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.
000 gallons of toxic solvents and 100 kilograms of toxic cadmium waste in U s. production each year.
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.
They also found higher rates of apoptosis 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.
However large concentrations of ethanol can be toxic to yeast which has limited the production capacity of many yeast strains used in industry.
Toxicity is probably the single most important problem in cost-effective biofuels production says Gregory Stephanopoulos the Willard Henry Dow Professor of Chemical engineering at MIT.
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
which are even more toxic to yeast. The more we understand about why a molecule is toxic
and methods that will make these organisms more tolerant the more people will get ideas about how to attack other more severe problems of toxicity says Stephanopoulos one of the senior authors of the Science paper.
This work goes a long way to squeezing the last drop of ethanol from sugar adds Gerald Fink an MIT professor of biology member of the Whitehead Institute and the paper s other senior author.
They are also working on using this approach to boost the ethanol yield from various industrial feedstocks that because of starting compounds inherently toxic to yeast now have low yields.
which includes antibodies peptides RNA and DNA to human patients. In a study appearing in the journal Integrative biology the researchers used this technology to identify materials that can efficiently deliver RNA to zebrafish and also to rodents.
This type of high-speed screen could help overcome one of the major bottlenecks in developing disease treatments based on biologics:
#Fish on the flyzebrafish are used commonly to model human diseases in part because their larvae are transparent making it easy to see the effects of genetic mutations or drugs.#
For this study Yanik s team developed a new technology to inject RNA carried by nanoparticles called lipidoids previously designed by Daniel Anderson an associate professor of chemical engineering member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute
for Medical Engineering and Science and an author of the new paper. These fatty molecules have shown promise as delivery vehicles for RNA interference a process that allows disease-causing genes to be turned off with small strands of RNA.#
#Yanik s group tested about 100 lipidoids that had performed not well in tests of RNA delivery in cells grown in a lab dish.
#A few hours after injection the researchers imaged the zebrafish to see if they displayed any fluorescent protein in the brain indicating
#Jeff Karp an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical school who was not part of the research team says this work is an excellent example of harnessing a multidisciplinary team to partner complementary technologies for the purpose of solving a unified problem.
This approach should have utility across multiple disease areas. New leadsthe researchers are now using
#Biologists find an early sign of cancer Years before they show any other signs of disease pancreatic cancer patients have very high levels of certain amino acids in their bloodstream according to a new study from MIT Dana-Farber
Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute. This finding which suggests that muscle tissue is broken down in the disease s earliest stages could offer new insights into developing early diagnostics for pancreatic cancer which kills about 40000 Americans every year
and is caught usually not until it is too late to treat. The study which appears today in the journal Nature Medicine is based on an analysis of blood samples from 1500 people participating in long-term health studies.
The researchers compared samples from people who were diagnosed eventually with pancreatic cancer and samples from those who were not.
What that means for the tumor and what that means for the health of the patient those are long-term questions still to be answered says Matthew Vander Heiden an associate professor of biology a member of MIT s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
The paper s other senior author is Brian Wolpin an assistant professor of medical oncology at Dana-Farber.
Wolpin a clinical epidemiologist assembled the patient sample from several large public-health studies. All patients had drawn their blood
What we found was that this really interesting signature fell out as predicting pancreatic cancer diagnosis which was elevation in these three branched chain amino acids:
We found that higher levels of branched chain amino acids were present in people who went on to develop pancreatic cancer compared to those who did not develop the disease Wolpin says.
These findings led us to hypothesize that the increase in branched chain amino acids is due to the presence of an early pancreatic tumor.
Using those mouse models we found that we could perfectly recapitulate these exact metabolic changes during the earliest stages of cancer Vander Heiden says.
This is a finding of fundamental importance in the biology of pancreatic cancer says David Tuveson a professor at the Cancer Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who was involved not in the work.
which has not been seen in other types of cancer occurs in the early stages of pancreatic cancer.
They suspect that pancreatic tumors may be trying to feed their own appetite for amino acids that they need to build cancerous cells.
The findings may also allow scientists to pursue new treatments that would work by targeting tumor metabolism
and cutting off a tumor s nutrient supply Vander Heiden says. MIT s contribution to this research was funded by the Lustgarten Foundation the National institutes of health the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation n
#Underwater robot for port security Last week at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems MIT researchers unveiled an oval-shaped submersible robot a little smaller than a football with a flattened
Each year these superbugs including drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis and staphylococcus infect more than 2 million people nationwide
Using a gene-editing system that can disable any target gene they have shown that they can selectively kill bacteria carrying harmful genes that confer antibiotic resistance or cause disease.
and they envision that eventually the technology could be adapted to deliver the CRISPR components to treat infections or remove other unwanted bacteria in human patients.
We re excited about the application of Combigem to probe complex multifactorial phenotypes such as stem cell differentiation cancer biology
To train the material Holschuh first wound raw SMA fiber into extremely tight millimeter-diameter coils then heated the coils to 450 degrees Celsius to set them into an original or trained shape.
If your suit happens to have sensors it could tourniquet you in the event of injury without you even having to think about it.
who are demonstrating delivery of vaccines in Africa. Delta Drone in France is using the platform for open-air mining operations,
#A new way to diagnose malaria Over the past several decades malaria diagnosis has changed very little.
which causes the disease. This approach gives an accurate count of how many parasites are in the blood an important measure of disease severity
but is not ideal because there is potential for human error. A research team from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research
This technique could offer a more reliable way to detect malaria says Jongyoon Han a professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering at MIT.
It s based on a naturally occurring biomarker that does not require any biochemical processing of samples says Han one of the senior authors of a paper describing the technique in the Aug 31 issue of Nature Medicine.
Hunting malaria with magnetswith the traditional blood-smear technique a technician stains the blood with a reagent that dyes cell nuclei.
However the technology and expertise needed to identify the parasite are not always available in some of the regions most affected by malaria
which can be toxic so the parasite converts the iron into hemozoin a weakly paramagnetic crystallite.
which can be obtained with a finger prick making the procedure minimally invasive and much easier for health care workers than drawing blood intravenously.
Tracking infectionhemozoin crystals are produced in all four stages of malaria infection including the earliest stages
Also the amount of hemozoin can reveal how severe the infection is or whether it is responding to treatment.
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