On Saturday, the Stanford Students in Biodesign and Biopharma (SSB) hosted “Impulse,” amongst Stanford’s premier biotechnology conferences, bringing collectively a neighborhood of scholars constructing merchandise and know-how for healthcare and biomedicine.

The annual SSB convention featured talks with Google AI researcher Rory Sayres Ph.D. ’07, founding father of an AI-powered drug discovery startup Raphael Townshend Ph.D. ’20, main researchers in robotics, nanodevices and wearable gadgets and prime biotech enterprise capitalists. 

A central theme of the convention was the personalization of biotechnology. A dialog with professor of mechanical engineering Monroe Kennedy and professor of design David Jaffe featured in depth talks about the way forward for robotics in biology and potential advances in adaptable assistive know-how.

Both audio system shared a sentiment that AI is a good software for assistive know-how and that the longer term will maintain a number of advances in that discipline, particularly for many who are deaf and blind. However, Jaffe added that with the intention to really make this new know-how feasibly accessible to most people, he believes it have to be proven to be efficient, well-understood by healthcare professionals, reimbursable by insurance coverage and reasonably priced.

As a part of his discuss, Kennedy stated that it’s important to rigorously observe and be impressed by organic processes with the intention to create know-how that solves organic issues. “A lot of really cool work comes out of biomimetics [the imitation of biological processes to solve biological problems],”  Kennedy stated, emphasizing the significance of making know-how that’s immediately knowledgeable by nature and biology.

Bioengineering professor Mark Skylar-Scott deepened the dialog round customized know-how along with his discuss “Moving beyond the petri dish: Whole-organ biofabrication.” Skylar-Scott is at present growing customizable 3-D bioprinting know-how options to handle single ventricle illness, a illness the place sufferers lack a left ventricle of their coronary heart. 

The goal is to exchange tubes that at present get positioned within the coronary heart throughout surgical therapy for the situation with one thing “living and beating and able to supply energy to the blood,” Skylar-Scott stated. The lab at present investigates printing vascular tissue by feeding various kinds of stem cells right into a 3D bioprinter, creating customized vasculature.

Professor Jin Hyung Lee from the neurological sciences division continued the dialog of adaptable and personalizable biotech options along with her discuss on making a high-resolution neural community map of the mind, which is essential for understanding localized mind operate. Through the creation of a “digital brain,” she says she seeks to know the connectivity and performance of large-scale neural networks with the intention to drive the event of recent therapies for neurological illnesses. 

“Brain disorders are the primary cause of disability worldwide and brain healthcare is a huge, increasing problem but there is nothing that is changing the curve of this big upsweep in cases,” Lee stated. 

“Problem definition is the most important but we are unable to do that with brain disorders,” she stated, pointing to illnesses similar to Alzheimer’s the place some remedies contain inserting electrodes contained in the affected person’s mind and offering electrical impulses to attempt to restore mind operate. But, in keeping with Lee, this methodology is essentially ineffective as a result of for essentially the most half “we are going in blindly and don’t truly know how the brain works.” 

Throughout her discuss, Lee emphasised the significance of with the ability to localize issues to particular circuitry within the mind. 

“The ultimate goal of brain health care is to restore brain function and the main reason why we have failed in treatments is because we don’t have a rigid, quantitative way of measuring brain function,” Lee stated. “MRIs show us the anatomical structure of the brain but cannot tell us anything about brain function.” She believes that when we’re capable of outline mind operate, this is able to result in great advances in customized healthcare for mind issues as a substitute of generic protocol-based therapy, unspecific to sufferers’ wants. 

The day-long occasion additionally featured talks that touched upon a number of different advances within the biotech area like engineering RNA biology with AI, constructing prostheses together with a prototyping workshop.

The number of matters, from mind circuits to classes to be realized from AI in healthcare, appealed to many attendees, like Vedant Chittake ’26, a bioengineering main desirous about oncological and cardiological analysis. “The conference was really insightful and I enjoyed gaining a lot of perspective into what different professors are doing in the field,” Chittake stated.