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The Doctor Is In

admin — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 20:33:41 +0000

The Doctor Is In admin Thu, 07/31/2025 - 16:33

Shao-Yun Hsu kept seeing the same name on research study after research study: Brandon Dixon, an engineer at Georgia Tech.

Hsu, a microsurgeon in Taiwan, was trying to figure out how to help her patients with lymphedema — an uncomfortable and life-limiting swelling in limbs that results from lymph nodes failing to drain fluid from an arm or leg.

Hsu had what she thought was a basic question: exactly how much fluid each small lymphatic vessel could drain. And as she dug into the clinical research, she saw Dixon’s name over and over.

Spoiler alert: There’s no good answer to Hsu’s question. At least not yet. But the search has brought her to Atlanta to pursue a biomedical engineering Ph.D. in Dixon’s lab.

Together, they’re embarking on a new project with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that could one day help Hsu’s patients by making a lymph node transplant a viable option for many more people who suffer from lymphedema.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Summary sentence

Microsurgeon Shao-Yun Hsu takes treating her patients all the way to Georgia Tech, where she’s getting a Ph.D. and developing biomaterials to restore function — and quality of life — for people with lymphedema.

Summary

Dateline

Thu, 07/31/2025 - 12:00

jstewart@gatech.edu

Contact

Joshua Stewart
College of Engineering

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lymphedema

brandon dixon

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Mercury ID

683452

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Thu, 07/31/2025 - 16:32

These ‘Exploding’ Capsules Could Deliver Insulin Without a Needle

admin — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 13:22:30 +0000

These ‘Exploding’ Capsules Could Deliver Insulin Without a Needle admin Tue, 07/08/2025 - 09:22

Georgia Tech engineers have created a pill that could effectively deliver insulin and other injectable drugs, making medicines for chronic illnesses easier for patients to take, less invasive, and potentially less expensive.

Along with insulin, it also could be used for semaglutide — the popular GLP-1 medication sold as Ozempic and Wegovy — and a host of other top-selling protein-based medications like antibodies and growth hormone that are part of a $400 billion market.

These drugs usually have to be injected because they can’t overcome the protective barriers of the gastrointestinal tract. Georgia Tech’s new capsule uses a small pressurized “explosion” to shoot medicine past those barriers in the small intestine and into the bloodstream. Unlike other designs, it has no complicated moving parts and requires no battery or stored energy.

“This study introduces a new way of drug delivery that is as easy as swallowing a pill and replaces the need for painful injections,” said Mark Prausnitz, who created the pill in his lab with former Ph.D. student Joshua Palacios and other student researchers.

In animal lab tests, they showed their capsule lowered blood sugar levels just like traditional insulin injections. The researchers reported their pill design and study results DATE in the Journal of Controlled Release.

Read about the technology on the College of Engineering website.

Summary sentence

Engineers use sodium bicarb to “self-pressurize” a pill able to deliver drugs that usually require injection directly to the small intestine.

Summary

Engineers use sodium bicarb to “self-pressurize” a pill able to deliver drugs that usually require injection directly to the small intestine.

Dateline

Tue, 07/08/2025 - 12:00

jstewart@gatech.edu

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Joshua Stewart
College of Engineering

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Mark Prausnitz

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Biotechnology, Health, Bioengineering, Genetics

Chemistry and Chemical Engineering

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Mercury ID

682959

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Tue, 07/08/2025 - 09:21

How New Information Triggers the Brain to Navigate Changing Environments

admin — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 15:54:41 +0000

How New Information Triggers the Brain to Navigate Changing Environments admin Tue, 06/24/2025 - 11:54

Stephanie Prince explains her research with a scenario many Atlantans can relate to.

Imagine you’re driving to the Atlanta airport to pick up a friend. They call to say they’re in the terminal — but they’re not sure which one. North, maybe? You head that direction through the maze of roads around the airport.

Then they call back. They’re actually in the South Terminal. So you make a quick mental adjustment and switch your route to arrive at the correct side of the airport.

