2023 BME Year in Review

MCK E LV E Y S CHOOL OF E NGINE E R ING

Biomedical Engineering

2023 Year in Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS Research Areas & Centers

3

Research News

4

Feature Story

6

Student News

10

Faculty Outreach

12

Faculty Awards

13

Grant News

14

Dear colleagues, alumni and friends, I am delighted to present to you our 2023 WashU BME Year in Review. Alongside highlights of our student, faculty and community accomplishments in 2023, we reflect upon 25 years of our most impactful and enduring course in our undergraduate program – Quantitative Physiology. This special feature underscores our commitment to providing our students with a comprehensive and transformative learning experience.

Since the founding of WashU BME in 1997, we have worked to establish ourselves as leaders in biomedical research, education and professional opportunity for our undergraduate and graduate students. We are delighted to have your interest and partnership in advancing the mission of WashU BME. In addition, I am thrilled to announce that we have recently welcomed two exceptional individuals to our faculty. Professor Cory Berkland and Assistant Professor Yifan Dai have joined our department, bringing with them invaluable expertise and entrepreneurial spirit. I am excited to witness the contributions they will make to our university community.

Warm regards,

Lori Setton On the cover: Image by Samantha Zambuto, PhD. The image depicts a scanning electron micrograph image of a vaginal epithelial cell growing on a fiber-reinforced hydrogel composite.

We developed these biomaterial composites to engineer cell-based models of the vagina to understand vaginal biomechanics in the context of childbirth injury.

Department Chair and Lucy & Stanley Lopata Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering

#13 2023 best colleges for Engineering

#10

graduate biomedical engineering program among private universities US News

Niche

#6

Best Bachelor’s in biomedical engineering program Successful Student

2

Research Areas

27

Biomedical & Biological Imaging Cardiovascular Engineering Cell & Molecular Bioengineering Neural Engineering

full-time Faculty

Orthopedic Engineering Regenerative Engineering in Medicine Women's Health Technologies

including 6 AIMBE Fellows, 3 American Heart Association Fellows, 2 National Academy of Inventors Fellows

20+ Participating Research Centers & Pathways Interdisciplinary Research Centers & Pathways

67+33+x60 33%

130+ affiliate faculty

Center for Biomolecular Condensates (CBC) Center for Cellular Imaging Center for Cyborg and Bio-robotics Research Center for Engineering MechanoBiology (CEMB) Center for Human Immunology & Immunotherapy Programs (CHiiPS) Center for Innovation in Neuroscience and Technology (CINT) Center for the Investigation of Membrane Excitability Diseases (CIMED) Center of Regenerative Medicine (CRM)

of faculty are women

Center for Women’s Health Engineering Children’s Discovery Institute Genome Engineering & iPSC Center (GEiC) Hope Center for Neurological Disorders

Startups with ties to bme Acera Surgical Inc.

Geneoscopy

Sparo Labs

datadog health

Mindset

Caeli Vascular

Encodia Inc.

NeuroLutions

Osteovantage

Epharmix

SentiAR Inc.

Armor Medical Inc.

Imaging Sciences Pathway Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences (ICTS) Institute for Materials Science & Engineering (IMSE) McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience McDonnell Genome Institute (MGI) Musculoskeletal Research Center (MRC) Siteman Cancer Center 3

research news Virtual drug quiets noise in images of heart tissue whitney curtis

A low-cost potential therapy for spinal cord injuries If you’ve ever tried taking a picture of a puppy, you likely ended up with a blur of fur. Now try reading a stock ticker on the puppy’s fur, and you’ll have the challenge that faces researchers studying electrical conduction of heart muscle.

The living heart contracts and relaxes every second as the heart pumps, but to researchers studying electrical conduction, this essential pumping is a confounding feature that they call “motion artifact.” Researchers need to read that stock ticker – that is, the moving fluorescent signals that indicate the electrical functioning of heart cells – but to do so, they typically have to use drugs that stop the cells from beating while they take their measurements.

