#Glowing diamonds make great thermometers Diamonds are known for many things: hardness, luster, and their reputation for being a irl best friend.
a cancer biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical center in Dallas. Researchers have used magnets before to levitate whole creatures,
which could allow clinicians to spot rare circulating tumor cells in a patient sample. The device could also distinguish red blood cells from white blood cells,
and a sign that a patient is prone to infection. Traditional methods for sorting cells rely on fluorescent molecular tags,
Researchers could identify which individual cellsrom a tumor or a strain of bacteriaurvive a drug treatment and study them further, something that's not possible with current culture-and-stain tests,
says neurologist Dena Dubal of the University of California, San francisco (UCSF), who was involved not in the study. he importance of this work cannot be underestimated as the world population is aging rapidly. ultiple groups of scientists have shown that adding the blood of older mice to younger animalsbodies makes them sluggish, weaker,
ß2 microglobulin (B2m), an immune protein normally involved in distinguishing one own cells from invading pathogens.
B2m has also been found at increased levels in patients with Alzheimer disease and other cognitive disorders.
nearly as good as young animals at completing the water maze, for instance, the scientists report online today in Nature Medicine.
say, within cancerous tumors u
#Eye drops could dissolve cataracts Cataracts cloud the eyes of tens of millions of people around the world and nearly 17.2%of Americans over the age of 40.
Currently, the only treatment is surgeryasers or scalpels cut away the molecular grout that builds in the eye as cataracts develop,
and surgeons sometimes replace the lens. But now, a team of scientists and ophthalmologists has tested a solution in dogs that may be able to dissolve the cataract right out of the eye lens.
And the solution is itself a solution: a steroid-based eye drop. Though scientists don fully understand how cataracts form,
they do know that the ogoften seen by patients is a glob of broken proteins,
stuck together in a malfunctioning clump. When healthy, these proteins, called crystallins, help the eye lens keep its structure and transparency.
causing the signature teamy glassvision that accompanies cataracts. Coming up with a solution other than surgery has been tough.
Scientists have been hunting for years for mutations in crystallin proteins that might offer new insights
and pave the way to an alternate therapy Now, it looks like a team led by University of California (UC), San diego,
Her team came up with the eye drop idea after finding that children with a genetically inherited form of cataracts shared a mutation that stopped the production of lanosterol, an important steroid in the body.
the adults produced lanosterol and had no cataracts. So the researchers wondered: What if lanosterol helped prevent
or reduce cataracts? The team tested a lanosterol-laden solution in three separate experiments. First, they used human lens cells to test how effectively lanosterol shrank lab models of cataracts.
They saw a significant decrease. Then, they progressed to rabbits suffering from cataracts. At the end of the 6-day experiment, 11 of 13 rabbits had gone from having severe or significant cataracts to mild cataracts or no cataracts at all.
Finally, the team moved on to dogs, using a group of seven, including black Labs, Queensland Heelers,
and Miniature pinschers with naturally occurring cataracts. The dogs responded just as the researchers hoped to the lanosterol solution,
which was given in the form of both eye injections and eye drops. The dogslenses showed the same type of dissolving pattern as the human and rabbit lens cells.
The improvement was remarkableesearchers could tell just by looking at the dogseyes that the cataracts had decreased.
But the exact mechanism of how lanosterol manages to disperse the mass of proteins remains unknown. his is a really comprehensive and compelling paperhe strongest
He has been investigating cataract proteins since 2000. hey discovered the phenomena and then followed with all of the experiments that you should dohat as biologically relevant as you can get. uben Abagyan,
That makes them attractive as backup power sources for hospitals and manufacturing plants as well as for producing distributed power systems not connected to the grid.
says immunologist Richard Koup, deputy director of the Vaccine Research center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland,
says immunologist Jake Estes of the Frederick National Laboratory of the National Cancer Institute (a sister of NIAID) in Frederick,
or antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. eservoirsof infected cells that hold latent provirus are a key reason why powerful combinations of ARVS cannot eliminate infections and cure people.
HIV/AIDS researchers working to cure the infection face several obstacles that these new scopes could help overcome.