You had a plan. You received new information. You quickly changed your destination.
The question Prince has studied is this: How does that process happen in the brain?

A new research paper in Nature Communications is offering insights into that decision-making. And it could help scientists as they work to better understand when brain disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s impair those processes.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Summary sentence

Biomedical engineers show how two brain regions quickly adapt to shift focus from one planned destination to another.

Summary

Biomedical engineers show how two brain regions quickly adapt to shift focus from one planned destination to another.

Dateline

Tue, 06/24/2025 - 12:00

jstewart@gatech.edu

Contact

Joshua Stewart
College of Engineering

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Keywords

Annabelle Singer

Biomedical Engineering

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Research

Mercury ID

682871

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Tue, 06/24/2025 - 11:53

Painting a Target on Cancer to Make Therapy More Effective

admin — Mon, 19 May 2025 12:10:41 +0000

Painting a Target on Cancer to Make Therapy More Effective admin Mon, 05/19/2025 - 08:10

Biomedical engineers at Georgia Tech created a treatment that could one day unlock a universal strategy for treating some of the hardest-to-treat cancers — like those in the brain, breast, and colon — by teaching the immune system to see what it usually misses.

Their experimental approach worked against those kinds of cancers in lab tests and didn’t damage healthy tissues. Importantly, it also stopped cancer from returning.

While the therapy is still in early stages of development, it builds on well established, safe technologies, giving the treatment a clearer, quicker path to clinical trials and patient care.

Reported in May in the journal Nature Cancer, their technique is a one-two punch that flags tumor cells so they can be recognized and then eliminated by specially enhanced T cells from the patient’s own immune system.

Get all the details on the College of Engineering website.

Summary sentence

A BME team is putting a synthetic flag on tumors, then engineering a patient’s immune cells to find and eliminate cancer.

Summary

A BME team is putting a synthetic flag on tumors, then engineering a patient’s immune cells to find and eliminate cancer.

Dateline

Mon, 05/19/2025 - 12:00

jstewart@gatech.edu

Contact

Joshua Stewart
College of Engineering

Associated importer

Keywords

Gabe Kwong

CAR T-Cells

cancer therapy

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Mercury ID

682433

Source updated

Mon, 05/19/2025 - 08:10

Georgia Tech Offers New Astrobiology Minor

admin — Fri, 09 May 2025 14:00:41 +0000

Georgia Tech Offers New Astrobiology Minor admin Fri, 05/09/2025 - 10:00

Students from all majors are invited to register for the new Minor in Astrobiology at Georgia Tech. Welcoming its first enrolled students in Fall 2025, the minor is the latest degree offering from the College of Sciences and Georgia Tech Astrobiology Program.

Astrobio in Focus

The Minor in Astrobiology will provide a broad, interdisciplinary introduction to the field of astrobiology while encouraging exploration beyond students’ primary fields of study.

The program will foster the development of well-rounded scientists and engineers who will graduate with confidence in their knowledge and ability to engage in cutting-edge endeavors across the astrobiology discipline.

The Minor in Astrobiology is open to all undergraduates at Georgia Tech. Students who enroll now and meet program requirements may graduate with the minor designation as early as the end of Fall 2025 term.

Enrolled students will learn about the physical and chemical conditions for development of a habitable planet; deeply understand Earth, space, and planetary science as well as the origin and evolution of life on Earth; and critically evaluate scientific issues related to astrobiology in media and popular culture.

Habitable Planet

The foundation of the new minor is the popular School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) course EAS 1601: Habitable Planet. Led by EAS Assistant Professor Frances Rivera-Hernández, the course enrolls up to 300 students a semester and expands options for study and career horizons.

"Students from a lot of different majors enjoy 1601 where they get a true sense for the broadness of astrobio — stars, galaxies, biology, life beyond Earth, and how we create technology and science to explore those places,” Rivera-Hernández explains.

Like the new minor, EAS 1601 is also open to all majors. The class is offered in person across fall and spring semesters, and also available online during the summer term.

