News Brief: Hopkins BME researchers featured in major media outlets
Hopkins BME researchers were recently featured in several major media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Scientific American.
Natalia Trayanova, Murray B. Sachs Professor of Biomedical Engineering, was featured in a story entitled “A ‘Digital Twin’ of Your Heart Lets Doctors Test Treatments Before Surgery” in The Wall Street Journal.
The article describes Trayanova’s role at the forefront of digital twin technology, a $1.6 billion healthcare market that many clinicians believe has the potential to revolutionize patient care within the next five to ten years. Generated using patient-specific data such as medical images, digital twins, or virtual replicas of patient anatomy, allow researchers such as Trayanova to model treatments and predict patient responses before treatment begins. Trayanova is currently leading a clinical trial to test simulation-driven treatments for cardiac arrhythmias using computational models of patient hearts.
Read the full The Wall Street Journal article here.
Raj and Neera Sing Professor of Biomedical Engineering Kathleen Cullen’s research was featured in an article that appeared in The Washington Post recently about how Olympic gymnasts maintain their balance.
The article, titled “How Olympians – and the rest of us – stay balanced and upright,” shares insights from Cullen’s research on the vestibular system to explain how Olympians, as well as the average person, maintain balance. For American gymnast “Simone Biles perfecting something on the beam or on the mat, any sort of in-the-moment correction would be done with vestibular and proprioceptive feedback,” Cullen said in the article. “Everything else, including vision, is just too slow.”
Cullen’s research focuses on understanding how vestibular information is encoded and integrated with other information in the brain to ensure accurate perception and control of body posture and gaze. Recent work in her lab revealed how the cerebellum transforms sensory information into an estimate of body motion required for postural control, and how the brain computes internal models of voluntary movement.
Read the full The Washington Post article here.
An Aug. 20 Scientific American article about animal testing alternatives, titled “The End of the Lab Rat?” discusses how a growing, multidisciplinary community of researchers around the world is investigating alternatives to animal models, including Deok-Ho Kim, professor of biomedical engineering, and Anicca Harriot, a postdoctoral fellow in his lab.
Researchers in the Kim Lab develop human microphysiological systems and organoids for drug discovery and development. These bioengineered tissue models closely mimic human biology and could change the way diseases are studied and treated.
Kim’s team conducts studies using human stem cells rather than animal models: and because they share the same genes as their human donors, stem cell-based systems are particularly useful for studying rare diseases and other disorders for which animal models do not exist or fall short of producing good results. Current projects include testing the cardiotoxicity and effectiveness of new chemotherapy drugs—many of which fail in humans because they are unsafe or don’t work—and screening new therapies for muscular dystrophy.