One is the lack of detectable virus in the blood plasma of patients on effective ARV therapy
whether an intervention aimed at curing the infection is working. Several techniques exist to measure changes in reservoirs,
Conventional MRIS found in hospitals work by inducing a magnetic field gradient across your entire body.
This helps medical technicians localise and examine tissues inside your body but requires bulky equipment.
You'll see new applications in the ER in surgery with telehealth in remote communities and even in ambulances.
#Mini robot space surgeon to climb inside astronauts It could one day answer the prayers of astronauts who need surgery in deep space.
The miniature surgeon slides into the body through an incision in the belly button. Once inside the abdominal cavity which has been filled with inert gas to make room for it to work the robot can remove an ailing appendix, cut pieces from a diseased colon or repair a perforated gastric ulcer.
the surgery bot will perform a set of exercises to demonstrate its dexterity, such as manipulating rubber bands and other inanimate objects.
if you would consider surgery in space, "says team member Shane Farritor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Medical emergency For now, the only humans in space venture no further than the International space station.
Surgery in space would be extremely difficult. Without gravity, it is easy for bodily fluids like blood to float free
so medical tools need to be relatively light but capable of handling many kinds of situations."
"says Dmitry Oleynikov at the University of Nebraska Medical center.""That difficulty increases logarithmically when you're trying to do complex procedures such as an operation."
The feed relays to a control station, where a human surgeon operates it using joysticks.
Space surgeons Prototypes have performed several dozen procedures in pigs. The team says the next step is to work in human cadavers
"You could imagine situations in the future where you can actually dial in a surgery from the ground
This article will appear in print under the headline"Surgery bot fits in astronaut's gut a
The worst-case scenario is the Kessler syndrome proposed by astrophysicist Donald Kessler in the 1970s.
JAXA today cancelled the planned launch of Epsilon due to an abnormality detected 19 seconds before the planned lift off at 1. 45 pm local time.
They will also run medical and technical tests and broadcast a science lesson to Chinese students from orbit.
MIT has a strong record of applying interdisciplinary approaches to large-scale problems from energy to cancer.
Such particles could help scientists to track specific molecules produced in the body monitor a tumor s environment
Future versions of the particles could be designed to detect reactive oxygen species that often correlate with disease says Jeremiah Johnson an assistant professor of chemistry at MIT and senior author of the study.
You may be able to learn more about how diseases progress if you have imaging probes that can sense specific biomolecules Johnson says.
These particles could also be used to evaluate the level of oxygen radicals in a patient s tumor which can reveal valuable information about how aggressive the tumor is.
We think we may be able to reveal information about the tumor environment with these kinds of probes
and obtain real-time biochemical information about disease sites and also healthy tissues which is not always straightforward.
which should provide a highly useful diagnostic tool with real potential to follow disease progression in vivo says Bottle who was involved not in the study.
The research was funded by the National institutes of health the Department of defense the National Science Foundation and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research h
Increased speed and higher voice tones for example are strong indicators of high stress levels. Readers placed around an office collect the data and push it to the cloud.
Additionally more than 60 research organizations across the globe are using the system on management social psychology medicine computer science and physical therapy among other things.
A study with Cornell University in 2013 for instance allowed the startup to prove that it could accurately predict high levels of cortisol in someone s saliva an indicator of high stress based on their tone of voice.
They envision that this stable erasable and easy-to-retrieve memory will be suited well for applications such as sensors for environmental and medical monitoring.
or to detect inflammation from irritable bowel disease. These engineered bacteria could also be used as biological computers Lu says adding that they would be particularly useful in types of computation that require a lot of parallel processing such as picking patterns out of an image.
whether a certain disease marker is expressed or whether a neuron is active at a certain time.
In recent years the microbiome has attracted increasing attention for its role in health and disease.
This week MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) announce the launch of the Center for Microbiome Informatics
and Therapeutics a new interdisciplinary center dedicated to advancing the understanding of the microbiome s role in human biology
and techniques for treating diseases and conditions linked to an altered microbiome.##Today low-cost genetic sequencing
for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). This center is built around a bold idea: to accelerate our progress toward a world in
which was established at MIT in 2012 to tackle some of the world s biggest health challenges through interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of engineering science and clinical medicine.
