Archive: Discovered at Berkeley
SubscribeEradicating malaria
November 21, 2012: Taking aim at the global health problem of malaria, which infects 250 million people worldwide every year and kills one child every 45 seconds in Africa alone, UC Berkeley researchers in the frontier field of synthetic biology re-engineered yeast to produce the antimalarial drug artemisinin. The development of this semi-synthetic compound through cutting-edge research and public-private collaboration ensures an affordable, ... [Read more]
Tackling the global energy challenge
June 8, 2012: The Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley is leading the world’s quest to transition from today’s carbon-based energy economy.
Hepatitis vaccine
February 21, 2012: Building on his work at Berkeley, biochemistry professor Edward Penhoet co-founded Chiron in 1981 to develop diagnostic tools and biopharmaceuticals to tackle a range of diseases and conditions, including cancer, HIV, malaria, multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis. Best known for its work discovering the virus that causes hepatitis C and the subsequent development of screening methods to reduce the risk ... [Read more]
Circuit simulator
February 6, 2012: Virtually every electronic microchip developed in the world today is the product of SPICE computer simulation software, or one of the modeling program’s derivatives. Based on Department of Defense-funded research conducted at Berkeley during the 1960s, the original SPICE program was developed in 1972 under the direction of Donald Pederson. Later, A. Richard Newton, professor of engineering, collaborated on crafting ... [Read more]
Molecular mechanics of disease
January 30, 2012: The research of Robert Tjian, professor of molecular and cell biology, has provided new insights into the molecular mechanisms that underlie a host of human diseases and conditions from Huntington’s disease and cancer to diabetes and infertility. Seeking to understand how genes are controlled inside the cell, Tjian’s work focuses on proteins that regulate the expression of genes and their ... [Read more]
Punching holes in tumor cells
January 17, 2012: Berkeley engineers developed a way to destroy cell walls without harming nearby tissue vessels, a breakthrough that has since become a surgical technique that attacks difficult-to-remove tumors. In 2008, UC Berkeley licensed the irreversible electroporation (IRE) technology to medical device manufacturer AngioDynamics for use in its NanoKnife System. The minimally invasive surgical system, which uses microsecond electrical pulses to punch ... [Read more]
Smart dust
January 9, 2012: Kris Pister, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, coined the term “smart dust” as he pioneered the development of wireless sensor network technology to measure and transmit data on conditions, such as temperature, light, moisture, vibration, movement, magnetism and pollutants. Pister co-founded Dust Networks to commercialize the technology, in which arrays of low-power microsensors are inked together to form ... [Read more]
Search engine solution
January 2, 2012: Eric Brewer, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, laid the foundations for today’s giant server farms, using clusters of computers to create a cost-effective, scalable Web-search platform. Building on the prototype, Brewer co-founded Inktomi and helped lead the startup onto the NASDAQ 100. Adopted by Internet giants, including Yahoo, Google, MSN and Amazon, Inktomi’s search engine technology led the ... [Read more]
Bridging the R&D gap
December 12, 2011: The vision of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society is to develop information technology solutions for the world’s most pressing social and environmental problems. CITRIS leverages interdisciplinary collaborations among faculty at four University of California campuses with government resources and researchers at industry-leading corporate partners. Advancing groundbreaking discoveries in clean energy, health care and smart ... [Read more]
Jump-starting the bioeconomy
December 6, 2011: Harnessing innovation across the fields of bioengineering and biotechnology, structural and chemical biology, and bioinformatics, the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) is accelerating fundamental discoveries to address society’s critical needs and catalyzing the technologies and industries of the 21st century. QB3 fosters interdisciplinary research collaborations across three UC campuses to stimulate partnerships with private industry, and provides state-of-the-art facilities ... [Read more]
Biotech building blocks
November 22, 2011: Using seed money from the National Science Foundation, bioengineers from UC Berkeley and Stanford launched the world’s first open-source biological design-build facility to help speed the development of innovative solutions across health, energy and industry. The synthetic anti-malarial drug artemisinin, which relied on engineered microbes, took 10 years and $25 million to get out of the lab and into small-scale ... [Read more]
Missing link
November 14, 2011: Heralded as the “Breakthrough discovery of 2009″ by the journal Science, Ardipithecus ramidus, a completely new human ancestor, was unearthed in Ethiopia by a UC Berkeley co-led research team. At 4.4 million years old, “Ardi” is the oldest, most complete hominid skeleton ever found — 1.2 million years older than the famous fossilized specimen “Lucy.” Funded by the National Science ... [Read more]
Bionic reality
November 7, 2011: The first company in the world to commercialize a bionic exoskeleton, UC Berkeley spin-off Ekso Bionics could help millions of paraplegics walk again. The Ekso (formerly eLegs) exoskeleton, which made Time magazine’s list of the 50 best inventions of 2010, evolved from a DARPA-funded, campus research project to develop a mechanical brace that could enhance human strength, endurance and load-carrying ... [Read more]
Breaking the microprocessor barrier
October 27, 2011: UC Berkeley researchers broke through the microprocessor performance roadblock with two revolutionary transistor designs — Silicon-On-Insulator and 3D FinFET — that allow microchips to process information faster in a smaller footprint, with less power and more reliability. Embraced as the preferred next-generation technologies, the UC Berkeley designs are set to underpin the $304 billion semiconductor industry over the next 15 ... [Read more]
A cancer treatment
October 19, 2011: The National Academy of Sciences proclaimed UC Berkeley Cancer Research Lab’s groundbreaking isolation and blockade of the T-cell antigen CTLA-4 “one of the three most important findings in immunology in the last 20 years.” The discovery led to the development of an immunotherapy that boosts the effectiveness of a number of cancer vaccines. Now FDA-approved for the treatment of advanced ... [Read more]
Synthetic biology revolution
October 19, 2011: UC Berkeley established the Synthetic Biology Institute with the goal of creating transformative processes, products and technologies that meet critical demands in energy, health, agriculture, manufacturing and security. Backed by Agilent Technologies, SBI seeks to bridge the gap between today’s small-scale biological engineering and the mass production of synthetic-biological systems across industries. Synthetic biology has the potential to profoundly impact ... [Read more]
Saul Perlmutter awarded 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics 
October 4, 2011: Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics and LBNL senior scientist, will share the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other scientists, including former UC Berkeley postdoc Adam Riess, for their discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This discovery in 1998 led to the realization that the universe is largely composed of an enigmatic “dark energy.”
Novel metamaterial vastly improves quality of ultrasound imaging
November 5, 2010: New “metamaterials” can overcome some of the limitations of microscopes and imagers, including ultrasound imagers. Researchers in the Nano-scale Science & Engineering Center have come up with a metamaterial to improve the picture quality of ultrasound by a factor of 50.
