Translation is a quarterly publication run by a team of both undergraduate and graduate students. We strive to include a variety of pieces to spark interest in our diverse audience, including news from across campus, interviews of community members, reports of related events on and off campus, profiles of student research, and insight from top Bay Area professionals. We hope Translation serves as a portal by which the entire community can both share their work, and learn about the happenings at the other corners of campus and the Bay Area at large.
Summer 2010
Elucidating the New US Health Care Bill
By Ying Lei
On March 23, 2010, after endless months of national debate and gnashing of teeth, President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The chief goal of this new health care bill is to extend health insurance coverage to millions of Americans who are currently uninsured. In addition, the bill attempts to address the rising cost of health care through an assortment of new initiatives, the effectiveness of which will only be known with time.
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New BMES Calendar of Events
By Juan-Carlos Foust
The Translation is now happy to provide for its readership a composite calendar of upcoming Stanford-associated events, seminars, presentations, colloquiums, conferences, talks, walks—you get the idea—anything and everything Bio-E related that might draw interest from the diverse community of Stanford undergraduates, graduates, and otherwise affiliated or non-affiliated persons we’re looking to support through this publication. You can find, in the top-right corner of the site, the link to the nifty Google calendar, which we hope will serve as the consolidated repository for all those hard-to-remember and oftentimes poorly or unevenly advertised occasions you’re just dying to attend! So check it out, and if you happen to know of an event that’s not represented, send us an email at translation@lists.stanford.edu.
A Stanford Lab’s Advances in Renewable Energy and Cancer Targeting Vaccines
Based on an Interview with James Swartz
By Leimomi Kanagusuku
Who knew that a potential alternative fuel and cancer vaccines could be studied in the same lab? The Swartz Lab is currently working to harness the capabilities of hydrogen and complex proteins. Led by James Swartz and comprised of approximately ten graduate students with chemical engineering or bioengineering backgrounds, this lab is unusual as its groundbreaking work spans both environmental and health issues.
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Micromasonry
Transforming Cells into Bricks Offers New Method for Assembling Artificial Tissues
By Juan-Carlos Foust
Researchers at the MIT-Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) recently developed a method to potentially overcome the reluctance of cells grown in vitro to form complex 3-dimensional shapes. The tendency of these cells to form flat sheets has proven to be a major obstacle in the field of synthetic tissue design for constructing biomaterials and building whole organs to replace damaged blood vessels, livers, and other body parts.
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Defribillator Decoded
By Leimomi Kanagusuku
Have you ever watched a medical television show like “House,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” or “Scrubs” and thought, “how cool it would be to use a crash cart”? Well, maybe that wouldn’t necessarily be the case with “Scrubs,” but you have to admit - it does look exciting. Technology, making the rapid progress that it does, seems to have taken defibrillators to the next level once again. In early stages, these heart-reviving machines were only meant for external use and gradually internalized within the last fifty years. A recent study by Dr. Gust H. Bardy and his team from the Seattle Institute for Cardiac Research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicating the development of defibrillators without electrical wires.
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Developing The 2009 H1N1 Vaccine
Delays That Were Faced and Improvements That Can Be Made
By Jayodita Sanghvi
The H1N1 outbreak was identified in April 2009, and the WHO declared a state of global pandemic in June 2009. The forecasted risk of H1N1 spreading through the American population was high. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), in August 2009, predicted that up to 30% of the US population could contract H1N1, meaning that 90 million Americans could get sick, 1.8 million Americans would need hospitalization, and 30,000 Americans could die. They predicted that the number of cases would start to rapidly increase in September and peak in October, but a vaccine would not be available till at least late October. In fact, a vaccine was not approved by the FDA till September 2009, only after which bulk production could start. The development of a vaccine is typically a long process involving an intensive research and development stage, animal testing, clinical trials and regulation, and mass production. Given this long timeline, how is a country able to respond to a national pandemic such as the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak?.
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Student Spotlight: Lionel Guillou
Biomechanics of a Beating Heart
Students across Stanford embark on a multitude of diverse research projects within the field of biomedical engineering. The Translation spotlights different students each issue to provide a sense of understanding of the diversity of research that appears at the University. Here we spotlight Lionel Guillou, who works on understanding the possible effects of stem cell treatment on heart attack (infarct) patients. His labs inject pluripotent stem cells, which may have the ability to differentiate into cardiomyocytes (heart tissue cells), into rodents to try and reverse the harmful damage that occurs after myocardial infarction.
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