Disease at MGH. Under their guidance the center will seek to develop a regional ecosystem together with other hospitals universities and research institutions.
Collaboration between academic investigators and real-world clinicians is vital to the center s purpose according to Xavier who also serves as the Kurt Isselbacher Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical school.
Molecular biologists microbiologists and cell biologists seek to understand microbe/microbe and microbe/host cell function and communication he says.
Immunologists geneticists and genomics researchers drive Progress to this wealth of information clinicians contribute patient-based insights and gain potential targets for therapeutics.
The center s initial flagship project will focus on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD. Individuals with IBD which includes conditions such as ulcerative colitis
and Crohn s disease suffer from chronic inflammation of the digestive tract and experience severe diarrhea pain fatigue
and weight loss. IBD is known to have a strong link to the microbiome according to Alm:
Microbiome-based medicine is poised to revolutionize patient care for IBD and many other diseases in the gastrointestinal tract he says.
Our goal is to develop new treatment options personalized to an individual s microbiota and based on natural or engineered microorganisms that have higher efficacy and fewer side effects than conventional drug treatments.
Today however researchers and doctors can take advantage of faster low-cost genomic tools that allow them to study the entire bacterial system of individual patients.
targeted therapies designed to remove add or even modify specific bacteria; or medical interventions based on reprogramming an individual s immune system.
We need to develop a toolkit for engineering the human microbiome Alm says. Both Alm and Xavier emphasize that the center s long-term purpose is to expand the breadth and depth of this emerging field.
While IBD is the focus of the initial flagship project the center is designed to foster opportunities to explore the impact of the microbiome on systemic autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis Type 1 diabetes arthritis and other disorders such as
autism obesity acne and allergies. The co-directors are presenting their research collaboration this week at an MGH-hosted conference on microbes metabolism and mucosal circuits.
can make towers almost twice as strong to handle stress.)Smith compares the process to today at home installation of rain gutters:
Currently, when a doctor wants to run a series of blood tests on a patient, he or she collects several vials of blood
and youe trying to screen for some disease, but you don have a lab with you.
Piggybacking on the fundraising bracelet trend of a few years ago, he sold silicone bracelets, raising $60, 000 to fund research on his brother disease.
receiving pacemaker implants in his chest that could intercept aberrant signals from his brain before they reached his muscles.
#Better chemotherapy through targeted delivery Every year about 100000 Americans are diagnosed with brain tumors that have spread from elsewhere in the body.
These tumors known as metastases are treated usually with surgery followed by chemotherapy but the cancer often returns.
A new study from MIT Brigham and Women s Hospital and Johns hopkins university suggests that delivering chemotherapy directly into the brain cavity may offer a better way to treat tumors that have metastasized to the brain.
Metastatic disease should be sensitive to chemotherapy but systemic chemotherapy has not proven effective because it s not getting to the brain at a high enough dose for a long enough period of time says Cima who is also a member of MIT s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
We re showing we get much higher degrees of tumor cell death when we deliver the drug locally.
The paper s other senior authors are Robert Langer the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT
and a member of the Koch Institute the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES and the Department of Chemical engineering and Henry Brem a professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. The lead author is Urvashi Upadhyay previously a neurosurgeon
at Brigham and Women s Hospital and now an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Massachusetts Medical school.
To make sure that enough reaches a tumor very large quantities must be given often producing side effects.
For a few types of cancer doctors have developed more targeted approaches. With ovarian cancer the best results are achieved
when drugs are delivered directly into the abdominal cavity. However this is not widely done because it requires implanting a catheter in the patient for 12 weeks
To overcome these delivery issues Cima s lab is working on small implantable devices to deliver drugs for ovarian cancer and bladder disease as well as brain cancer.
TMZ which is a first-line treatment for brain metastasis and gliomas and doxorubicin a common treatment for breast cancer
Zone of influenceworking with mice implanted with tumors similar to human brain metastases the researchers found that TMZ delivered directly to the brain prolonged survival by several days compared with TMZ administered by injection.
or programmed cell death in tumor cells near the capsules. However doxorubicin delivered to the brain did not perform as well as systemic injection of doxorubicin.