This can affect cardiac electrophysiology and limit the ability to study how electrical conduction is coupled to both mechanical contraction and cellular structure.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a new computational approach to removing movement in images of expanding and contracting heart cells and tissues. By computationally removing movement, the algorithm mimics drug’s action in stopping the heart, without compromising cellular structure or tissue contractility. Results of the research, led by Nathaniel Huebsch, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, and Guy Genin, the Harold and Kathleen Faught Professor of Mechanical Engineering, both in the McKelvey School of Engineering, are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sept. 11, 2023.

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A spinal cord injury is a life-altering event, and the effects, such as muscle weakness and paralysis, can dramatically disrupt a person’s life. While there is no cure for paralysis, there has been some progress in developing potential treatment options to improve symptoms. Even still, much of it remains out of reach to many patients. A person with a complete spinal cord injury may benefit from a spinal cord stimulator, but cost, safety and patient willingness to undergo surgery are barriers to treatment.

Now, a group of engineers from Washington University St. Louis, led by Ismael Seáñez, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and of neurosurgery at the School of Medicine, has begun work on a low-cost, noninvasive approach to spinal cord stimulation that offers affordable hope to patients. Their work, published in the Journal of Neural Engineering July 25, uses a lowtech electrode array that effectively stimulates muscles in the legs in people with spinal cord injuries.

One kind of stimulation, called epidural spinal cord stimulation (eSCS), implants electrodes underneath the skin near the spine and sends electrical signals to stimulate specific muscle groups.

In a spinal cord injury, neuronal communication from the brain to muscles in the body may be interrupted, but the connections from the spinal cord to the muscles themselves remain intact.

ESCS can get extremely close to the spine and essentially allow the weakened signals from the brain to reach their targets in the spinal cord to reactivate the muscles.

Small proteins in heart play big role Induction of a torpor-like state with ultrasound whitney curtis

A heartbeat is a carefully coordinated series of electrical signals led by sodium ion channels, which tell the heart when to contract and to relax. Any disruption to these signals may lead to cardiac diseases such as an irregular heartbeat, or arrhythmia. Two researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have taken a closer look at this process at the molecular level and have found what may provide new insights into different heart conditions and how to develop better therapies.

Jonathan Silva, professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering, and Jeanne Nerbonne, Alumni Endowed Professor of Molecular Biology & Pharmacology in Medicine and Developmental Biology in the School of Medicine, and their labs found distinct effects of novel proteins, known as intracellular fibroblast growth factors (iFGF), on the regulation of the kinetics of cardiac sodium channel gating. Their results were published in the Journal of General Physiology March 21, 2023.

The team sought to determine how one intracellular fibroblast growth factor, iFGF12, works in a healthy human heart by observing how the iFGFs change the sodium channel at the molecular level.

Some mammals and birds have a clever way to preserve energy and heat by going into torpor, during which their body temperature and metabolic rate drop to allow them to survive potentially fatal conditions in the environment, such as extreme cold or lack of food.

While a similar condition was proposed for scientists making flights to space in the 1960s or for patients with lifethreatening health conditions, safely inducing such a state remains elusive.

Hong Chen, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering and of neurosurgery at the School of Medicine, and a multidisciplinary team induced a torpor-like state in mice by using ultrasound to stimulate the hypothalamus preoptic area in the brain, which helps to regulate body temperature and metabolism. In

addition to the mouse, which naturally goes into torpor, Chen and her team induced torpor in a rat, which does not. Their findings, published May 25, 2023, in Nature Metabolism, show the first noninvasive and safe method to induce a torpor-like state by targeting the central nervous system.

