December 11, 2024

The Quarter at Aggie Square Biomedical Engineering cohort wrapped up their 10-week experience with a presentation of three medical prototypes for growth-accommodating heart valves, noninvasive glucose monitors and stroke-detection devices. The students chose the concepts to solve complex health challenges they encountered. 

November 29, 2024

A landmark clinical trial is underway at UC Davis Health: the world's first spina bifida treatment combining fetal surgery with stem cells. A child taking their first steps marks a major milestone, but for 20-month-old Nixon, his steps are scientifically a miracle. 

November 27, 2024

Multiple babies have been born after receiving the world’s first spina bifida treatment combining surgery with stem cells. This was made possible by a landmark clinical trial at UC Davis Health. The one-of-a-kind treatment, delivered while a fetus is still developing in the mother’s womb, could improve outcomes for children with this birth defect. Launched in the spring of 2021, the clinical trial is known formally as the “CuRe Trial: Cellular Therapy for In Utero Repair of Myelomeningocele.”

November 21, 2024

Tobi looks like your typical 2 year old. He loves to swim, climb, jump on the trampoline and ride his green tractor. He is able to walk independently. You would never guess this active little boy was diagnosed with myelomeningocele, also known as spina bifida, before birth. But for the past 30 months, he has been part of the CuRe clinical trial, the world’s first stem cell treatment for spina bifida delivered during fetal surgery at UC Davis Health.

October 25, 2024

The vehicles that deliver gene editing cargo to the body’s cells can be toxic, complicating gene therapies, particularly those addressed to brain cells of developing fetuses. Less toxic carriers, however, are being developed by scientists affiliated with the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Berkeley. These carriers are engineered to degrade quickly, which reduces their potential to induce an inflammatory response.

October 24, 2024

A new study shows that a biomedical tool can successfully deliver genetic material to edit faulty genes in developing fetal brain cells. The technology, tested in mice, might have the potential to stop the progression of genetic-based neurodevelopmental conditions, such as Angelman syndrome and Rett syndrome before birth.

September 20, 2024

Graduate student receives grant to improve outcomes for spina bifida at UC Davis, where she was treated for the condition as a newborn over 20 years ago. As a newborn from Auburn, Abigail Humphries was life-flighted to UC Davis Medical Center for complications related to spina bifida, a condition where the spinal cord fails to fuse properly in the womb. Nearly 20 years later, she's now a biomedical engineering graduate student working on a project funded by the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, to improve health outcomes of spina bifida at the University of California, Davis.

August 16, 2024

The University of California, Davis, is awarding over $480,000 to help scientists advance compelling research and innovations toward commercial applications through the Science Translation and Innovative Research (STAIR™) proof-of-concept grant program. The program plays an important role in helping campus innovators bridge the early-stage hurdle of access to funding during one of the most challenging phases in new technology development.

August 1, 2024

In their proposal titled “Printing beyond barriers: A pathway to non-invasive deep inside body printing,” Mohsen Habibi, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Davis, and his UC Davis collaborators, Aijun Wang, a professor of biomedical engineering and surgery, and James Marcin, a professor of pediatrics and vice chair for pediatric clinical research, suggest using Direct Sound Printing, or DSP, to 3D print things like implants or scaffolds inside the human body and reduce the need for invasive surgeries.

July 2nd, 2024

We want to share with you the extraordinary story of how the UC Davis Schools of Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and College of Engineering are working together to advance health across species. Treatments for #SpinaBifida developed at #UCDavis have changed Tobi, ToMo and Arthur’s lives.

June 17th, 2024

Cutting-edge therapies delivering treatment to foetuses diagnosed with neurological defects have the potential to change natal care as we know it.

April 5th, 2024

Quarter at Aggie Square’s 2022 fall quarter Biomedical Engineering cohort won the 2023 Big Bang! Competition in spring 2023 with Square Solutions, one of their two medical innovations. The students received the $10,000 Human Health + Industry Sector Award for their design for safe transportation for cell therapies.

March 25th, 2024

The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, or AIMBE, has inducted Professor Aijun Wang into its esteemed College of Fellows. This represents one of the greatest distinctions given to medical and biological engineers, as it is reserved for the top two percent of individuals making outstanding contributions to these fields, from advancing engineering research to pioneering new types of biomedical technology.

February 6th, 2024

The Department of Biomedical Engineering has coursed a triangle of clinical know-how, manufacturing ability and entrepreneurial skill for the redesign of its Quarter at Aggie Square Experience. Professor Aijun Wang is actively involved in the program.