As an explanation for that discrepancy the researchers found that TMZ travels farther from the capsule after release allowing it to reach more tissue.
This could be valuable information in designing future versions of this treatment for brain tumors or other cancers he adds.
The properties of the drug molecule have to be taken into account in the design of local therapy that s effective says Cima.
There s a zone around each one of these devices where it can work depending on the molecule.
Michael Lim an associate professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins says the new approach seems like a promising way to expand the range of treatments available for brain tumors
Although there are still many hurdles to developing this approach to treat human cancer Cima says he believes it is worth pursuing
because so many cancers particularly those of the breast and lung spread to the brain. The researchers are also working on using this approach to precisely deliver drugs to very small regions of the brain in hopes of developing better treatments for psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.
The research was funded by the National institutes of health and the Brain science Foundation n
#Microscopic walkers find their way across cell surfaces Nature has developed a wide variety of methods for guiding particular cells enzymes and molecules to specific structures inside the body:
White blood cells can find their way to the site of an infection while scar-forming cells migrate to the site of a wound.
But finding ways of guiding artificial materials within the body has proven more difficult. Now a team of researchers at MIT led by Alfredo Alexander-Katz the Walter Henry Gale Associate professor of Materials science and engineering has demonstrated a new target-finding mechanism.
That s the method used by white blood cells for example to locate regions where pathogens are attacking body cells.
For example it could be developed as a method of locating tumor cells within the body by identifying their surface texture perhaps in combination with other characteristics.
#Fast modeling of cancer mutations Sequencing the genomes of tumor cells has revealed thousands of genetic mutations linked with cancer.
However sifting through this deluge of information to figure out which of these mutations actually drive cancer growth has proven to be a tedious time-consuming process.
It s a very rapid and very adaptable approach to make models says Thales Papagiannakopoulos a postdoc at MIT s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
what their role is in tumor progression. If we can actually understand the biology we can then go in
and try targeted therapeutic approaches. Led by Papagiannakopoulos graduate student Francisco Sanchez-Rivera the paper s other lead author
This approach could be used to study nearly any gene in many different types of cancer the researchers say.
There has to be a functional way of assessing the role of these cancer-gene candidates as they appear in sequencing studies Sanchez-Rivera says.
Cutting out cancer genescrispr originally discovered by biologists studying the bacterial immune system involves a set of proteins that bacteria use to defend themselves against bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria.
In this study the researchers focused on a type of non-small cell lung cancer called lung adenocarcinoma
Jacks lab has engineered previously mice that conditionally express the Kras oncogene only in the lung leading them to develop lung adenocarcinoma.
The researchers administered these mice with lentiviruses targeting three different genes allowing them to see how each gene cooperates with Kras to influence tumor growth.
Once the tumors develop the researchers can study how aggressive they are how fast they grow
The researchers found that the mice in this study developed very similar tumors to those seen previously in mice with those genes deleted using traditional methods.
whose role in lung cancer is understood not as well revealed that APC loss also drives tumor progression.
Tumors without that gene became much less differentiated and more similar to embryonic cells. To verify these results the researchers also used mice with APC deleted by traditional methods
and found the same types of tumors. This is#a wonderful new example of the power of the CRISPR approach says Anton Berns a professor of molecular genetics at The netherlands Cancer Institute.
It also comes at the right time. The cancer genome sequence initiative provides us with numerous candidate genes that might modulate tumorigenesis
and we need a rapid method to test their contribution. This is precisely what this methodology provides.
Personalized treatmentsthis system could be used in combination with hundreds of existing mouse strains that have been engineered to express known cancer genes allowing researchers to study more thoroughly the interactions of multiple genes.
and brain to model tumors in those regions the researchers say. This method also offers new ways to seek personalized treatments for cancer patients depending on the types of mutations found in their tumors the researchers say.
They envision using this technique to create mice with tumors carrying the same genetic profile as a patient then testing different drugs on them to see which have the best effect.