“We’re purposely very flexible with that course and the overall minor,” adds EAS Jean “Chris” Purvis Professor Jennifer Glass. “Students use EAS 1601 as a launchpoint to pick their interests for their wider field of study and to hone career interests — whether that’s space, biology, and autonomous rovers; hunting for chemical signs of life beyond our planet; or becoming an entrepreneur.”

Over the past five years, students in the class frequently asked for formal degree offerings in astrobiology. Glass and fellow faculty partnered with then-graduate fellow Tyler Roche to explore the idea of a minor, leveraging Sutherland Dean's Chair funding in 2021 to officially launch the Georgia Tech Astrobiology Program in tandem with the Astrobiology Graduate Certificate Program, Astrobiology Fellows, and ExplOrigins young researcher group.

Astrobio and Beyond

The Astrobiology Program is now supported by the new Georgia Tech Space Research Initiative and co-directed by Rivera-Hernández and EAS Assistant Professor Christopher E. Carr, who holds a primary appointment in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering.

Glass and Rivera-Hernández co-direct the Astrobiology Graduate Certificate Program, and co-direct the Astrobiology Minor with Nicholas Hud, Regents' Professor and Julius Brown Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

The team’s collaborative approach to interdisciplinary leadership mirrors unique opportunities ahead for students who are interested in exciting careers across the field of astrobiology and beyond.

“The minor is designed across three broad divisions of study,” Glass adds. “Whether you’re curious about ‘Foundations of Life,’ want to dive deep into ‘Earth, Space, and Other Worlds,’ or are exploring career ideas for ‘Astrobiology in a Wider World,’ we’ve built a solid home for you in Astrobio at Tech.”

The Minor in Astrobiology will be listed in the 2025-26 Catalog beginning May 12.

Summary sentence

Students from all majors are invited to register for the new Minor in Astrobiology at Georgia Tech.

Summary

Students from all majors are invited to register for the new Minor in Astrobiology at Georgia Tech. Welcoming its first enrolled students in Fall 2025, the minor is the latest degree offering from the College of Sciences and Georgia Tech Astrobiology Program.

Dateline

Thu, 05/08/2025 - 12:00

jess@cos.gatech.edu

Contact

Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences at Georgia Tech

(Story and Photo: Jess Hunt-Ralston)

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Mercury ID

682296

Source updated

Fri, 05/09/2025 - 09:59

Amid a Tropical Paradise Known as ‘Lizard Island,’ Researchers are Cracking Open Evolution’s Black Box

admin — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 14:56:41 +0000

Amid a Tropical Paradise Known as ‘Lizard Island,’ Researchers are Cracking Open Evolution’s Black Box admin Mon, 03/31/2025 - 10:56

Every morning in Miami, our fieldwork begins the same way. Fresh Cuban coffee and pastelitos – delicious Latin American pastries – fuel our team for another day of evolutionary detective work. Here we’re tracking evolution in real time, measuring natural selection as it happens in a community of Caribbean lizards.

As an assistant professor of ecology and evolution at Georgia Tech, my journey with these remarkable reptiles has taken me far from my London roots. The warm, humid air of Miami feels natural now, a far cry from the gray, drizzly and lizard-free streets of my British upbringing.

Our research takes place on a South Florida island roughly the size of an American football field – assuming we’re successful in sidestepping the American crocodiles that bask in the surrounding lake. We call it Lizard Island, and it’s a special place.

Here, since 2015, we’ve been conducting evolutionary research on five species of remarkable lizards called anoles. By studying the anoles, our team is working to understand one of biology’s most fundamental questions: How does natural selection drive evolution in real time?

Each May, coinciding with the start of the breeding season, we visit Lizard Island to capture, study and release all adult anoles – a population that fluctuates between 600 to 1,000. For the entire summer, female anoles lay a single egg every seven to 10 days. By October, a whole new generation has emerged.

The anoles of Lizard Island, clockwise from top left: Cuban knight anole, Hispaniolan bark anole, American green anole, Cuban brown anole, Puerto Rican crested anole. Neil Losin/Day's Edge Prods.