December 19th, 2023

The Team led by Professor Aijun Wang has designed and tested a scaffold that can help large deep burn wounds heal faster. Their study shows that this scaffold may reduce the risk of complications and need for grafting.

November 29th, 2023

The Team, led by fetal surgeon Diana Farmer and Professor Aijun Wang, has been awarded nearly $15 million for groundbreaking work on a spina bifida treatment. The funding will allow the team to carry out phase 2 of a clinical trial that tests the first stem cell treatment for spina bifida.

August 2nd, 2023

Quarter at Aggie Square immerses students in real-life application of technological solutions. Last fall's Quarter at Aggie Square Biomedical Engineering at the Health Campus Experience cohort developed two innovations.

May 18th, 2023

The Team, Professor Aijun Wang and Assistant Professor Randy Carney of the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering, Investigates Extracellular Vesicles as Next-Generation Drug Platform by Engineering Their Uniformity, Receives $2.3M from the NIH.

March 15th, 2023

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, or NIBIB, has awarded a $2.3 million research grant to Department of Biomedical Engineering professors Cheemeng Tan, Randy Carney and Aijun Wang on a collaborative project that poses to demystify the functional components of EVs and their potential medical applications. NIBIB is the arm of the National Institutes of Health that focuses on how engineering can deepen our understanding of diseases and transform their prevention, detection, diagnosis and treatment.

February 21st, 2023

UC Davis Professor Aijun Wang and his team are collaborating with Murthy laboratory at UC Berkeley to develop a much-needed cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). They are designing a therapy to treat DMD before birth by editing the gene that encodes dystrophin, a key protein in stabilizing muscle fiber.

December 19th, 2022

Interdisciplinary Research Leads to Historic Clinical Trial Delivering Stem Cells During Fetal Surgery to Treat Spina Bifida.

A very comprehensive report of our clinical trial; please check it out!

October 10th, 2022

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) recently shared some encouraging news on The Stem Cellar about a CIRM-funded stem cell clinical trial for spina bifida at UC Davis Health.

October 7th, 2022

Diagnosed before birth with a spinal defect, three babies have kicked their legs, wiggled their toes and blown away their parents and a team of researchers at UC Davis Health who developed a novel approach to treat them.

October 6th, 2022

US doctors say they have successfully carried out surgery on babies in the womb to repair harmful spine defects using a special, therapeutic stem cell patch method.

October 6th, 2022

Three babies have been born after receiving the world’s first spina bifida treatment combining surgery with stem cells. This was made possible by our groundbreaking trial aimed to reverse the paralysis and other abnormal functions of spina bifida before birth.

October 4th, 2022

In the first of two episodes of Unfold, we examine the first clinical trial to treat bulldogs with spina bifida and the world’s first human clinical trial using stem cells before birth to treat the most serious form of the disease.

September 16th, 2022

Michelle and Jeff were elated to learn they are expecting a child. However, an ultrasound exam at 20 weeks into the pregnancy showed their fetus had spina bifida. Michelle is the second woman to take part in the CIRM funded clinical trial at UC Davis Health. Their baby, Toby, has so far hit all of his milestones and things are looking promising.

August 29th, 2022

Quarter at Aggie Square, which is a program within the Office of Undergraduate Education, is an intense, immersive learning experience hosted at UC Davis’ Aggie Square campus in Sacramento. In the program, small cohorts of about 12-25 students learn from dedicated faculty around a themed curriculum that matches their academic interests. The Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) participated in its first Quarter at Aggie Square in the Fall of 2021.

August 22th, 2022

Surgery resident Nataliya Bahatyrevich was awarded a prestigious T32 federal research grant. The award allows Nataliya Bahatyrevich, an aspiring cardiothoracic surgeon, to spend a year in Dr. Aijun Wang's laboratory and pursue a Master of Science in biomedical engineering. One of her current research projects includes finding a way to successfully repair damaged inner lining of any blood vessel or promote inner lining of synthetic stents to look like healthy native blood vessels.

August 8th, 2022

The award-winning team, named Spinal Protective Implant for Neonatal Enhancement (SPINE), included undergraduate seniors from the Department of Biomedical Engineering: Rajul Bains, Natalie Kelly, Shannon Lamb, Joe Morrison and Maya Mysore. The competitive annual award, which is given at the Engineering Design Showcase, is supported by Sandia National Laboratories and recognizes an outstanding engineering design project that supports the lab’s mission, which is to secure a peaceful and free world through technology.