Chen and her team, including Yaoheng (Mack) Yang, a postdoctoral research associate, created a wearable ultrasound transducer to stimulate the neurons in the hypothalamus preoptic area. When stimulated, the mice showed a drop in body temperature of about 3 degrees C for about one hour. In addition, the mice’s metabolism showed a change from using both carbohydrates and fat for energy to only fat, a key feature of torpor, and their heart rates fell by about 47%, all while at room temperature.

Featured Video Watch an illustrative view of the ultrasoundinduced artificial torpor.

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Quantitative Physiology leaves lasting impression on biomedical engineers 6

By Molly Olten

Students and alumni reflect on the challenges and rewards of “QP” “Quantitative Physiology” has been one of the defining biomedical engineering courses at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis for decades.

The course sequence consists of “Quantitative Physiology I” and “Quantitative Physiology II” and is considered by many to be the most difficult set of courses in the biomedical engineering curriculum. Better known collectively as “QP,” students learn to build and design ways to measure or observe human physiology. It requires students to apply previously learned principles of math, physics, chemistry, biology and computing, and understand how humans breathe, sense, move and experience their world.

“Almost everything we do in lab is a new, interesting and exciting challenge for the students,” said Patricia Widder, principal lecturer of biomedical engineering and associate director of undergraduate studies. “QP is a series of ‘ah ha’ moments for students seeing how things work in an engineering sense. We are synthesizing all these topic areas, chemistry, physics, biology, to be simultaneously applied.

They learn to ask themselves, ‘what are my assumptions and what can I use?’”

Since its creation at the founding of the BME department in 1994, QP is where BME students get hands-on

experience with electrode recordings of the visual cortex, active contractions of the beating heart or force transducers in deforming bone. Through QP, students develop fundamental knowledge of neurophysiology and cardiac electrophysiology and learn how engineers have developed devices and systems to monitor and decode the complexities of human physiology. No matter students’ post-baccalaureate plans, QP aims to set them up for success.

The course is taught by a rotation of faculty who present different modules.

In the first portion of the course, Quantitative Physiology I, Dennis Barbour, MD, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering and director of master’s studies, leads learning in neurophysiology, with students measuring their own brain waves in the associated labs. Jonathan Silva, professor of biomedical engineering, presents modules on bioelectricity in neurons and myocytes, showing students how to build theoretical models of electrically excitable cells such as muscles and neurons.

“Whether their ultimate goal is industry, entrepreneurship, research or medicine, the knowledge learned in QP will prepare them,” Widder said.

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In the thick of it Ahmed Ahmed, who is majoring in biomedical engineering, and George Mitrev, who is majoring in biomedical engineering and systems science & engineering, took the course sequence during the 2022-23 academic year. They said even first-year biomedical engineering students are aware of QP’s reputation.

“Starting with ‘Introduction to BME,’ there’s this notion that we’re preparing for QP,” Ahmed said. “Especially in ‘Biomechanics,’ when we start doing longer lab reports and focusing on how to analyze our data.”

While neither Ahmed nor Mitrev said they found the material intimidating, they both admitted that managing such a workintensive course was a challenge. Each week, students complete labs that vary from tissue dissection and organ isolation to building electrocardiograms from scratch. They must complete an in-depth report following each lab.

“It’s a rewarding experience because you realize the tools to create the medical devices of tomorrow aren’t out of reach for us,” Mitrev said.

“The university provides extraordinary equipment and instructors. You don’t need $100,000 to build a medical device, and you definitely don’t need $100,000 to learn about building a medical device.”

Through the years Since the QP course was created, it has grown to meet the needs of students while staying current with changing trends and technology.

While neural and cardiac physiology have remained a staple of QP allowing students to learn the principles of electrocardiography, electromyography and electroencephalography, new disciplines

“

It’s a rewarding experience because you realize the tools to create the medical devices of tomorrow aren’t out of reach for us. The university provides extraordinary equipment and instructors.” –­ George Mitrev are frequently added to the course. With the expansion of tools in molecular biology and systems engineering, QP brought lessons in systems biology, building computational networks to mimic drugreceptor interactions that affect muscle contractility. With advances in microfluidic systems that allow studies of gas-fluid exchange, QP introduced modules in respiratory physiology to understand how oxygen is transported from the lungs to the blood circulation.

