xue, and Associate Professor of Surgery Dino Ravnic to be Huck Leadership Fellows.

Lab Bench to Commercialization 2024 grant recipients announced

Four projects led by researchers in the Penn State Eberly College of Science have been selected to receive Lab Bench to Commercialization (LB2C) grants in 2024

A new method for selecting aptamers, or "chemical antibodies," created by Penn State engineers takes only days to complete, instead of the months typically needed for traditional methods. Credit: Kate Myers/Penn State. All Rights Reserved.

Novel hydrogel finds new aptamers, or ‘chemical antibodies,’ in days

One double-helix strand of DNA could extend six feet, but it is so tightly coiled that it packs an entire sequence of nucleotides into the tiny nucleus of a cell. If that same DNA was instead split into two strands and divided into many, many short pieces, it would become trillions of uniquely folded 3D molecular structures, capable of bonding to and possibly manipulating specifically shaped molecules — if they’re the perfect fit.