July 12th, 2022

Dr. Diana Farmer and Dr. Aijun Wang are serving as Principal Investigators for a collaborative project with newly funded National Center for Interventional Biophotonic Technologies (NCIBT) at UC Davis. NCIBT was funded by the recent $6.3 million P41 grant from NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) as a national Center for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. NCIBT develops technologies for more precise and timely assessments of tissue physiology, biochemistry, and metabolism. Drs. Farmer and Wang are leading one of the Collaborative Projects to leverage the new NCIBT technologies to refine in utero repair of fetal myelomeningocele.

June 17th, 2022

Our research team from UC Davis Biomedical Engineering has recently been awarded a $3.1 million, two-year grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) for an innovative medical device that could improve treatment outcomes and the quality of life for the more than two million people throughout the world who are on hemodialysis.

May 26th, 2022

Dr. Aijun Wang and team receives funds to develop a smart durable vascular device for hemodialysis patients treated for kidney failure. This device uses a unique molecule that guides the body’s own stem cells to help prevent the failure of synthetic vascular grafts. Such failures are a common problem for kidney disease patients undergoing hemodialysis.

May 4th, 2022

UC Davis doctoral student, Tanner Henson, was recently awarded a fellowship from the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Program. The fellowship will provide three years of funding, starting in September 2022, which will allow Henson to expand his research on synthetic extracellular vesicles for traumatic brain injury.

April 28th, 2022

Dr. Aijun Wang receives funds to lead his team’s study, Extracellular Vesicle Theranostics in the Central Nervous System. This collaborative study includes researchers from surgical subspecialties, pharmacology, biomedical engineering, pathology, and computer science.

September 1st, 2021

Our Department of Surgery has launched the world’s first human clinical trial using stem cells to treat spina bifida. The historic effort will test an innovative approach — developed by Department of Surgery physician-scientists over the course of more than a decade — that combines in utero surgery and cellular therapy.

July 27th, 2021

Dr. Aijun Wang and Dr. Diana Farmer have been selected as part of 8 teams to receive funding from this year's UC Davis Science Translation and Innovative Research (STAIR™) grant program!

May 5th, 2021

Dr. Aijun Wang, a biomedical engineer and associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Surgery, speaks on his interest in improving arteriovenous (AV) grafts used during kidney dialysis.  

March 3rd, 2021

The team at UC Davis – in a CIRM-funded study – will use a stem cell “patch” that is placed over the exposed spinal cord, then surgically close the opening, hopefully allowing the stem cells to regenerate and protect the spinal cord.

March 1st, 2021

A UC Davis Health team today announced the launch of the world’s first, FDA-approved human clinical trial using stem cells before birth to treat the most serious form of spina bifida. 

February 18th, 2021

Faculty innovators Aijun Wang, Alyssa Panitch, and Kit Lam have formed a startup, VasoBio, to develop technology that may improve arteriovenous (AV) grafts used during kidney dialysis. 

November 13th, 2020

The first human clinical trial using stem cells to treat spina bifida has been made possible thanks to a $9 million grant provided on Nov. 12 by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

November 12th, 2020

California’s stem cell agency (CIRM) today awarded a $9 million grant to Dr. Diana Farmer and Dr. Aijun Wang to help launch the world’s first human clinical trial using stem cells to treat spina bifida, a birth defect that occurs when the spine and spinal cord don't form properly.

October 8th, 2020

Shriners Hospitals for Children — Northern California’s surgeon in chief, Diana L. Farmer, M.D., FACS, FRCS, and principal investigator for the Institute for Pediatric Regenerative Medicine, Aijun Wang, Ph.D., have received approval for a human clinical trial from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to test an innovative stem cell therapy that integrates regenerative medicine and surgery.

September 24, 2020

One-of-a-kind treatment approved for human testing. A UC Davis Health fetal surgeon and a stem cell scientist have received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to test a groundbreaking spina bifida treatment that combines surgery with stem cells. The one-of-a-kind treatment, delivered while the baby is still in the mother’s womb, could improve outcomes for children with the birth defect.

August 17, 2020

Funding will be used to create bio-engineered vascular grafts.

Congratulations to Dr. Wang for his recent KidneyX award in developing next-generation vascular grafts for end-stage renal disease patients' hemodialysis applications. He plans to engineer a layer of stem cell-capturing molecules to coat the surface of the grafts, forming a “living” endothelium that functions much like a native vein. The new grafts are expected to reduce thrombosis, infection and the need for repeated replacement of failed grafts.

July 1, 2020

Congratulations to the Surgical Bioengineering Laboratory Research Program Team (team leader Dr. Aijun Wang) for winning the UC Davis Health Deans’ Team Award for Excellence in Research! 

The Surgical Bioengineering Laboratory Research Program team is a key research center of the Department of Surgery for making high impact discoveries through a multidisciplinary, collaborative team-based approach with mentoring opportunities. Research within the lab has generated considerable impact in the biomedical engineering and regenerative medicine fields......

