Envisioning an animal-free drug supply, scientists have — for the first time — reprogrammed a common bacterium to make a designer polysaccharide molecule used in pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals. 

The era of widespread remote learning brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic requires online testing methods that effectively prevent cheating, especially in the form of collusion among students. With concerns about cheating on the rise across the country, a solution that also maintains student privacy is particularly valuable.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will receive a Grants for Arts Projects award this year to support the commissioning of new time-based art works at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC). Grants for Arts Projects is the principal grants program of the National Endowment for the Arts, awarding a total of nearly $25 million to support 1,073 projects in the arts across America in this first round of fiscal year 2021. This award marks the fifth consecutive year that EMPAC has received funding from the Arts Endowment.

Pingkun Yan, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is among 63 inventors named by the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) to the 2021 class of NAI Senior Members.

An antioxidant found in green tea may increase levels of p53, a natural anti-cancer protein, known as the “guardian of the genome” for its ability to repair DNA damage or destroy cancerous cells.

TROY, N.Y. — Jonathan Dordick, the Howard P. Isermann ’42 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), for his “contributions to methods for rapidly screening drug efficacy and toxicity, and biocatalytic technologies for improving human health.”

More than a dozen faculty members in the School of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have received 2020 School of Engineering Faculty Awards. The awards recognize innovative pedagogy, high impact research, and teamwork by Rensselaer Engineering faculty who have continued to push the frontiers despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an era of required social distancing and stressed medical resources, a virtual clinical environment that allows doctors and nurses to safely practice intubating a simulated COVID-19 patient, among other necessary procedures, could accelerate and enhance training efforts.

A new grant from the National Institute On Aging at the National Institutes of Health will support ongoing research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to address Alzheimer’s disease caused by gene mutations. According to Chunyu Wang, the principal investigator and an assistant professor of biological sciences at Rensselaer, the project seeks to understand and counter the mechanism that produces Amyloid-Beta 42 peptide in brain cells.

As cancer and tumor cells move inside the human body, they impart and are subject to mechanical forces. In order to understand how these actions affect cancer cell growth, spread, and invasion, a team of engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is developing new models that mimic aspects of the mechanical environment within the body, providing new insight into how and why tumors develop in certain ways.