Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Boleslaw Szymanski, Ph.D., and Chunyu Wang, M.D. Ph.D., have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement Science (AAAS). Steven Cramer, Ph.D., who was elected AAAS Fellow in 2017, was elected Council Member of the Section on Engineering.

Heparin, the world’s most widely used blood thinner, is used during procedures ranging from kidney dialysis to open heart surgery. Currently, heparin is derived from pig intestines, but scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered how to make it in the lab. They have also developed a path to a biomanufacturing process that could potentially revolutionize how the world gets its supply of this crucial medicine. 

Steve Eshiemogie, a doctoral student studying chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been recognized as an honorable mention in the annual Cell Press Rising Black Scientists Awards for his essay “From village to lab: An African scientist’s quest for a sustainable future.” [MS1] More than 350 students across a range of scientific disciplines applied. 

This year, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers will begin work on a radically new approach to treating and preventing genetic diseases such as Alzheimer’s.It’s thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s TARGETED Challenge, which funds scientific research on ways to deliver gene editing tools directly to cells in the human body. 

For the first time, researchers have used bacteria to “upcycle” waste polyethylene

A team of researchers led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Jonathan S. Dordick, Ph.D., Institute Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has illuminated a new possibility for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19 in research published in Communications Biology.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have published research in Molecular Pharmaceuticals predicting how proteins interact in drug development. The research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is in collaboration with Amgen and University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. In the paper, researchers use a mathematical model to predict the viscosity of solutions of proteins to be used as drugs. This is critical in drug development as the viscosity determines the method of delivery — needle or IV.