#Steam from the sun A new material structure developed at MIT generates steam by soaking up the sun. The structure a layer of graphite flakes
and an underlying carbon foam is a porous, insulating material structure that floats on water. When sunlight hits the structure surface, it creates a hotspot in the graphite,
This is where we re Going with an expected rise of wireless charging one promising future application Soljacic sees is in medical devices especially implanted ventricular assist devices (or heart pumps) that support blood flow.
Currently a patient who has experienced a heart attack or weakening of the heart has wires running from the implant to a charger
which means risk for infection. In our case a patient could lie on the bed
and while he or she is sleeping our technology could charge the device from a distance Soljacic says.
This noninvasive approach could pave the way to using optogenetics in human patients to treat epilepsy and other neurological disorders,
Such implants can be difficult to insert, however, and can be incompatible with many kinds of experiments, such as studies of development, during
or of neurodegenerative disorders, during which the implant can interact with brain physiology. In addition, it is difficult to perform long-term studies of chronic diseases with these implants.
To find a better alternative, Boyden, graduate student Amy Chuong, and colleagues turned to the natural world.
Many microbes and other organisms use opsins to detect light and react to their environment.
says Garret Stuber, an assistant professor of psychiatry and cell biology and physiology at the University of North carolina at Chapel hill. n animals with larger brains,
Working with researchers at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Switzerland, the MIT team also tested Jaws ability to restore the light sensitivity of retinal cells called cones.
In people with a disease called retinitis pigmentosa, cones slowly atrophy, eventually causing blindness. Friedrich Miescher Institute scientists Botond Roska and Volker Busskamp have shown previously that some vision can be restored in mice by engineering those cone cells to express light-sensitive proteins.
making it potentially more useful for treating retinitis pigmentosa. This type of noninvasive approach to optogenetics could also represent a step toward developing optogenetic treatments for diseases such as epilepsy,
which could be controlled by shutting off misfiring neurons that cause seizures, Boyden says. ince these molecules come from species other than humans,
oil-pipeline leaks can lead to toxic spills and prolonged, expensive cleanup operations. All of these systems could benefit significantly from improved leak-detection methods,
Coordination across agencies and providers could be the key to quality medical care; you may want your family to be able to share the pictures you post on a social-networking site.
The new approach, described May 18 in Nature Methods, could also help neuroscientists learn more about the biological basis of brain disorders. e don really know
for any brain disorder, the exact set of cells involved, Boyden says. he ability to survey activity throughout a nervous system may help pinpoint the cells
or networks that are involved with a brain disorder, leading to new ideas for therapies. Boyden team developed the brain-mapping method with researchers in the lab of Alipasha Vaziri of the University of Vienna and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
The paper lead authors are Young-Gyu Yoon, a graduate student at MIT, and Robert Prevedel, a postdoc at the University of Vienna.
similarly the return of motor function in patients with neurological damage could be identified by its unique grammar.
holds great potential for treating many diseases caused by malfunctioning genes. However, it has been difficult for scientists to find safe and effective ways to deliver gene-blocking RNA to the correct targets.
Up to this point, researchers have gotten the best results with RNAI targeted to diseases of the liver,
This raises the possibility of using RNAI to treat many types of disease, including cancer and cardiovascular disease,
the researchers say. here been a growing amount of excitement about delivery to the liver in particular,
but in order to achieve the broad potential of RNAI therapeutics, it important that we be able to reach other parts of the body as well,
says Daniel Anderson, the Samuel A. Goldblith Associate professor of Chemical engineering, a member of MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science,
400 variants of their particles in cervical cancer cells by measuring whether they could turn off a gene coding for a fluorescent protein that had been added to the cells.
To demonstrate the potential for treating lung disease, the researchers used the nanoparticles to block two genes that have been implicated in lung cancer VEGF receptor 1 and Dll4,
which promote the growth of blood vessels that feed tumors. By blocking these in lung endothelial cells,
the researchers were able to slow lung tumor growth in mice and also reduce the spread of metastatic tumors.
Masanori Aikawa, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical school, describes the new technology as monumental contributionthat should help researchers develop new treatments
and learn more about diseases of endothelial tissue such as atherosclerosis and diabetic retinopathy, which can cause blindness. ndothelial cells play a very important role in multiple steps of many diseases, from initiation to the onset of clinical complications,
says Aikawa, who was not part of the research team. his kind of technology gives us an extremely powerful tool that can help us understand these devastating vascular diseases.
The researchers plan to test additional potential targets in hopes that these particles could eventually be deployed to treat cancer, atherosclerosis,
and other diseases. Scientists from Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and Harvard Medical school also contributed to the study,
which was funded by a National Defense Science and Engineering Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, MIT Presidential Fellowships, the National institutes of health, the Stop and Shop Pediatric Brain tumor Fund,
the Pediatric Brain Tumour Fund, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Alnylam, and the Center for RNA Therapeutics and Biology e
#Chemotherapy timing is key to success MIT researchers have devised a novel cancer treatment that destroys tumor cells by first disarming their defenses,
then hitting them with a lethal dose of DNA damage. In studies with mice, the research team showed that this one-two punch,
which relies on a nanoparticle that carries two drugs and releases them at different times,
dramatically shrinks lung and breast tumors. The MIT team, led by Michael Yaffe, the David H. Koch Professor in Science,
who is a member of MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. ee moving from the simplest model of the nanoparticle just getting the drug in there
and targeting it to having smart nanoparticles that deliver drug combinations in the way that you need to really attack the tumor.
