While clues to treating diseases that ravage the body and mind later in life sometimes appear in early stages of human development, studying a subject’s entire lifespan is neither efficient nor practical. So how can researchers study these early stages to combat diseases that manifest themselves later on?

There are more technically precise descriptions of what’s at the core of a growing trend broadening the horizons of biomedical engineering than “the soft, squishy side of bioengineering.”

Biomedical engineering professor Tony Hu and team published online by the journal Nature: Biomedical Engineering…