Category Archives: Biotechnology

By Heiloi Yip When asked to envision the future of biotechnology, one might think of a couple common images. Some may think about synthetic organisms using tissue pieced together from different species to form a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’. Others may think about a swarm of tiny robots that work together like ants might do, performing aContinueContinue reading “Xenobots: Tiny blobs with massive potential”

By Kilian Robinson Renewable energy generation has never been more important, considering climate change and how much more aware humans are of the impacts of carbon dioxide emissions. Consequently, the search for completely renewable energies has been a prominent topic of discussion in modern day energy generation methods. Despite our recent progress in 2020, inContinueContinue reading “The role of viral energy generators in modern biotechnology”

By Charlotte Hutchings Gene therapy is an approach to treating or preventing human disorders through the delivery of therapeutic nucleic acids to diseased cells (Lundstrom, 2018). In order to achieve targeted delivery to specific organs and cell types, viruses have been employed as a gene therapy vector as they have naturally evolved to be ableContinueContinue reading “AAV-Induced Cancer: Cause for Concern in Gene Therapy?”

By Hannah Scheucher Diagnosis is a patient-specific process to characterize an illness via collection of information, integration of different data and clinical reasoning. In this pursuit, hypotheses of possible conditions explaining a patient’s symptoms are established and eliminated over the course of time. Even with advances in technology and diagnostic testing, diagnostic error still representsContinueContinue reading “Symptom checkers: how AI could transform the field of diagnostics”

By Cristina Piñel Neparidze Have you ever heard about cytokine storms? Most of the time, when people say that someone has died from COVID-19, the cause of death is simply attributed to the virus and its ability to induce multiple organ failure. We imagine that the unfortunately deceased individual lost their battle against this sneakyContinueContinue reading “Magnetic Blood Filtration as a Promising Treatment for Sepsis”

By Sreenidhi Venkatesh Since their discovery in the 1980s, the human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) have taken the medical world by storm due to their ability to induce immune system failure, allowing opportunistic infections and cancers to become even more life-threatening.  Currently, the main form of treatment for HIV is anti-retroviral drugs which target various mechanismsContinueContinue reading “Target, Transfect, Transect – Using CRISPR to Treat HIV”

By Ernest Poon In 2003, after 13 years and over $3 billion, the ambitious multinational and multidisciplinary Human Genome Project was completed. Whilst the subsequent conversion of DNA to an amino acid sequence is relatively straightforward, the next step in gene expression – how the amino acid sequence folds to form a polypeptide – isContinueContinue reading “The Puzzle of Protein Folding”