Doctors routinely give cancer patients two or more different chemotherapy drugs in hopes that a multipronged attack will be more successful than a single drug.
which shuts down one of the pathways that promote uncontrolled tumor growth. These pretreated tumor cells were much more susceptible to treatment with a DNA-damaging drug called doxorubicin than cells given the two drugs simultaneously. t like rewiring a circuit,
says Yaffe, who is also a member of the Koch Institute. hen you give the first drug,
found on tumor cell surfaces, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat pancreatic cancer and some types of lung cancer.
Doxorubicin is used to treat many cancers, including leukemia, lymphoma, and bladder, breast, lung, and ovarian tumors.
Staggering these drugs proved particularly powerful against a type of breast cancer cell known as triple-negative,
which doesn have overactive estrogen, progesterone, or HER2 receptors. Triple-negative tumors, which account for about 16 percent of breast cancer cases,
are much more aggressive than other types and tend to strike younger women. That was an exciting finding
ow do you translate that into something you can actually give a cancer patient? From lab result to drug delivery To approach this problem,
folate, helps direct the particles to tumor cells, which express high quantities of folate receptors.
Once the particles reach a tumor and are taken up by cells, the particles start to break down.
The researchers tested the particles in mice implanted with two types of human tumors: triple-negative breast tumors and non-small-cell lung tumors.
Both types shrank significantly. Furthermore, packaging the two drugs in liposome nanoparticles made them much more effective than the traditional forms of the drugs,
even when those drugs were given in a time-staggered order. his particle delivery system not only provides a platform for time-staggered treatment strategies in cancer,
but also for delivering the drugs more directly to the tumor tissue itself, says Rune Linding,
As a next step before possible clinical trials in human patients, the researchers are now testing the particles in mice that are programmed genetically to develop tumors on their own,
instead of having human tumor cells implanted in them. The researchers believe that time-staggered delivery could also improve other types of chemotherapy.
and ovarian cancers. At the same time, Hammond lab is working on more complex nanoparticles that would allow for more precise loading of the drugs
The work was funded by the National institutes of health, the Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program supported by the Kathy and Curt Marble Fund for Cancer Research,
and a Breast cancer Alliance Exceptional Project Grant
#Getting more electricity out of solar cells When sunlight shines on today solar cells, much of the incoming energy is given off as waste heat rather than electrical current.
including the areas most affected by Parkinson disease, which is caused by the death of dopamine-generating cells.
which may lead to cancer and other diseases if not mended. The effectiveness of these repair systems varies greatly from person to person;
scientists believe that this variability may explain why some people get cancer while others exposed to similar DNA-damaging agents do not.
A team of MIT researchers has developed now a test that can rapidly assess several of these repair systems,
which could help determine individualsrisk of developing cancer and help doctors predict how a given patient will respond to chemotherapy drugs.
The new test, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of April 21, can analyze four types of DNA repair capacity simultaneously, in less than 24 hours.
who is the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor, an American Cancer Society Professor, and a member of MIT departments of biological engineering and of biology, Center for Environmental Health Sciences,
and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Measuring repair With the new test, the MIT team can measure how well cells repair the most common DNA lesions,
including single-strand breaks, double-strand breaks, mismatches, and the introduction of alkyl groups caused by pollutants such as fuel exhaust and tobacco smoke.
of which carry a specific type of DNA damage, also called DNA lesions. Each of these CIRCULAR DNA strands,
the DNA lesions prevent those genes from being expressed, so when the DNA is repaired successfully, the cell begins to produce the fluorescent protein.
In others, repairing the DNA lesion turns the fluorescent gene off. By introducing these plasmids into cells and reading the fluorescent output,
scientists can determine how efficiently each kind of lesion has been repaired. In theory, more than five plasmids could go into each cell,
which type of lesion the plasmid carries, as well as information about which patient cells are being tested.
Some of these differences have been linked with cancer vulnerability; for example, a genetic defect in a type of DNA repair called nucleotide excision repair often leads to a condition called xeroderma pigmentosum, in
which DNA damage caused by ultraviolet light goes unrepaired and leads to skin cancer. Scientists have identified also links between DNA repair and neurological, developmental,
and immunological disorders, but useful predictive DNA-repair-based tests have not been developed, largely because it has been impossible to rapidly analyze several different types of DNA repair capacity at once.
