Office for Research

To infect its victims, influenza A heads for the lungs, where it latches onto sialic acid on the surface of cells. Now, Rensselaer researchers have created the perfect decoy: a carefully constructed spherical nanoparticle coated in sialic acid that lures the influenza A virus to its doom. When misted into the lungs, the nanoparticle traps influenza A, holding it until the virus self-destructs.

Carolina Motter Catarino, a graduate student in chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer, has been awarded £10,000 from the Lush Prize, which is a collaboration between cosmetics company Lush and research organization Ethical Consumer. As the largest prize fund for the complete replacement of animal experiments, it funds projects working to end animal research in toxicology (chemical testing).

IBM and Rensselaer have announced the creation of the new Center for Health Empowerment by Analytics, Learning, and Semantics (HEALS). Located on the Rensselaer campus, the HEALS center is a five-year collaborative research effort aimed at researching how the application of advanced cognitive computing capabilities can help people to understand and improve their own health conditions.

Probiotic yogurts and pills promise better health, but the bacteria we ingest find a complex and challenging environment when they enter our gut. Food sources shift with every meal we eat, and the threat of pathogens is ever-present. In this competitive landscape, there’s a clear winner already on the field: The genus Bacteroides makes up 30 percent of the bacteria in the human gut, the single most abundant genus.

Researchers at Rensselaer and Albany Medical Center are working together to develop three-dimensional bioprinting and imaging techniques that will generate and analyze tumor models in the laboratory, with the goal of accelerating the development and optimization of personalized anti-cancer drugs.

We know Alzheimer’s as a brutal disease that dismantles our loved ones, but there is hope. Science and engineering researchers are looking inside the disease to identify early warning signs and develop the imaging techniques to see them, to unravel the bio-chemical puzzle that creates a toxic clump of misfolded proteins, and to develop and test new drugs and therapies that chip away at cognitive decline. The insights that emerge from such research are the seeds for medicine in the form of diagnostic tools, treatments, and hopefully, a cure.

Biology dictates that DNA creates proteins that create—among other things—metabolites, the outputs of metabolism. In organisms from fungi to humans, the relationship between these players is heavily influenced by our internal circadian clock, and responds to environmental influences (such as a prolonged day) with implications for industry as well as human health.

Two doctoral students in biomedical engineering who are working to help victims of spinal cord injuries, Anthony D’Amato and Christopher Johnson, have been awarded New York State Department of Health Spinal Cord Injury Research Board Predoctoral Fellowships.

Four years ago, Rensselaer and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai entered into a relationship to promote personalized medicine and medical care through collaborations in education, research, and development of new diagnostic tools and treatments. Several innovative projects on Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, diabetes, and osteoporosis have already emerged from this partnership.

Can a diet high in processed fat and sugar and Type 2 diabetes cause degeneration of intervertebral discs in the spine? If so, what is happening, and can it be prevented? As part of an ongoing collaboration between Rensselaer and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai—a partnership that draws upon the expertise of both schools to address significant health problems—researchers hope to answer those questions by investigating the link between diet, obesity-linked Type 2 diabetes, and intervertebral disc degeneration.

Most children are not diagnosed with ASD until after 4 years of age. Earlier diagnosis is generally acknowledged to lead to better outcomes as children engage in early intervention services. Now, an algorithm based on levels of metabolites found in a blood sample can accurately predict whether a child is on the autism spectrum of disorder (ASD), based upon a recent study. The algorithm, developed by researchers at Rensselaer, is the first physiological test for autism and opens the door to earlier diagnosis and potential future development of therapeutics.

Rensselaer has received a grant of nearly  $1 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for continuing work on a novel data visualization platform that will harness and accelerate the analysis of vast amounts of data for the foundation’s Healthy Birth, Growth, and Development Knowledge Integration initiative. 

This grant brings total giving from the foundation to Rensselaer over the course of this project to nearly $1,360,000.

To support its groundbreaking work in the emergent field of “exposomics,” the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded two grants to research teams from Rensselaer and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In addition, the state of New York and Mount Sinai provided $3.2 million to these grants in matching funds through the state’s Division of Science, Technology, and Innovation program; these funds were critical in securing the grants.

To learn what different cells do, scientists switch them on and off and observe the effects. There are many methods that do this, but they all have problems: too invasive, too slow, or not precise enough. Now, a new method to control the activity of neurons in mice, devised by scientists at Rensselaer and Rockefeller University, avoids these downfalls by using magnetic forces to remotely control the flow of ions into specifically targeted cells.

The National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health has awarded a five-year grant totaling more than $4 million to the Rensselaer Lighting Research Center (LRC) to support research that could benefit the more than 5.7 million Americans living with Alzheimer’s disease.

Understanding how the brain reacts to acceleration is essential to designing more effective protective equipment and strategies for preventing traumatic brain injury, or TBI.

The evolution of planet Earth and the emergence of life during its first half-billion years are inextricably linked, with a series of planetwide transformations — formation of the ocean, evolution of the atmosphere, and the growth of crust and continents — underpinning the environmental stepping-stones to life. But how, and in what order, were the ingredients for
life on Earth manufactured and assembled?