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Bioengineering

From lab to classroom: The Center for Engineering MechanoBiology
Kayla Gay looking into a microscope in a lab.

Kayla Gay, who teaches middle school in Northwest Philadelphia, spent the summer learning about lab techniques that she can bring back to her classroom.

(Image: Courtesy of Kayla Gay)

From lab to classroom: The Center for Engineering MechanoBiology

Penn’s Center for Engineering Mechanobiology is a summer program for K-12 teachers in Philadelphia to work with scientists and engineers to develop innovative, hands-on lessons to engage students in STEM-integrated education.

Ian Scheffler

Building tomorrow’s innovators: Penn’s Widjaja Entrepreneurship Fellows Program
A group of students at Penn in class at a table.

David Bakalov, center, hopes to leverage his Fellows experience to develop new medical treatments.

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Building tomorrow’s innovators: Penn’s Widjaja Entrepreneurship Fellows Program

The Sugi and Millie Widjaja Engineering Entrepreneurship Fellows Program matches 12 Penn students with mentors to learn what it takes to transform ideas into potential companies.

Ian Scheffler

Stentix wins the 2025 Y-Prize
Winners of Penn’s 2025 Y-Prize holding their certificates.

The Stentix team (top) Summer Cobb and Amanda Kossoff, (bottom) Aarsha Shah and Elizabeth Jia, with judges (descending left) Matt Fitz-Henry, Jason Smith, Jennifer Gilburg, and Sasha Schrode, and (descending right) David Hsu, Gerald Lopez, and Dean Miller.

(Image: Courtesy of the William and Phyllis Mack Institute for Innovation Management)

Stentix wins the 2025 Y-Prize

The winning team of Penn Engineering’s annual award for entrepreneurial technology have created a noninvasive mechanism to adjust medical stent positioning using magnetic reconfiguration.

From the William and Phyllis Mack Institute for Innovation Management

Borrowing nature’s blueprint: How scientists replicated bone marrow
A chip with bioengineered bone marrow.

The new chip will allow for automated experiments, and can be connected to chip-based models of other organ systems, like the lungs.

(Image: Dan Huh)

Borrowing nature’s blueprint: How scientists replicated bone marrow

A collaborative research team from Penn Engineering, Penn Medicine, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have developed a chip that mimics human bone marrow.

Ian Scheffler

BEND lipids improve LNP mRNA delivery and gene editing
A gloved hand holding a beaker of lipids in a lab.

A sample of the new lipids, which improve the success rate of lipid nanoparticles delivering their contents.

(Image: Sylvia Zhang)

BEND lipids improve LNP mRNA delivery and gene editing

Penn Engineering researchers have developed a new class of lipids called branched endosomal disruptor (BEND) lipids to better deliver mRNA and gene-editing tools.

Ian Scheffler

Breakthroughs in gene editing and expression control with mvGPT
Tyler Daniel using a pipette in a bioengineering lab.

Sherry Gao, Tyler Daniel (pictured), and their coauthors have developed a new tool that can simultaneously and independently edit multiple genes and regulate their expression.

(Image: Bella Ciervo)

Breakthroughs in gene editing and expression control with mvGPT

Penn Engineers have created a gene editing tool that can address different genetic diseases in the same cell.

Ian Scheffler

Penn Center for Innovation celebrates 10 years
Scientists holding a model of something (forthcoming)

(Image: Eric Sucar)

Penn Center for Innovation celebrates 10 years

The University’s nexus for technology transfer supports researchers in their innovative efforts, from CAR T to mRNA advancements that have dramatically reshaped the world.
Unlocking the brain: Peptide-guided nanoparticles deliver mRNA to neurons
Emily Han, a doctoral student in the Mitchell Lab.

Emily Han is a doctoral student in the Mitchell Lab in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

(Image: Bella Ciervo)

Unlocking the brain: Peptide-guided nanoparticles deliver mRNA to neurons

Researchers in the lab of Michael Mitchell in Penn Engineering have developed a method for delivering lipid nanoparticles across the blood-brain barrier specifically to targeted neurons.

Ian Scheffler

Brain research could help patients with paralysis move again
Iahn Cajigas and Qasim Qureshi review data on a desktop computer.

Iahn Cajigas and researcher Qasim Qureshi review data to identify consistent patterns in brain activity that will enable them to predict a patient’s intention to move in real time.

(Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine News)

Brain research could help patients with paralysis move again

Penn Medicine researchers are using machine learning to study the areas of the brain that control movement.

From Penn Medicine News

How fungi make a key medicinal molecule
A petri dish of fungal matter in a lab.

Image: Bella Ciervo

How fungi make a key medicinal molecule

New research from Penn Medicine has uncovered the catalyst that creates a compound in fungi whose derivatives are applied to treatments for cancer and inflammation.

Ian Scheffler