UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering Podcast

UC San Diego nanoengineering Ph.D. student Caleb Christianson talks soft robotics, and puts his own research in context, in this 9-minute podcast. Christianson is part of the Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab led by mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Mike Tolley at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Read the story about the UC San Diego robotics association that graduate students Caleb Christianson and Ben Shih created.

http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2500

Jungwoo Lee is a materials scientist and UC San Diego nanoengineering graduate student working to make better batteries in the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Converstion run by NanoEngineering professor Shirley Meng at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Lee is also a key member of a UC San Diego battery startup called South 8 Technologies. The team is commercializing breakthrough research led by Cyrus Rustomji (UC San Diego PhD ‘15) in Shirley Meng’s lab. The researchers’ advances in electrolyte chemistry enable lithium-ion batteries to run at temperatures as low as -60 degrees Celsius with excellent performance. For comparison, today’s lithium-ion batteries stop working at -20 degrees Celsius. The South 8 Technologies team aims to leverage their work to provide unique battery solutions for a variety of transportation, high-atmosphere, aerospace and defense applications.

Bioengineers at UC San Diego have used ultrasound to activate genetically modified, live immune T cells so that they recognize and kill cancer cells. The new platform offers a possible path forward for non-invasively and remotely activating just the CAR-T cells that are near a specific tumor. “CAR-T cell therapy is becoming a paradigm-shifting therapeutic approach for cancer treatment,” said UC San Diego bioengineering professor Peter Yingxiao Wang. “However, major challenges remain before CAR-based immunotherapy can become widely adopted. For instance, the non-specific targeting of CAR-T cells against nonmalignant tissues can be life-threatening. This work could ultimately lead to an unprecedented precision and efficiency in CAR-T cell immunotherapy against solid tumors, while minimizing off-tumor toxicities.”

Paper title: "Mechanogenetics for the remote and non-invasive control of cancer immunotherapy," in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS). Authors of the study are Yijia Pan, Ziliang Huang, Molly Allen, Yiqian Wu, Ya-Ju Chang, Shu Chien and Yingxiao Wang at UC San Diego; Sangpil Yoon, Changyang Lee and K. Kirk Shung at University of Southern California; and Jie Sun and Michel Sadelain at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants HL121365, GM125379, CA204704 and CA209629), the National Science Foundation (grants CBET1360341 and DMS1361421) and the Beckman Laser Institute Foundation.

Read the full story and get a link to the paper here:

http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2412

Bioengineers at UC San Diego have used ultrasound to activate genetically modified, live immune T cells so that they recognize and kill cancer cells. The new platform offers a possible path forward for non-invasively and remotely activating just the CAR-T cells that are near a specific tumor. “CAR-T cell therapy is becoming a paradigm-shifting therapeutic approach for cancer treatment,” said UC San Diego bioengineering professor Peter Yingxiao Wang. “However, major challenges remain before CAR-based immunotherapy can become widely adopted. For instance, the non-specific targeting of CAR-T cells against nonmalignant tissues can be life-threatening. This work could ultimately lead to an unprecedented precision and efficiency in CAR-T cell immunotherapy against solid tumors, while minimizing off-tumor toxicities.”

Paper title: "Mechanogenetics for the remote and non-invasive control of cancer immunotherapy," in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS). Authors of the study are Yijia Pan, Ziliang Huang, Molly Allen, Yiqian Wu, Ya-Ju Chang, Shu Chien and Yingxiao Wang at UC San Diego; Sangpil Yoon, Changyang Lee and K. Kirk Shung at University of Southern California; and Jie Sun and Michel Sadelain at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants HL121365, GM125379, CA204704 and CA209629), the National Science Foundation (grants CBET1360341 and DMS1361421) and the Beckman Laser Institute Foundation.

Read the full story and get a link to the paper here:

http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2412

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed new electrolytes that enable lithium batteries to run at temperatures as low as -60 degrees Celsius with excellent performance -- in comparison, today's lithium-ion batteries stop working at -20 degrees Celsius. The new electrolytes also enable electrochemical capacitors to run as cold as -80 degrees Celsius -- their current limit is -40 degrees Celsius.

Press release: http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2235

NanoXpo: Showcasing the Real World Impact of Nanoengineering by UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

When Kevin Jubbal arrived at UC San Diego as a medical student, he immediately noticed that an incubator specific to health care and medical technology innovation was missing from the entrepreneurial ecosystem at UC San Diego. So, he started Blue LINC.

A team of UC San Diego engineering students is one of just six finalists selected from a pool of more than 300 that entered the competition, which challenges students to apply the same design principles used in creating Disney’s famous theme parks to develop new outdoor spaces at their own college or university.

Welcome to the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering podcast. In this episode, we tell you about a novel, medical diagnostics tool created by engineering alumni.