Biological Engineering

A new technique keeps cells alive during extraction to track the activity of thousands of genes across time. The breakthrough method is called Live-seq and was jointly developed by scientists at EPFL and ETH Zurich.

Scientists at EPFL and the Karolinska Institute have tested and confirmed a protocol for growing human embryonic stem cells into retina cells to treat eye diseases such as age-related macular degeneration.

The multidisciplinary Zurich research team Liver4Life has succeeded in doing something during a treatment attempt that had never been achieved in the history of medicine until now: it treated an originally damaged human liver in a machine for three days outside of a body and then implanted the recovered organ into a cancer patient. One year later, the patient is doing well.

EPFL scientists have developed a digital model of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, which realistically simulates the movements of the animal. The twin is a big step towards reverse engineering the neuromechanical control of animal behavior, and developing bioinspired robots.

Two EPFL scientists are putting their expertise in coral reefs to work in Mauritius and Seychelles. The pair has joined a United Nations program that aims to restore reefs affected by human and environmental pressure using a method known as seascape genomics.