The Secret Lives of Lizards

Anoles aren’t early risers, so we don’t expect much activity until the Sun strengthens around 9:30 a.m.; this gives us time to prepare our equipment. Our team catches anoles with telescopic fishing poles fitted with little lassos, which we use to gently pluck the lizards off branches and tree trunks. Ask any lizard biologist about their preferred lasso material and you’ll spark the age-old debate: fishing line or dental floss? For what it’s worth, we recently converted – we’re now on Team Fishing Line.

Picture yourself as an anole on Lizard Island. Your life is short – typically just one year – and filled with daily challenges. You need to warm up in the Sun, find enough food to survive, search for a mate, guard your favorite branch from other lizards and avoid being eaten by a predator.

Like human beings, each lizard is unique. Some have longer legs, others stronger jaws, and all behave slightly differently. These differences could determine who survives and who doesn’t; who has the most babies and who doesn’t.

These outcomes drive evolution by natural selection, the process where organisms with traits better suited to their environment tend to survive and reproduce more. These advantageous traits are then passed on to future generations, gradually changing the species over time. However, scientists still have an incomplete understanding of exactly how each of these features predicts life’s winners and losers in the wild.

To understand how species evolve, researchers need to crack open this black box of evolution and investigate natural selection in wild populations. My colleagues and I are doing this by studying the anoles in exquisite detail. Last year was especially exciting: We ran what we called the Lizard Olympics.

Catching an anole with a lizard lasso. Look closely – the anole blends in quite well with the tree. Neil Losin/Day's Edge Prods.

Tiny Fishing Poles

As the morning heat builds, we spot our first lizards: Cuban brown anoles near to the ground, and the mottled scales of Hispaniolan bark anoles just above them. Further up, in the leafy tree canopies, are American green anoles, and the largest species, the Cuban knight anole, about the size of a newborn kitten.

In 2018, a new challenger entered the arena – the Puerto Rican crested anole, a species already present in Miami but one that hadn’t yet made it to Lizard Island. Its arrival provided us with an unexpected opportunity to study how species may evolve in real time in response to a new neighbor.

Catching these agile athletes requires patience and precision. With our modified fishing poles, we carefully loop the dental floss over their heads. Each capture site is marked with bright pink tape and a unique ID number; all lizards are then transported to our field laboratory just a short walk away.

In the laboratory, Stroud weighs a green anole. Neil Losin/Day's Edge Prods.

The Lizard Olympics

Here, the real Olympic trials begin. Every athlete goes through a comprehensive evaluation. Our portable X-ray machine reveals their skeletal structure, and high-resolution scans capture the intricate details of their feet. This is particularly critical: Like their gecko cousins, anoles possess remarkable sticky toes that allow them to cling to smooth surfaces such as leaves and maybe even survive hurricanes.

We also measure the shape and sharpness of their claws, as both features are crucial for these tree climbers. DNA samples provide a genetic fingerprint for each individual, allowing us to map family relationships across the island and see which is the most reproductively successful.

A portable X-ray machine takes detailed measurements of a lizard’s skeleton. James Stroud

The performance trials are where things get interesting. Imagine a tiny track meet for lizards. Using high-speed video cameras, we precisely test how fast each lizard runs, and using specialist equipment we measure how hard it bites and how strong it grips rough branches and smooth leaves.

These aren’t arbitrary measurements – each represents a potential evolutionary advantage. Fast lizards might better escape predators. Strong bites might determine winners in territorial disputes. Excellent grip is crucial for tree canopy acrobatics.

Each measurement helps us answer fundamental questions about evolution: Do faster lizards live longer? Do stronger biters produce more offspring? These are the essential metrics of evolution by natural selection.

The identification code lets researchers track the lizard’s growth and survival. Neil Losin/Day's Edge Prods.

As afternoon approaches, the team relocates each piece of bright pink tape and returns the corresponding lizard to the exact branch it was caught on. The anoles now sport two tiny 3-millimeter tags with a unique code that lets us identify it when we recapture it in future research trips, along with a small dot of white nail polish so we know not to catch it immediately after we let it go.