Most recently, Christine O’Brien, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, has introduced physiology of reproduction and women’s health, central to her own research. In one of these modules, students perform peripheral blood flow measurements using a light-based imaging technique and learn how peripheral blood flow decreases during postpartum hemorrhage, the global leading cause of maternal mortality. Students first measured a tissue-mimicking blood flow phantom across a range of flow rates, and then measured their own blood flow during multiple physiology challenges, such as occluding blood flow or placing their hands in cold water.

To tackle the important contributions of engineers to imaging systems design and measures, Chao Zhou, professor of biomedical engineering, introduced a module that shows students a range of imaging techniques such as CT, MRI, PET, ultrasound and optical imaging methods. In labs, students use brightfield and fluorescence microscopes to observe and measure cell structures and optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging on fruit fly models to study intricate cardiac physiology parameters, such as heart rate and chamber dimensions.

This focus on imaging systems has resulted in more biomedical engineering students choosing to continue on to earn graduate degrees in imaging science.

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A lasting impression This course continues to resonate with students and alumni alike with its impact extending far beyond the classroom. Even decades after taking the class, former students recall the profound influence it had on their academic and professional journeys.

Alumni, regardless of their career paths in research, industry or medicine, carry with them the knowledge and experiences acquired through QP. Krista Gietl, head of digital and ecommerce analytics at MilliporeSigma, earned a bachelor’s degree from WashU in 2013.

Despite its challenges, Gietl said she enjoyed the experiments and that the class helped her build confidence. “I think that’s the cool thing about the class, too, is that you’re doing most of these experiments on yourself, so everyone’s signals look a little different,” Gietl said. “I liked the last lab when you have to design the experiment yourself. We did one on cardiac output and lung volume. One of my lab partners was a semiprofessional cyclist, so we brought in his bike equipment that we could hook up to measure things from his body and made a lab about it. That was fun and showed you you’ve done this enough that you can design an experiment and write a 15-page report about it.”

“In the lab component, we could actually watch the theories and everything that we were learning about in practice,” Blake said. “We electrically stimulated frog muscles and watched the contractions and the action potentials, measured the sodium gradients and really learned specifically how nerves work to contract muscles. I remember doing a lab where we hooked ourselves up to cardiac monitors, and we actually massaged our own vagal nerves and watched the impact that it had on our heart rate. When I was studying that same phenomenon in medical school and how your heart rate can change with pressure on the vagus nerve or with respiration, it was like an anchor point to be able to really have seen that in real-time in a laboratory setting.”

Alumni Survey Are you an alumni with memories of taking Quantitative Physiology?

Share your favorite moments from the courses with us! Take our survey and your memory may appear on WashU BME social media.

Beyond QP, Blake says that her engineering education has shaped her professionally.

“I didn’t know how my engineering background would impact my actual formal career,” Blake said. “I knew I wanted to be a doctor, but so many things did have applicability to both medical school as well as what I do now in interventional pain. There are probably so many subtle ways that the knowledge that I gained during college and during those classes has influenced my ability to understand and apply my own specialty.”

Likewise, Helen Blake, MD, who earned a bachelor’s degree from WashU in 2003 and is an interventional pain physician in St. Louis, cites QP as a formative experience during her path to medical school.

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student news Students win Rice360 global health tech design competition jerry naunheim

Students gain engineering skills in cardiovascular research experience

From left: Trinh Woolridge, Samantha Olson and Savannah Chatman

Fistula Fighters, a team of three McKelvey School of Engineering students, won first place at the Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies’ annual Global Health Technologies Design Competition. Team members Trinh Woolridge, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering, and Savannah Chatman and Samantha Olson, both Dual Degree students in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, competed against 27 teams to take home the $500 top prize.

