Featured
Five years ago, Jeffrey Karp sat down to a dinner party with Massachusetts General Hospital dermatologist R. Rox Anderson. The two started talking, and by the end of the evening, Karp—himself a bioengineer at the nearby Brigham and Women’s Hospital—knew he wanted to make a collaboration happen between them. But on what? As he thought, he twisted his ring—his nickel allergy had flared up, and the skin on his finger was chafed and raw. Twist, and think; twist, think. And then it hit him: up to 45 million people in the United States shared his allergy, and the best measures they had to control it were small-molecule chelating creams with a dangerous tendency to leach into the skin.
We were recently featured in an article in partnership with the Nature Publishing group. The article highlights the importance of our focus solving important biomedical problems that can be effectively translated into effective solutions. It is still amazing what nature can teach us!
Source: Nature Publishing Group – From Nature To Clinic
One late evening in a coffee shop near McGill University, Jeff Karp overheard two students talking about drug delivery and tissue engineering. Jeff, an undergrad, listened closely as the students discussed two graduate level courses. At the time Jeff was questioning his major. He had switched from biology to chemical engineering but found himself bored in class; uninterested in the details of how refrigerators work. That night at the coffee shop Jeff learned about two classes that he became desperate to take: one on artificial organs and engineering and the other on cells and biotechnology. To enroll he would need to take no less than 5 prerequisite physiology classes. Undeterred, Jeff added a year to his undergrad studies and switched majors yet again, this time to biomedical engineering. He had finally found the right balance between medicine and engineering. Jeff says a “degree in engineering is a degree in problem-solving” and that he uses the skills he learned in undergrad every day. Read more on Feature – Nature Publishing Group…
Source: The Scientist
Sticking Power
An adhesive inspired by a parasitic worm could help better affix skin grafts in burn patients.
Bioengineer Jeffrey Karp is used to finding inspiration in unusual places. He’s looked to porcupines’ barbed quills and the sticky pads of geckos’ feet, for example, to develop medical adhesives. And one afternoon a few years ago he sat in his office with some of his lab members Googling parasites. Read more on The Scientist – Sticking Power…
Anchor Anand Naidoo joins Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society, and Jeffrey Karp from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute to talk about the controversy surrounding a recent breakthrough in stem cell research involving the cloning of human stem cells.
Read more on Prof Karp Live on CCTV! [Panel on the Ethics of New Stem Cell Cloning Method]…