Healing, Hacking, and Helping the Human Body

After a heart attack, the heart doesn’t heal, it scars. And once that happens, the damage is permanent.

But what if we could teach the heart to heal itself instead?

In this talk, I’ll share how we’re developing silk-based cardiac patches loaded with tiny cell-derived messengers that can influence how heart cells behave after injury. It’s a story that brings together biology, engineering, and a bit of creativity to rethink how we treat heart disease.

What if the thing that's supposed to protect you is part of the problem? Ovarian cancer is notoriously hard to detect early, and by the time it's found, it's often already learned to manipulate the immune system, turning the body's own defenses into allies.
In this talk, Amy will unpack how ovarian cancer hijacks immune cells, why that makes it so difficult to treat, and what researchers are doing to fight back.

Since the 1960’s scientists and engineers have been chasing an ambitious goal: a way to continuously measure any molecule in the body in real-time. Six decades of effort produced just one commercial success story, the continuous glucose monitor.

That changed when a biophysicist asked a deceptively simple question: How does the body actually sense things?

The answer unlocked an entirely new way of thinking. Nutromics' lab-on-a-patch is the world's first wearable biosensor capable of measuring virtually any molecule in real-time, and it has now been shown to work on real people in clinical studies.

This talk will explore the science behind the wearable patch technology, its first clinical applications, and what it means for the future of human health and beyond.