At 8:30 p.m., with the Lizard Olympics done for the day, we return to the island donning headlamps. Night brings a different perspective. Some of the most wily lizards are difficult to catch when fully charged by the midday Sun, so our nocturnal jaunts allow us to find them while they sleep. However, it’s often a race against time. Hungry lizard-eating corn snakes are also out hunting, trying to find the anoles before we do. As we wrap up another 16-hour day around 11:30 p.m., the team shares stories of the night.

Should a snake climb along a branch where a baby anole sleeps, the lizard will wake up and drop to the ground to escape. James Stroud

Evolution on the Island

Now spanning 10 years, 10 generations and five species, our Lizard Island dataset represents one of the longest-running active studies of its kind in evolutionary biology. By tracking which individuals survive and reproduce, and linking their success to specific physical traits and performance abilities, we’re documenting natural selection with unprecedented detail.

So far we have uncovered two fascinating patterns. Initially, it didn’t pay to be different on Lizard Island. Anoles with very average shapes and sizes lived longer compared with those that are slightly different. But when the crested anoles arrived, everything changed: Suddenly, brown anoles with longer legs had a survival advantage.

Anoles communicate with their dewlap, an expandable throat fan that signals other lizards. Jon Suh

The Lizard Olympics is helping us understand why. The larger, more aggressive crested anoles are forcing brown anoles to spend more time on the ground, where those with longer legs might run faster to escape predators – allowing them to better survive and pass on their long-leg genes, while shorter-legged anoles might be eaten before they can reproduce.

By watching natural selection unfold in response to environmental changes, rather than inferring it from fossil records, we’re providing cutting-edge evidence for evolutionary processes that Charles Darwin could only theorize about.

These long days of observation are slowly revealing one of biology’s most fundamental processes. Every lizard we catch, every measurement we take adds another piece to our understanding of how species adapt and evolve in an ever-changing world.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Summary sentence

Each May, coinciding with the start of the breeding season, we visit Lizard Island to capture, study and release all adult anoles – a population that fluctuates between 600 to 1,000.

Summary

Each May, coinciding with the start of the breeding season, we visit Lizard Island to capture, study and release all adult anoles – a population that fluctuates between 600 to 1,000.

Dateline

Tue, 03/25/2025 - 12:00

Contact

Author:

James T. Stroud, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolution, Georgia Institute of Technology

Media Contact:

Shelley Wunder-Smith
shelley.wunder-smith@research.gatech.edu

Keywords

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News room topics

Earth and Environment

Mercury ID

681459

Source updated

Mon, 03/31/2025 - 10:55

Measles Can Ravage the Immune System and Brain, Causing Long-Term Damage – A Virologist Explains

admin — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 14:41:40 +0000

Measles Can Ravage the Immune System and Brain, Causing Long-Term Damage – A Virologist Explains admin Mon, 03/31/2025 - 10:41

The measles outbreak that began in west Texas in late January 2025 continues to grow, with 400 confirmed cases in Texas and more than 50 in New Mexico and Oklahoma as of March 28.

Public health experts believe the numbers are much higher, however, and some worry about a bigger resurgence of the disease in the U.S. In the past two weeks, health officials have identified potential measles exposures in association with planes, trains and automobiles, including at Washington Dulles International Airport and on an Amtrak train from New York City to Washington, D.C. – as well as at health care facilities where the infected people sought medical attention.

Measles infections can be extremely serious. So far in 2025, 14% of the people who got measles had to be hospitalized. Last year, that number was 40%. Measles can damage the lungs and immune system, and also inflict permanent brain damage. Three in 1,000 people who get the disease die. But because measles vaccination programs in the U.S. over the past 60 years have been highly successful, few Americans under 50 have experienced measles directly, making it easy to think of the infection as a mere childhood rash with fever.

As a biologist who studies how viruses infect and kill cells and tissues, I believe it is important for people to understand how dangerous a measles infection can be.