This opens up a whole new field of being personalized able to do oncology where you can model human mutations
and start treating tumors based on these mutations Papagiannakopoulos says. The research was funded by the Howard hughes medical institute the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology at MIT and the National Cancer Institute u
#Big step in battling bladder disease The millions of people worldwide who suffer from the painful bladder disease known as interstitial cystitis (IC) may soon have a better, long-term treatment option, thanks
to a controlled-release, implantable device invented by MIT professor Michael Cima and other researchers.
In the mid-2000s, a urologist at Boston Children Hospital contacted Cima at the behest of Institute Professor Robert Langer with a plea:
Could he develop an alternative treatment for IC? Treating the debilitating disease which causes painful and frequent urination that can interrupt daily life currently requires infusing the drug lidocaine into a patient bladder through a catheter.
This provides temporary relief and must be repeated frequently. ou hear that and you say, here has to be a better way,?
and tested in clinical trials by Taris Biomedical, co-founded by Cima and Langer, a longtime collaborator and entrepreneur.
But Taris now plans to tailor the platform device to carry other drugs into the bladder to treat various diseases,
including bladder cancer. rology hasn gotten really the benefit of improvement in the biotech revolution. This type of technology can revolutionize how we do drug therapy in urology,
says Cima, who serves on Tarisboard of directors. Taris taking shape Liris started as Lee Phd thesis under the tutelage of Cima and with a grant from the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation
who has founded four other companies in his time at MIT Microchips Inc.,Springleaf Therapeutics, Entra Pharmaceuticals,
a nurse called and asked about every ache and pain, Cima says. After two weeks, there were none.
whom also had called lesions Hunner lesions, which affect about 10 to 15 percent of IC sufferers.
Usually, doctors cauterize these lesions (which don disappear on their own) while patients are under anesthesia in an operating room.
But the resulting scarring sometimes leads to patients losing some bladder function. uch to our surprise
in our trials, the lesions in those using Liris disappeared after two weeksin five out of six patients,
Results of both trials were published in 2012 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Last year, Taris began an ongoing focus study specifically on patients with Hunner lesions.
ain is a subjective outcome, Cima says, ut the disappearance of the Hunner lesions was a purely objective outcome.
That objective result, I believe, is one important factor that Allegan decided to acquire the product.
Taris itself had also become a leading expert in interstitial cystitis. So that helped too. With the Allergan acquisition funds, Taris will further develop the device to deliver drugs for other bladder diseases,
including chemotherapy for bladder cancer whose high recurrence rate is due, in part, to difficulties delivering drugs in a sustained way.
Last year, Taris entered a research collaboration with Astrazeneca to develop novel treatments for bladder cancer. his device is a platform
Cima says. hether it bladder cancer, overactive or underactive bladder any of these indications where you might want to deliver drugs right to the bladder it can do that.
A member of the MIT Koch Institute, Cima is also working on other drug-delivery projects,
such as intraperitoneal chemotherapy delivery to treat ovarian cancer, funded in part by the Bridge Project
and bind with particular molecules within the body such as markers for tumor cells or other disease agents.
which could also be an essential property for diagnostic or therapeutic applications. Moreover Bawendi says We wanted to be able to manipulate these structures inside the cells with magnetic fields
so that they interact in specific ways with molecules or structures within the cell either for diagnosis or treatment.
For example the coating could have a molecule that binds to a specific type of tumor cells;
so you could see the spatial macroscopic outlines of a tumor he says. The next step for the team is to test the new nanoparticles in a variety of biological settings.
Massachusetts General Hospital; Institut Curie in Paris; the Heinrich-Pette Institute and the Bernhard-Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg Germany;
Children s Hospital Boston; and Cornell University. The work was supported by the National institutes of health the Army Research Office through MIT s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies and the Department of energy y
then the cable can get taut and fracture, which is really bad news . So we wanted to understand what was underlying those patterns.
which, when wound on a spool, retains a certain amount of curve as it unwound.
Now Stephanopoulos and colleagues at MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have identified a new way to boost yeast tolerance to ethanol by simply altering the composition of the medium in
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