The competition recognizes designs for low-cost technologies that address global health challenges in resource-limited settings.

The team developed a wearable device for those experiencing urinary incontinence due to vesicovaginal fistulas, which are abnormal openings between the bladder and vagina that result from prolonged and obstructed labor. The device is a biker-style short with a built-in urine collection cup and bag, enabling users to seamlessly perform everyday tasks and avoid the stigma associated with incontinence.

Throughout the project, the group worked with mentors Christine O'Brien, assistant professor of biomedical engineering; Lewis Wall, professor of sociocultural anthropology in Arts & Sciences and of obstetrics & gynecology at the School of Medicine; and Tracy Spitznagle, professor of physical therapy in the School of Medicine.

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The second year of the Cardiovascular Research Summer Program (CardS) was held this summer at the McKelvey School of Engineering. The 10-week program offered undergraduate students an opportunity to participate in cardiovascular research and to gain hands-on experience. Students also participated in a course on cardiac physiology and developing research skills, weekly Lunch & Learns and social activities.

Chao Zhou, professor of biomedical engineering, began this program with support from an Institutional Award for Undergraduate Student Training from the American Heart Association.

BME internship program benefits local companies and students alike Each year, the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering offers the St. Louis Internship Program for Biomedical Engineers that connects students with small local companies to gain hands-on experiences.

This summer, seven students participated in the program at six different companies. Most of the organizations are startups, which gives students the opportunity to have a more direct role. Since the program began, 48 interns have participated.

2023 Intern Report Read more about the projects and experiences BME interns had this summer.

Fall 2023 Students Student design and innovation honored at BME Day

281 52 156

undergraduate students

The Department of Biomedical Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering hosted its annual BME Day that celebrates student design groups and graduate student research, outreach and leadership. Student teams took part in the senior design competition, where they present projects addressing a biomedical problem that they designed during the yearlong capstone course.

Students and faculty members took part in the Department of Biomedical Engineering’s annual research retreat, which aims to encourage departmental collaboration and community held at Laumeier Sculpture Park.

All of the department’s doctoral students were invited to take part in the retreat, which included keynote talks from faculty, presentations from senior doctoral candidates and a poster session.

The event brought together students and faculty to discuss achievements in their respective fields while encouraging collaboration. It also served as an opportunity to introduce incoming graduate students to the biomedical engineering community at Washington University in St. Louis.

PhD Students

54+46+x70 100+x70 54%

100%

of BME STudents are women

of PhD students are fully-funded

Where do our recent undergraduates go?

WashU BME hosts student-led retreat

Master’s students

34+51+15 34% entered the workforce 51% continued education 14% internship, Co-op, other

41%

of PhD students received an external fellowship Fall 2022 BME PhD student population

29

NIH training fellowships

17

university fellowships

4

NSF graduate research fellowships

6

MD/PhD training fellowships

4

independent fellowships

11

Faculty outreach O’Brien lab mentors local high school researcher

Summer school: Vahey lab hosts K-12 educator for curriculum development When Christine O’Brien, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, met Cynthia Chapple, founder of Black Girls Do STEM, it was obvious they had great potential for collaboration. They’re both researchers who are passionate about science as well as mentoring girls in STEM. Black Girls Do STEM is a St. Louis-based nonprofit that serves as one of those support structures.

“We wanted something that would offer more than exposure,” O’Brien said. “We wanted to build students’ resumes as well as their confidence and create tangible results that would allow them to see themselves as scientists or engineers.”

That’s what led to Laura Brown, a rising senior at Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience, a magnet high school in St. Louis, spending six weeks in O’Brien’s lab as a high school researcher.

“I love science and engineering because it challenges me to think and problem solve,” Brown said. “I hope to become a cardiothoracic surgeon when I’m older, and since this experience, I’ve considered majoring in biomedical engineering.”

