The emergence of new gene-editing technologies is profoundly transforming human therapeutics, agriculture, and industrial biotechnology. Advances in clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) have created a fertile environment for mass-scale manufacturing of cost-effective products ranging from basic research to translational medicine. In our analyses, we evaluated the p...

Metabolix has applied advanced metabolic pathway engineering at the genome level to solve the manufacturing challenges for a range of PHA copolymers. Metabolix has built into the genome of the production host the ability to produce both the building blocks and polymerization capability for several different PHA copolymer families. The capability to produce many compositions with a single bacter...

Tobacco chloroplasts are ready to be tested as a platform for the expression of recombinant proteins on a commercial scale. They hold the promise of reproducible yields of 5-25% of total soluble cellular protein in leaves and reliability has been achieved through refinement of an expression toolkit that includes vectors, recently developed expression cassettes and systems for marker gene remova...

BACKGROUND Against the backdrop of systemic inefficiency in the public health care system and the theoretical claims that markets result in performance and efficiency improvement, developing countries' governments have been rapidly commercializing health care delivery. This paper seeks to determine whether commercialization through an expansion in private hospitals has led to performance improv...

Taking AUV technology from the drawing board and putting it into commercial practice has been a long and costly process, however, there are several companies that have done just that. Are AUVs ready for commercialization? Have they been successful? Who’s leading the pack? Who’s buying-military, offshore, academia? This paper will attempt to answer those questions.

Historically, human healthcare has evolved within two main disciplines—medicine and surgery. Medicine has primarily focused on the use of chemistry to attempt to restore, correct or modify physiology in order to achieve alleviation of symptoms and in some instances (e.g. bacterial infections) cures. By the end of the last century, biological medicinal products had also become increasingly impor...

1.1 The birth year of Astro Boy In 2003, a variety of events were held across Japan to celebrate Astro Boy’s birthday, which falls on April 7th in the famous comics featuring the robot hero. Similar enthusiasm was seen in “ROBODEX (Robot Dream Exposition),” the world’s largest-scale exhibition of partner robots. Showcasing about 80 models of human-friendly robots, the four-day event attracted n...

A major breakthrough in UV-LIGA (Lithographie, Galvanoformung and Abformung) started with the use of epoxy-based EPON SU-8 photoresist in the mid-1990s. Using this photoresist has enabled the fabrication of tall and high aspect ratio structures without the use of a very expensive synchrotron source needed to expose the photoresist layer in X-ray LIGA. SU-8 photoresist appeared to be well-suited...