Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
MHT's Galen Moore on Fox25: Apple unveiling iPad2?
The legacy of Ken Olsen - by Gordon College & Televerse Productions
Regenerative medicine firms make business of creating skin
Biomedical engineer and graduate student Alice A. Chen has been named the 2011 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, winning $30,000 for using micro- and nanotechnology applications to study diseases and health issues.
Chen, a grad student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology and Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is being recognized for innovations such as a humanized mouse with a tissue-engineered human liver, which is intended to bridge a gap in the drug development pipeline between laboratory animal studies and clinical trials.
“Alice Chen’s inventive accomplishments will impact the effectiveness of new therapies,” said Joshua Schuler, executive director of the Lemelson-MIT Program, in a statement.
Already an entrepreneur, Chen co-founded Sienna Labs, a biotechnology company that has developed a breakthrough class of new medical pigments to enhance microsurgeries for skin disease, with fellow MIT graduate Todd Harris. The company has already conducted pilot human studies and plans to start clinical trials focused in the dermatological laser treatment market within the next year.
Chen holds five pending patents and, with her graduate advisor, Sangeeta Bhatia, is looking to possibly launch a second startup, this one for commercializing her humanized mouse model. Bhatia was a 2009 Mass High Tech Women to Watch honoree.
In addition to 29-year-old Chen being honored with the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, three other 2011 $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize winners were chosen from colleges across the nation, according to program officials.
• Lemelson-MIT Caltech Student Prize winner Guoan Zheng developed an on-chip, inexpensive microscopy imaging technology with many potential applications, including improved diagnostics for malaria and other blood-borne diseases in the developing world and rapid screening of new drugs.
• Lemelson-MIT Illinois Student Prize winner Scott Daigle developed a system that utilizes automatic gear shifting to reduce the efforts exerted by wheelchair operators. Daigle’s company, IntelliWheels Inc., has an entire suite of products to improve the everyday actions of wheelchair users.
• Lemelson-MIT Rensselaer Student Prize winner Benjamin Clough has demonstrated a new technique that employs sound waves to boost the distance from which researchers can use terahertz spectroscopy to remotely detect hidden explosives, chemicals, and other dangerous materials.
Last year the winner of the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize was MIT graduate student Erez Lieberman-Aiden, who most recently worked on developing the “Hi-C” method for three-dimensional genome sequencing, which not only sequences the base pairs of DNA, but how that DNA is folded in the nucleus of a cell.
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
