By Public Affairs, UC Berkeley | July 21, 2014 UC Berkeley professor and synthetic-biology pioneer Jay Keasling was on Capitol Hill Thursday, stressing the need for a federal strategy to ensure continued U.S. leadership in a field he said can yield significant medical benefits for people throughout the world, and even save lives. Keasling, right, chats with San Diego Rep. Scott Peters, who serves on the Science, Space and Technology Committee. (Photo by Michelle Moskowitz) Keasling, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of bioengineering and senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, led a team of scientists in engineering a microbial production process for artemisinin, an effective but, in many parts of the world, prohibitively expensive therapy for malaria. The disease takes nearly a million lives each year, mostly children under the age of 5. His teams synthetic-biology process has been licensed to Sanofi-Aventis, which has scaled the process to industrial levels and is on track, he said, to meet roughly half the worlds need for the drug by next year. Keasling who also serves as director of the National Science Foundation-funded Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, and as CEO of the Energy Department-funded Joint BioEnergy Institute … Continue reading →

LIVERMORE -- Deep inside Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's Center for Bioengineering, scientist Sat Pannu and his research team are hard at work crafting spaghetti noodle-sized devices with a mundane appearance but an audacious goal: To rewire damaged human brains. Fitted with dozens of tiny microelectrodes, each of these brain implants is intended to monitor the electrical activity of brains devastated by physical injury or mental illness -- and provide the precise stimuli to help minds compensate for what they've lost. It sounds fanciful, like something out of Hollywood. But building on technology more than a decade in the making, center director Pannu and his associates envision a time, not too many years away, when advanced, so-called deep-brain stimulation implants combat the ravages of post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, even chronic pain or addiction. "This technology allows us to interface with the brain using hundreds, if not thousands, of electrodes," Pannu said. "If you had these devices implanted in the brain, you could record (neural activity) and see how therapies are working in real time." Pannu's $5.6 million project -- which is in the early stages of animal testing -- is part of an array of brain research underway at Lawrence … Continue reading →