Underappreciated Acute Effects

Measles is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet. One person who has it will infect nine out of 10 people nearby if those people are unvaccinated. A two-dose regimen of the vaccine, however, is 97% effective at preventing measles.

When the measles virus infects a person, it binds to specific proteins on the surface of cells. It then inserts its genome and replicates, destroying the cells in the process. This first happens in the upper respiratory tract and the lungs, where the virus can damage the person’s ability to breathe well. In both places, the virus also infects immune cells that carry it to the lymph nodes, and from there, throughout the body.

Measles can wipe out immune cells’ ability to recognize pathogens.

What generally lands people with measles in the hospital is the disease’s effects on the lungs. As the virus destroys lung cells, patients can develop viral pneumonia, which is characterized by severe coughing and difficulty breathing. Measles pneumonia afflicts about 1 in 20 children who get measles and is the most common cause of death from measles in young children.

The virus can directly invade the nervous system and also damage it by causing inflammation. Measles can cause acute brain damage in two different ways: a direct infection of the brain that occurs in roughly 1 in 1,000 people, or inflammation of the brain two to 30 days after infection that occurs with the same frequency. Children who survive these events can have permanent brain damage and impairments such as blindness and hearing loss.

Yearslong Consequences of Infection

An especially alarming but still poorly understood effect of measles infection is that it can reduce the immune system’s ability to recognize pathogens it has previously encountered. Researchers had long suspected that children who get the measles vaccine also tend to have better immunity to other diseases, but they were not sure why. A study published in 2019 found that having a measles infection destroyed between 11% and 75% of their antibodies, leaving them vulnerable to many of the infections to which they previously had immunity. This effect, called immune amnesia, lasts until people are reinfected or revaccinated against each disease their immune system forgot.

Occasionally, the virus can lie undetected in the brain of a person who recovered from measles and reactivate typically seven to 10 years later. This condition, called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, is a progressive dementia that is almost always fatal. It occurs in about 1 in 25,000 people who get measles but is about five times more common in babies infected with measles before age 1.

Researchers long thought that such infections were caused by a special strain of measles, but more recent research suggests that the measles virus can acquire mutations that enable it to infect the brain during the course of the original infection.

There is still much to learn about the measles virus. For example, researchers are exploring antibody therapies to treat severe measles. However, even if such treatments work, the best way to prevent the serious effects of measles is to avoid infection by getting vaccinated.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Summary sentence

Measles can damage the lungs and immune system, and also inflict permanent brain damage.

Summary

Measles can damage the lungs and immune system, and also inflict permanent brain damage.

Dateline

Mon, 03/31/2025 - 12:00

Contact

Author:

Peter Kasson, Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Media Contact:

Shelley Wunder-Smith
shelley.wunder-smith@research.gatech.edu

Keywords

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News room topics

Health and Medicine

Mercury ID

681458

Source updated

Mon, 03/31/2025 - 10:41

Curing the Incurable: Georgia Tech’s $40M Medical Mission

admin — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 13:03:41 +0000

Curing the Incurable: Georgia Tech’s $40M Medical Mission admin Wed, 03/26/2025 - 09:03

Georgia Tech stands on the brink of a medical revolution, fueled by a monumental award from the Marcus Foundation. This transformative $40 million endeavor, with a principal investment of $20 million from the Marcus Foundation, promises to make high-quality, life-saving cell therapies more affordable, reliable, and accessible than ever before.

This was among the final initiatives personally directed by Bernie Marcus, the philanthropist, entrepreneur, and The Home Depot co-founder, before his passing in November 2024. Marcus invited Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera to his home in Boca Raton, Florida, to discuss Georgia Tech’s capability to usher in a new era of regenerative medicine.

“I’ll never forget my conversation with Bernie,” Cabrera said. “His challenge to Georgia Tech was clear: Use our engineering expertise to make cell therapies more accessible and cost-effective and develop cures for incurable diseases.