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Michael Vahey’s lab worked with a local chemistry teacher to develop lesson plans inspired by the team’s work with fluorescence microscopy When Kirstin Blase learned about a summer position in the lab of Michael Vahey, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, she was excited by the opportunity to return to research.

Blase, a chemistry teacher at Villa Duchesne, had previously worked in the Division of Radiological Sciences in the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine, where she researched radioactive compounds used in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging.

“As a scientist, I loved being in the lab and doing research,” Blase said. “As a teacher, the idea of observing real-world research and incorporating it into my classroom sounded like fun.”

The position, funded by Vahey’s recent award from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, allows a local K-12 educator to spend time in the lab developing curriculum inspired by the team’s work with fluorescent microscopy.

“The overarching goal of the program is to have lesson plans developed and published for anyone who wants to try them out in their classroom,” Vahey said. “We want this to be an active partnership with teachers and educators so we can help disseminate that information.”

Vahey worked with the university’s Institute for School Partnership (ISP) to recruit a teacher. The ISP also will distribute the finished lesson plans to the wider community once they’re ready for classroom use.

“One of the hurdles a lot of STEM teachers try to overcome is the idea that this material is too hard,” Blase said. “‘Hard’ just means that it requires more of our attention, focus and energy to master. Every year, I hope that each student has one unit or lab they’re interested in and had fun with.”

Blase spent six weeks in Vahey’s lab working about 20 hours a week. Lab members taught her how to use the fluorescent microscope, as well as to collect and prepare E. coli plasmids, DNA floating within the bacteria’s cell, for later study.

Faculty Awards Wagenseil named Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society Jessica Wagenseil, professor of mechanical engineering & materials science and vice dean for faculty advancement in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been elected a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). She was installed at the society’s annual conference in October 2023.

Wagenseil, affiliate faculty member of biomedical engineering, joins more than 350 Fellows honored for their impactful achievements in their area of interest, significant contributions to the

biomedical engineering community and leadership within their field of interest and within the society.

A Washington University alumna, Wagenseil studies cardiovascular mechanics, focusing on cardiovascular development, extracellular matrix proteins and microstructurally based constitutive modeling. Her work is important for testing clinical interventions for elastinrelated diseases and for designing better protocols for building tissue-engineered blood vessels. Among her awards and honors are the American Society for Matrix Biology Iozzo Award for Mid-Career Investigators in 2020; the Skalak Award for best paper in the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering in 2019; and the Dean’s Award for Extraordinary Service from Washington University in 2017.

O’Brien team advances in NIH maternal health challenge Christine O’Brien, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering, and her team, including Leo Shmuylovich, MD, PhD, assistant professor of dermatology in the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, and Kelsey Mayo, CEO of Armor Medical Inc., have received

a $320,000 prize in the third phase of the National Institutes of Health’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics Technology (RADx Tech) for Maternal Health Challenge.

The challenge that will ultimately award $8 million in total prizes to inventors who are developing home-based and point-ofcare maternal health diagnostic devices, wearables or other technologies designed to reduce maternal complications and death in those who live where maternity care is limited.

NSF CAREER Awards

Molecular activity of the immune system to get a closer look The COVID-19 pandemic brought immune systems into new light as researchers worldwide worked quickly to learn about the virus and develop effective vaccines.

However, much remains unknown about how proteins in the immune system assemble and engage in response to a viral invasion.

Michael Vahey, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a five-year, $606,563 CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to establish the factors that drive the assembly of viral immune complexes and study how they interact with immune cell receptors.

Making every photon count In imaging applications used for everything from astronomy to medical imaging, scientists aim to extract maximum information from each tiny bit of light they capture. However, current approaches lose information during data processing, necessitating new imaging methods to make each photon count.

