School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
January/February 2017

Fighting cancer with sticky nanoparticles

The labs of Mark Saltzman, the Goizueta Foundation Professor of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering, and professor Alessandro Santin at the Yale School of Medicine teamed up to develop a new drug delivery system to fight ovarian and uterine cancers. The system, which uses bioadhesive nanoparticles loaded with a potent chemotherapy drug, proved more effective and less toxic than conventional treatments for gynecological cancer. Key to the system is that the nanoparticles go directly to the tumor site, and then stay there long enough to fight the cancer cells. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tracking clots with supercomputers

With help from three supercomputers, including the High Performance Computing Clusters at Yale, researchers in the lab of Jay Humphrey, the John C. Malone Professor of Biomedical Engineering, are figuring out the stages of a blood clot’s formation and growth in abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs). Although most AAAs harbor a blood clot, little is known regarding the development of the clot or its effects on the underlying aortic wall. This research could lead to a better understanding of how clots contribute to the risk of rupture of an AAA, which can be lethal. The results of their most recent work were published in the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering.

Fitbit founder speaks at tech summit

Fitbit cofounder Eric Friedman ’99, ’00MS, spoke onstage with SEAS Dean T. Kyle Vanderlick for the 2016 Yale Technology Summit. Friedman discussed how his days as a computer science major helped prepare him for a career in entrepreneurship, and how his lunches with students from the humanities and other disciplines informed the general philosophy of his company, which pioneered the wearable fitness tracker. The founding of Fitbit, he said, was done more as a labor of love than for any guarantee of success. “We kept showing up, writing code, because what else were we going to do with our time?” said Friedman on the early days of Fitbit, now worth more than $4.1 billion.