“This generous award is a testament to our shared belief in the power of innovation and technology to improve lives, and it’s an honor for Georgia Tech to fulfill Bernie’s vision for the future of healthcare,” he added.

The funding will ignite innovation at Georgia Tech’s Marcus Center of Excellence for Cell Biomanufacturing, formerly named the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing, which has been bioengineering potential cellular cures for more than seven years.  It will enable Georgia Tech engineers to advance work at the center and within the National Science Foundation-funded Engineering Research Center in Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT), to develop automated bioreactor systems that eliminate the need for costly cleanrooms.

Marcus/CMaT Director Johnna Temenoff compared the current state of cell therapies to the early days of the automobile industry. She explained this new injection of funds will allow her team to shift from handcrafted production to an assembly-line approach.

“I firmly believe that for us to make good on the promises of these biotechnologies to improve healthcare worldwide, we must be able to manufacture them in a more reproducible and cost-effective manner. Georgia Tech’s distinctive strength lies in our engineering expertise, allowing us to tackle difficult biological problems,” Temenoff said.

The impact of this award extends beyond the laboratory. It has the potential to significantly boost Georgia's bioeconomy, making the state a hub for advanced therapy development and biomanufacturing. It will attract jobs and top-tier talent to the region.

Dr. Jonathan Simons, chief science officer and medical director of the Marcus Foundation, said Bernie Marcus liked to think of cells as “living drugs.”

Simons explained, “This is life-extending, lifesaving, and life-changing material. It's not like making a drug like penicillin or Tylenol. This is not like a little blister pack of pills. This is a whole new frontier for pharmacology and the pharmaceutical industry.”

Simons emphasized this is the latest chapter of both the Marcus Foundation’s investment in biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Bernie Marcus’s enduring biomedical research philanthropy.

“I think Bernie would say, ‘I’m not interested in my legacy. I’m interested in how many patients in five years will benefit from this $40 million effort. It’s all about lives changed, lives saved, and diseases ended,’” he said.

To learn more about Georgia Tech’s research in cell and gene therapy biomanufacturing, visit cellmanufacturing.gatech.edu.

Summary sentence

A significant grant from the Marcus Foundation will support the Institute's research into making cell therapies more affordable.

Summary

A significant grant from the Marcus Foundation will support the Institute's research into making cell therapies more affordable.

Dateline

Wed, 03/26/2025 - 12:00

swundersmith3@gatech.edu

Contact

Shelley Wunder-Smith
Director of Research Communications

Associated importer

Keywords

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News room topics

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Categories

Biotechnology, Health, Bioengineering, Genetics

Research

Mercury ID

681369

Source updated

Wed, 03/26/2025 - 09:03

Nature's Time Machine: How Long-Term Studies Unlock Evolution's Secrets

admin — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 15:24:41 +0000

Nature's Time Machine: How Long-Term Studies Unlock Evolution's Secrets admin Mon, 03/24/2025 - 11:24

Georgia Tech scientists are revealing how decades-long research programs have transformed our understanding of evolution, from laboratory petri dishes to tropical islands — along the way uncovering secrets that would remain hidden in shorter studies.

Through a new review paper published in Nature, the researchers underscore how long-term studies have captured evolution's most elusive processes, including the real-time formation of new species and the emergence of biological innovations.

"Evolution isn't just about change over millions of years in fossils — it's happening all around us, right now," says James Stroud, the paper’s lead author and an Elizabeth Smithgall Watts Early Career Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. "However, to understand evolution, we need to watch it unfold in real time, often over many generations. Long-term studies allow us to do that by giving us a front-row seat to evolution in action."

The paper, “Long-term studies provide unique insights into evolution,” is the first-ever comprehensive analysis of these types of long-term evolutionary studies, and examines some of the longest-running evolutionary experiments and field studies to date, highlighting how they provide new perspectives on evolution. For example, in the Galápagos, a 40-year field study of Darwin’s finches — songbirds named after evolutionary biology’s famous founder — documented the formation of a new species through hybridization. In the lab, a study spanning 75,000 generations of bacteria showed populations unexpectedly evolving completely new metabolic abilities.

