News

Marcu Lab Receives Grant From National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute for Interventional Cardiology

Research in Laura Marcu’s laboratory promotes better diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of human diseases through advancements in biophotonics technology – a field at the interface of physical sciences, engineering, biology, and medicine.  

They have received their third National Institutes for Health grant for continuing work on the clinical applications of fluorescent lifetime imaging (FLIm) for diagnostic and surgical purposes.  

BME Graduate Student Hannah O'Toole Wins Prestigious NIH Research Fellowship for Work on Biophotonics in Cancer Research

Biomedical engineering Ph.D. student Hannah O'Toole was recently awarded a National Institutes of Health T32 Chemical Biology Program fellowship for her work in sensing biomarkers for cancerous tumors through biophotonics technology. "The whole idea of biophotonics is to use light to interrogate biological samples, typically to make some diagnostic observations," O'Toole explains.  

Biomedical Engineering Professor Cheemeng Tan Receives NIH Grant to Engineer Synthetic Bacteria for Translational Clinical Medicine

Unlike the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the synthetic bacteria in Cheemeng Tan’s lab will not find a way to replicate. As he explains, ‘We will modify our synthetic bacteria using a method that turns them into controllable living micromachines.’ That means clinicians will be able to administer them in a controlled way for medical applications, including delivering medicine within the body, CRISPR-Cas gene editing, killing cancer cells, and administering probiotics and oral vaccines.

How Cadherins Let Cells Hold On and Let Go of Each Other

A fundamental question in cell biology is, how do cells control how strongly to stick to each other? Sometimes, cells need to be quite tightly glued together, for example in the lining of a blood vessel. At other times, they need to be able to peel apart. Understanding how cells can stick or unstick from each other is important for understanding tissue growth and wound healing. Cancers metastasize when tumor cells can come unstuck from a tumor and spread to other tissues.

Marcu Lab Receives R01 Grant to Continue FLIm Robotic Cancer Surgery Research

Laura Marcu, professor of biomedical engineering, has received a $3.2M grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue her groundbreaking research on clinical applications of Fluorescent Lifetime Imaging (FLIm). Working with  surgeons in the UC Davis Department of Otolaryngology and in collaboration with Intuitive Surgical Inc. her team will add an innovative FLIm technology to the da Vinci robotic surgical system to better identify cancerous tissue during  trans-oral-robotic-surgery (TORS).

Job Opportunity: Postdoctoral Position in Innate Immunity and Lab-chip Technology

A postdoctoral position is available in the Simon Laboratory for a candidate with an interest in performing novel research on innate immunity using vascular mimetic based lab-chip microfluidics technology. This position is funded by a new multi-PI grant to study the host immune response to skin infections using a novel bone marrow-on-a-chip device.

UC Davis BME Community Comes Together to Create Health, Equity and Wellness Committee

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the Spring of 2020 and the national attention on the severe problems that remain regarding anti-black racism in the U.S., the department of biomedical engineering came together to form the Health, Equity and Wellness (HEW) committee to address some of the practices and policies in their community that support a given culture.

Faculty Spotlight: Jamal S. Lewis

Jamal S. Lewis is an assistant professor in the biomedical engineering department. His lab (https://www.ucdavislewislab.com/) focuses on the development of biomaterial systems that can manipulate the immune system. The group plans to design the next generation of immunotherapeutics for applications in immune-related diseases. This multidisciplinary work incorporates aspects of biomaterials engineering, drug delivery and immunology. We recently sat down with him to catch up on some of his latest achievements and his thoughts on being Black in BME.