A collaborative team from the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation have developed a silk composite for significantly improved tendon regeneration and repair. Source: Science Daily

The value of MRI can be dramatically increased by making its output more quantitative so that images become maps of important tissue properties. To help achieve those goals, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) in collaboration with NIBIB recently launched a unique service that provides MRI research centers and clinics with access to NIST-traceable reference standards. Source: NIST.

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging is a non-ionizing imaging platform that combines light and ultrasound to safely image structures and molecules in the body. Researchers have now designed a nanoparticle-based PA contrast agent that targeted and significantly enhanced photoacoustic images of ovarian tumors in a mouse model.

As race season approaches, many runners have the same goal: go faster. But researchers now show that speeding up might require defying our natural biology. By combining data from runners monitored in a lab along with 37,000 runs recorded on wearable fitness trackers, scientists have found that humans' natural tendency is to run at a speed that conserves caloric loss -- something that racers seeking to shave time off their miles will have to overcome. Source: Science Daily/Cell Press

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.

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.

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