“These remarkable evolutionary events were only caught because of the long-term nature of the research programs,” Stroud says. “Even if short-term studies captured similar events, their evolutionary significance would be hard to assess without the historical context that long-term research provides.”

“The most fascinating results from long-term evolution studies are often completely unexpected — they're serendipitous discoveries that couldn't have been predicted at the start,” explains the paper’s co-author, Will Ratcliff, Sutherland Professor in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences at Georgia Tech.

“While we can accelerate many aspects of scientific research today, evolution still moves at its own pace,” Ratcliff adds. “There's no technological shortcut for watching species adapt across generations.”

Decades of discovery — from labs to islands

The new paper also highlights a growing challenge in modern science: the critical importance of supporting long-term research in an academic landscape that increasingly favors quick results and short-term funding. Yet, they say, some of biology's most profound insights emerge only through multi-decadal efforts.

Those challenges and rewards are familiar to Stroud and Ratcliff, who operate their own long-term evolutionary research programs at Georgia Tech.

In South Florida, Stroud’s ‘Lizard Island’ is helping document evolution in action across the football field-sized island’s 1,000-lizard population. By studying a community of five species, his research is providing unique insights into how evolution maintains species’ differences, and how species evolve when new competitors arrive. Now operating for a decade, it is one of the world’s longest-running active evolutionary studies of its kind.

In his lab at Georgia Tech, Ratcliff studies the origin of complex life — specifically, how single-celled organisms become multicellular. His Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE) on snowflake yeast has run for more than 9,000 generations, with aims to continue for the next 25 years. The work has shown how key steps in the evolutionary transition from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms occur far more easily than previously understood.

Important work in a changing world

Stroud says that the insights from these types of studies, and this review paper, are arriving at a crucial moment. “The world is rapidly changing, which poses unprecedented challenges to Earth's biodiversity,” he explains. “It has never been more important to understand how organisms adapt to changing environments over time.”

“Long-term studies provide our best window into achieving this,” he adds. “We can document, in real time, both short-term and long-term evolutionary responses of species to changes in their environment like climate change and habitat modification."

By drawing together evolution's longest-running experiments and field studies for the first time, Stroud and Ratcliff offer key insights into studying this fundamental process, suggesting that understanding life's past — and predicting its future — requires not just advanced technology or new methods, but also the simple power of time.

Funding: The US National Institutes of Health and the NSF Division of Environmental Biology

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08597-9

Summary sentence

Through a new review paper published in Nature, Georgia Tech scientists are revealing how decades-long research programs have transformed our understanding of evolution, uncovering secrets that would remain hidden in shorter studies.

Summary

Through a new review paper published in Nature, Georgia Tech scientists are revealing how decades-long research programs have transformed our understanding of evolution, uncovering secrets that would remain hidden in shorter studies.

Dateline

Wed, 03/19/2025 - 12:00

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Written by Selena Langner

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Mon, 03/24/2025 - 11:22

Thermal Imaging Could be a Simple, Highly Accurate Way to Track Vital Signs

admin — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:26:32 +0000

Thermal Imaging Could be a Simple, Highly Accurate Way to Track Vital Signs admin Wed, 03/19/2025 - 11:26

Biomedical engineers at Georgia Tech have developed a system for collecting and processing thermal images that allows for reliable, detailed measurement of vital signs such as respiration and heart rate or body temperature.

Their monitoring approach is passive and requires no contact. The system could one day lead to early detection for cancer or other diseases by flagging subtle changes in body tissues.

The researchers have overcome the spectral ambiguity inherent in conventional thermal imaging, sharpening the texture and detail they can extract from images and removing the effects of heat from the environment surrounding a subject. They published details of their work March 19 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Summary sentence

Using a simple setup and advanced processing, engineers can reliably detect physiological signals such as temperature, breathing, and pulse. The technology could open new possibilities for early disease detection.

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Wed, 03/19/2025 - 12:00

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Wed, 03/19/2025 - 11:25

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