Bioengineering | Penn Today

Hand holding a blood vial that reads "complement (C3 + C4)"

Decoding ancient immunity networks

A collaborative team from Penn Medicine and Penn Engineering have unraveled the mathematics of a 500-million-year-old protein network that “decides” which foreign materials are friend or foe.

5 min. read

Climate and environment updates: Accidental breakthrough creates water from thin air

Daeyeon Lee led a team in the School of Engineering and Applied Science that discovered a method of harvesting water from the air.

Penn spinout that replicates human tissue for drug testing raises $40 million investment

Vivodyne, a Penn spinout that creates human tissue to replace animal testing in drug development, has raised $40 million in a second round of venture capital investment.

Rakesh Krishnan sits at a computer staring at a 3D rendering of a protein.

Delivering a one-two punch to superbugs to fight infections

Penn researchers create mirror-image molecules that both kill pathogens outright and rally the immune system—an advance aimed at the growing crisis of antimicrobial resistance.

3 min. read

AI x Science Postdoctoral Fellowship

Bhuvnesh Jain and René Vidal have teamed up to create the AI x Science Fellowship, which builds on the thriving postdoctoral program of the Data Driven Discovery Initiative to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration among researchers across the University.

6 min. read

Performer, biomedical engineer, and soon-to-be graduate

A performer and dancer, fourth-year Jordyn Harris has been a work-study student for the Platt House and managed tech for myriad student shows, while also advising engineering first-years and working as a researcher at a hospital.

5 min. read

Cesar de law Fuente, middle, between two researchers from his team, standing in their lab.

New AI technique can uncover antiviral compounds using limited data

AI algorithms, when combined with traditional laboratory methods, can uncover promising drug leads against human enterovirus 71.

1 min. read

Microrobots navigate diverse oral environments to deliver therapies

The common procedures patients experience in a dentist’s office—from dental plaque removal to a root canal of an infected tooth—could look and feel very different in just a few years due to a team of researchers at the Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry, a joint center of Penn Dental Medicine and Penn Engineering.

3D visualization showing a reddish-blue tumor mass with internal vasculature, surrounded by blue CAR T cells and small extracellular vesicles against a dark background.

Armoring CAR T cells to take on cancer

Wei Guo of the School of Arts & Sciences and colleagues from the Perelman School of Medicine, School of Veterinary Medicine, and School of Engineering and Applied Science have uncovered how solid tumors manipulate cancer-fighting CAR T cells through extracellular vesicles, causing the engineered CAR T cells to commit fratricide—essentially turning against each other instead of attacking the cancer.