The National Academy of Engineering elected 86 new members and 18 foreign members, including BMES Fellow and Past President Gilda Barabino.

Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer, according to the organization.

Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature" and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."

 

Cato T. Laurencin, founding director of the Institute for Regenerative Engineering and the Sackler Center for Biomedical, Biological, Physical and Engineering Sciences at the University of Connecticut, won the 2019 Philip Hauge Abelson Prize, presented by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

A biomedical engineer and orthopedic surgeon, Laurencin is being honored for his unique contributions to the advancement of science, the organization announced. The Abelson Prize recognizes his global leadership in biomedical technology innovation, public service in shaping United States technology policy and invaluable mentorship to a generation of minority scientists.

 

University of Delaware, assistant professor of biomedical engineering Megan Killian is using novel methods to study muscle activity during the maturation and healing of the rotator cuff, the group of muscles and tissues that helps to keep the shoulder joint in place, according to a university article.

Killian recently received a grant from the National Institutes of Health for this work.

 

"The main thrust of this research is focused on how tendons and their attachments to bone are formed and remodeled with loading from active muscle contractions," Killian said in the article.

She is addressing problems with how the enthesis, the graded attachment site between the tendon and bone, forms in response to muscle loading, a critical factor in its development.

 

A team of Vanderbilt University bioengineers have developed technology to infiltrate tumor cells and flip on a switch that tells them to start fighting.

The team designed a nanoscale particle to do that and found early success using it on human melanoma tissue, according to a university announcement.

"Tumors are pretty conniving and have evolved many ways to evade detection from our immune system," said John T. Wilson, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and biomedical engineering. "Our goal is to rearm the immune system with the tools it needs to destroy cancer cells.

University of Maryland researchers have developed a technique that uses specially designed nanoparticles and near infrared laser treatment to cause cancer cells to lose their multidrug resistance capabilities for days at a time, the university announced.

The ability for cancer cells to develop resistance to chemotherapy drugs - known as multidrug resistance - remains a leading cause for tumor recurrence and cancer metastasis, but recent findings offer hope that oncologists could one day direct cancer cells to "turn off" their resistance capabilities, according to the announcement.

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have developed a wearable, disposable respiration monitor that provides high-fidelity readings on a continuous basis.

It's designed to help children with asthma and cystic fibrosis and others with chronic pulmonary conditions, according to a university article.

The inexpensively produced sensors were created by UCI biomedical engineers using the popular children's toy Shrinky Dinks, thin sheets of plastic that are painted or drawn on and then shrunk with heat.

A biomedical tool that tricks aggressive brain tumors such as glioblastoma into migrating into an external container rather than throughout the brain has been designated a "Breakthrough Device" by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, according to a Duke University article.

Dubbed the Tumor Monorail, the device mimics the physical properties of the brain's white matter to entice aggressive tumors to migrate toward the exterior of the brain, where the migrating cells can be collected and removed, the article states.

The purpose of the device is not to destroy the tumor, but to halt its lethal spread, making the disease more of a condition to manage than a death sentence.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have now successfully applied their distinctive big data-based approach to evaluating possible treatments for autism.

The findings, recently published in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience, have the potential to accelerate the development of successful medical interventions, according to a Rensselaer announcement.

One of the challenges in assessing the effectiveness of a treatment for autism is how to measure improvement. Currently, diagnosis and evaluating the success of an intervention rely heavily on observations by professionals and caretakers, according to the article.

"Having some kind of a measure that measures something that's happening inside the body is really important," said Juergen Hahn, systems biologist, professor, and head of the Rensselaer Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Researchers have developed a novel microfluidic device for measuring in real-time the cholesterol secreted from liver tissue-chip containing human hepatocytes.

The innovation can help researchers employing microfluidic cultures to study the effects of drugs such as statins on lowering cholesterol in real-time, according to a Science Daily announcement.

In a paper to be published in the September/December 2019 issue of TECHNOLOGY, a team of researchers from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago has developed a novel microfluidic device for measuring in real-time the cholesterol secreted from liver tissue-chip containing human hepatocytes, according to the announcement.

Research at the University of Minnesota could impact how millions of people, fighting cancer, get treatment, according to an article by the local NBC affiliate.

The research is focused on stopping how cancer spreads beyond an initial tumor, and it's already showing promise in stopping breast cancer cells, according to the article.

To understand the work that the Biomedical Engineering team is doing for the Masonic Cancer Center, Associate Professor and BMES member Paolo Provenzano says it's helpful to think of a tumor as a road map to understand the research his team is conducting.