Newsroom

Columbia engineering team demonstrates first multi-organ chip made of engineered human tissues linked by vascular flow for improved modeling of systemic diseases like cancer. Source: Columbia University

Bacterial infections are the leading cause of disease and death worldwide; an ongoing public health problem exacerbated by slow or inaccurate diagnostics. Now NIBIB-funded scientists have engineered an inexpensive, paper-based test that can rapidly identify multiple types of bacteria.

Two years ago, Sangeeta Bhatia and Christopher Chen founded a biotech company that on Wednesday officially launched as Satellite Bio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company aims to translate the work of Bhatia, Chen and their cofounder Arnav Chhabra into "tissue therapeutics" — regenerative medicines built from bioengineered tissue structures, or "satellites," that can be implanted into patients. Source: BiopharmaDive

Two recent studies supported by the National Institutes of Health Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) Tech program demonstrate how widespread distribution of COVID-19 at-home antigen tests can be used as an effective public health strategy to reduce the spread of the disease. Source: UMass Chan

NIBIB-funded researchers are developing an autonomous robot that can perform bowel surgery with minimal assistance from a surgeon. In preclinical models, the robot outperformed expert surgeons when compared head-to-head.

A new type of COVID-19 test is hitting the market, and could change how we detect the virus. MicroGEM, a Virginia-based molecular biology company with a Charlottesville office, is using its new saliva test to track COVID-19. Source: NBC TV12 Richmond, Virginia.

As the number of Covid-19 cases grows in the United States, experts wonder if the country fully understands the current threat from the pandemic. As the use of at-home Covid-19 tests rises, so does the concern that most of those test results go unreported, leading to an undercount of the true number of Covid-19 cases across the country. Source: CNN.com

An NIH-funded team at Cornell University has developed a compound delivered into the nose that blocked a protein used by SARS-CoV-2 to get into cells and prevented severe infection in mice. Antiviral drugs that target host cells may work against many existing and future variants of the virus that causes COVID-19. Source: NIH Research Matters

NIBIB-funded researchers are developing a method to activate natural killer cells using an external magnetic field, which not only enhances their cytotoxicity, but allows them to be tracked using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to verify that they’ve reached their target.