Abhinav Jha, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering and of radiology at Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology in the School of Medicine, both at Washington University in St. Louis, will develop one such method with a five-year, $500,000 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

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Grant news Brain-machine interfaces for insects to study principles of odor-guided navigation The ability to study neural responses in behaving insects is essential to understanding the robust solutions biological systems have developed for several engineering problems.

Researchers in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have long sought to understand the power of the locusts’ sensing, computing and locomotory capabilities.

Barani Raman, professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering, is leading a multidisciplinary team to study how the locust brain transforms sensory input into behavior with a four-year, $4.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Strategies for Understanding Neural and Cognitive Systems

(NCS) program. The grant converges years of research in Raman’s lab with that of his longtime WashU collaborators, including Shantanu Chakrabartty, professor of electrical & systems engineering, and Srikanth Singamaneni, professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, as well as Alexandra Rutz, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, and Yehuda Ben-Shahar, professor of biology, also at WashU. “Insects are an engineering marvel,” Raman said. “They possess diverse sensing modalities and locomotory responses yet contained in such a small package. We want to engineer tools to study the amazing capabilities of these relatively simpler organisms.”

A design of experiments approach to precision vaccine adjuvants Adjuvants are added to vaccines to improve protection, extend the duration of protection and reduce the dose or number of boosters required.

As vaccines are increasingly in demand for a growing variety of diseases and populations, vaccine developers are turning to combination adjuvants, which often work together to stimulate and activate a variety of cells and immune mechanisms, to meet clinical needs.

Jai Rudra, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, won a four-year, $2 million award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious 14

Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to support his lab’s research on mechanisms of nanomaterials-based combination adjuvants.

Rudra’s lab specializes in designing biomaterials for vaccine development and immunotherapy and has previously developed adjuvants based on synthetic nanomaterials, which act via mechanisms distinct from adjuvants extracted from microbes. With NIH support, Rudra plans to develop new combination adjuvants by combining engineered nanomaterials and immune adjuvants approved for human use or under development in the vaccine pipeline.

jerry naunheim

Grant funding

whitney curtis

New imaging technology may reduce surgeries for rectal cancer patients

$14.8 M BME Research Awards

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cause of cancer death in the United States among men and women, and the incidence among people under age 50 has risen to one in five new diagnoses, according to the American Cancer Society. While treatment allows some patients to avoid surgery, existing technology makes it difficult to determine whether the cancer has been successfully treated with no residual cancers.

Quing Zhu, a biomedical engineer, and Matthew Mutch, MD, a colorectal surgeon at the School of Medicine, and their collaborators have been working together to address this problem by developing a new imaging technology combining photoacoustic microscopy, ultrasound and deep learning to better determine whether a rectal cancer patient is successfully treated with radiation and chemotherapy and can be safely followed-up with nonsurgical imaging monitoring. With a four-year, $1.75 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the team led by Zhu and Mutch will pursue development of this new technology that would help physicians to accurately identify a treated rectal tumor bed with residual cancers that need surgery or normalized rectal tissue without need for surgery.

In the past, Stage 2 and 3 rectal cancers have been treated with radiation and chemotherapy followed by surgical removal of the cancerous tissue. However, advances in preoperative treatment enable up to 35% of these patients to achieve complete tumor death with radiation and chemotherapy alone. In these individuals, surgical resection has shown no benefit and carries the significant risks of major complications, prolonged recovery and reduced quality of life. Existing imaging modalities to determine whether the tumor has been eliminated make it difficult for surgeons to distinguish between a residual cancer and scar tissue, resulting in surgery remaining the standard of care.

FUNDING BY source INDUSTRY: 1%

1+721073

DOD: 3%

HIGHER ED INSTITUTE: 7% FOUNDATION: 7%

NSF: 10%

NIH: 72%

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non - profit org. u.s. postage

paid

st. louis, mo permit no. 2535

MSC 1163-0206-01 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Help support our future biomedical engineers MAKE A GIFT james byard/washington university

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