More details can be found here: https://health.ucdavis.edu/facultydev/Awards/list_deansteamaward.html

March 12, 2020

This study is in the top 5% (the 97th percentile) of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric:  https://wiley.altmetric.com/details/77402928

STEM CELLS Transl Med: https://stemcellsportal.com/press-releases/induced-pluripotent-stem-cells-show-success-treating-hemophilia-mice

Medical Health News (Alternative Medicine): http://www.medicalhealthnews.net/cell-btherapyb-seen-to-ease-blood-loss-in-hemophilia-a-mouse-model

Hemophilia News Today: https://hemophilianewstoday.com/2020/03/23/cell-therapy-seen-to-ease-blood-loss-in-hemophilia-a-mouse-model/

Biomedical Engineering: A Bench-to-Bedside Experience at the UC Davis Health Campus will give third-year biomedical engineering majors exposure to their field in the clinical environment, bringing engineering faculty together with medical departments. 

February 17-18, 2020

January 21, 2020

UC Davis has named its new class of Chancellor’s Fellows, marking the 20th anniversary of the program that provides philanthropic support to exceptional early-career faculty members. 

Dr. Wang's research focuses on developing innovative tools, technologies and therapeutics that combine molecular, cellular, tissue and biomaterial engineering to promote tissue regeneration and restore function. One of his lab’s main efforts has focused on isolating stem cells from human placental tissue, then using those stem cells to treat birth defects such as spina bifida and hemophilia. In addition to published papers, he functions as an influential advocate for academic entrepreneurship. 

“Dr. Wang is an extremely talented young scientist who has demonstrated that his academic productivity is rigorous and innovative. ... His many publications, patents, conference invitations, and awards are a testament to his success as a leader in his field.” — Ted Wun, associate dean for research, School of Medicine

November 6, 2019

Dr. Wang was invited to give a departmental seminar at UC Riverside Department of Bioengineering: 

Surgical Bioengineering - Engineering Stem Cells and Extracellular Components for Tissue Regeneration

August 6, 2019

Spina bifida is the most common permanently disabling birth defect in the United States. About 1,645 babies are born in the U.S. with spina bifida each year, and fetal surgery and research is givin...

www.fetalhealthfoundation.org

March 9, 2019

Researchers on the path to finding a cure for spina bifida have identified specific elements in stem cell secretions as key to protecting neurons and ultimately reducing the lower-limb paralysis as...

www.eurekalert.org​​​​​​

March 8, 2019

A diagram of an infant born with spina bifida, a birth defect where there is an incomplete closing of the backbone portion of the spinal cord. Photo courtesy of the Texas Children’s Hospital …

blog.cirm.ca.gov

March 5, 2019

Study reveals factors in stem cell secretions that protect neurons and reduce spinal cord injury. Researchers on the path to finding a cure for spina bifida have identified specific elements in stem cell secretions as key to protecting neurons and ultimately reducing the lower-limb paralysis associated with the birth defect.

January 28, 2019

Cell therapy with endothelial progenitor cells and stem cells genetically engineered to produce a functional clotting factor VIII (FVIII) may provide a stable and long-term...

hemophilianewstoday.com

December 13, 2018

University of California Biomedical, Research, Acceleration, Integration, & Development (UC BRAID) creates opportunities to improve health for Californians and beyond. Our...

www.ucbraid.org

November 15, 2018

Every day in the U.S. four children are born with spina bifida. It is the most common cause of lifelong paralysis and also frequently leads to other serious health problems affecting the bowel and …

blog.cirm.ca.gov​​​​

October 15, 2018

Every year, the second Wednesday in October is set aside as Stem Cell Awareness Day, a time to celebrate the progress being made in the field and to remind us of the challenges that lie ahead. Whil…

blog.cirm.ca.gov

January 7, 2018

At UC Davis, doctors in the world's #1 veterinary medicine program insert stem cells into bulldogs with spinal bifida and assess lame horses with the most advanced scanner ever — a Saudi prince onc...

www.latimes.com

September 20, 2017

Siblings Darla and Spanky were treated with a therapy for children with spina bifida. A video shows the puppies showing off their ability to walk, run and play in Davis, California.

www.dailymail.co.uk

August 29, 2017

A UC Davis-developed therapy that shows great promise helps two pups in need.

www.universityofcalifornia.edu

April 27, 2015

The lower-limb paralysis associated with spina bifida may be effectively treated before birth by combining a unique stem cell therapy with surgery, new research has found.

www.sciencedaily.com