Volume 2 Issue 12, December 2024

Strategies for hands-on and hands-off teaching, coupled with dynamic adaptation to students and science, enable effective pedagogy in bioengineering.

The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 allows bioengineered models in drug testing, including benchtop testing and computational models. These alternatives to animal testing may particularly advance drug discovery in reproductive and pregnancy research.

Stress urinary incontinence (SUI), a frequently underdiagnosed condition that mainly affects women, lacks effective and long-term treatment options. MUVON Therapeutics has developed a tissue-engineered advanced therapy medicinal product for the treatment of SUI, based on autologous cells, which is being tested in a phase II clinical study — a challenging development effort.

An article in Science Robotics presents a wireless bioelectronic robot that integrates living motor neurons and cardiomyocytes to power movement.

Synthetic data can be created by deep generative models to address challenges associated with real data, such as privacy issues, bias and data scarcity. This Review discusses the generation and application of synthetic data in biomedicine and bioengineering, including quality assessment and validation.

Synthetic gene circuits can endow cells with therapeutic functions. This Review discusses synthetic macromolecular systems, encompassing transcriptional, translational and post-translational mechanisms, that conditionally regulate protein expression and activity in response to specific internal or external stimuli, and their role in enhancing the therapeutic efficacy and safety of engineered cell therapies.

Volumetric compression is a pervasive phenomenon in the human body, manifesting during development, limb movement, digestion, tumorigenesis and injury. This Review provides an in-depth discussion of emerging engineering methods centred on volumetric compression, including foundational rationales, design principles and illustrative applications.

Microbial catalysts must partition incoming substrate between synthesis of biomass and synthesis of a desired product. Two-stage bioprocesses can accommodate this tradeoff to maximize process productivity by temporal separation of growth and production phases. This Review discusses the challenges of maintaining a high metabolic activity during the production phase.