Samson lab is now working on adapting the new test so it can be used with blood samples taken from patients,
and potentially enabling prevention or earlier diagnosis of diseases linked to DNA repair. Such a test could also be used to predict patientsresponse to chemotherapy drugs, which often work by damaging cancer cellsdna,
or to determine how much radiation treatment a patient can tolerate. The researchers also believe this test could be exploited to screen for new drugs that inhibit
Inhibitors could be targeted to tumors to make them more susceptible to chemotherapy, while enhancers could help protect people who have been exposed accidentally to DNA-damaging agents,
Tumors in low-oxygen environments tend to be more resistant to therapy and spread more aggressively to other parts of the body.
Measuring tumors oxygen levels could help doctors make decisions about treatments but there s currently no reliable noninvasive way to make such measurements.
Using this kind of sensor doctors may be able to better determine radiation doses and to monitor whether treatments are having the desired effect according to the researchers who describe the device in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of April 21.
In cases where you are trying to make therapeutic decisions you want to have some numbers that you can fall back on says Vincent Liu a graduate student in Cima s lab at MIT s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
Doctors often use MRI to diagnose tumors but currently MRI can only reveal the size and location of a tumor.
With the new MIT sensor doctors could track the state of the tumor and predict how it might respond to radiation treatment according to the researchers.
Radiation kills tumors by initiating DNA damage but oxygen is required to help finish the job.
An accurate reading of how much oxygen is present would help doctors calculate how much radiation might be necessary.
Measuring oxygen levels could also reveal the metastatic potential of a tumor: Those with lower oxygen levels tend to spread more aggressively.
The new MRI sensor combines two forms of silicone a solid called PDMS and a substance known as DDMPS which has an oily consistency.
The researchers shaped this polymer into a 1. 5-millimeter sensor that could be implanted in tissue during a biopsy;
After injection these particles clump together to form a solid sensor. DDMPS absorbs molecular oxygen
Ralph Weissleder a professor at Harvard Medical school and director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Molecular Imaging Research says this type of sensor is a novel way to potentially track how cancer patients
The cancer field certainly needs something like this says Weissleder who was not part of the research team.
What s happening in a tumor This type of sensor could also be useful for monitoring blood flow in diabetic patients who often experience restricted circulation in their extremities
or people who have suffered traumatic injuries. The researchers also anticipate that it could help scientists learn more about tumor biology.
As opposed to just studying the genetic profile of tumor cells this could also reveal how they re interacting with the stroma that surrounds the tumor.
Oxygen tension as simple as it sounds is a good measure of what s happening in a tumor Cima says.
The researchers are now working on sensors that could be used to monitor other biological properties such as ph. We hope this is the first of many types of solid-state contrast agents where the material responds to its chemical environment in such a way that we can detect it by MRI Cima says.
The research was funded by the National Cancer Institute Centers of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence and the U s army Research Office e
lowers joint stress; and drastically lowers the time required to acclimate to the prosthesis (which can take weeks or months with conventional models).
The system Herr says could also help prevent osteoarthritis a joint condition caused by age
and experience greater musculoskeletal stress which causes joint osteoarthritis. The scientific and engineering research that ultimately led to today s Biom prosthesis was conducted by Herr s research group within the MIT Media Lab
Osteoarthritis humanoid design and personal bionics Biom s broader goal is to prevent costly conditions such as osteoarthritis. As we age the loss of fast muscle fibers
and calf muscles to lose power driving painful joint disorders such as knee osteoarthritis and low back pain caused in part by awkward limping gaits.
Across the elderly population joint osteoarthritis is a leading cause of mobility impairment. At least among amputees Herr says Biom could help by fitting elderly populations with leg prostheses equal in biomechanical agility and control to a young adult s legs:
We find ourselves in a position where we can put 18-year-old calf muscles on patients independent of their age mitigating the problem of joint osteoarthritis across all populations Herr says.
for example, if a refrigerated vaccine has ever been exposed to temperatures too high or low. The paper lead authors are MIT postdoc Jiseok Lee and graduate student Paul Bisso.
The findings described in the March 30 issue of Nature Biotechnology offer the first evidence that this gene-editing technique known as CRISPR can reverse disease symptoms in living animals.
and replace it with the correct sequence holds potential for treating many genetic disorders according to the research team.
What s exciting about this approach is that we can actually correct a defective gene in a living adult animal says Daniel Anderson the Samuel A. Goldblith Associate professor of Chemical engineering at MIT a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
The recently developed CRISPR system relies on cellular machinery that bacteria use to defend themselves from viral infection.
Scientists envision that this kind of genome editing could one day help treat diseases such as hemophilia Huntington s disease
and customize says Anderson who is also a member of MIT s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.
Disease correctionfor this study the researchers designed three GUIDE RNA strands that target different DNA sequences near the mutation that causes type I tyrosinemia in a gene that codes for an enzyme called FAH.
Patients with this disease which affects about 1 in 100000 people cannot break down the amino acid tyrosine
This was enough to cure the disease allowing the mice to survive after being taken off the NCTB drug.
and also identifies several of the challenges that will need to be addressed moving forward to the development of human therapies says Charles Gersbach an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke university who was not part of the research team.
In particular the authors note that the efficiency of gene editing will need to improve significantly to be relevant for most diseases
Nevertheless this work is an exciting first step to using modern gene-editing tools to correct the devastating genetic diseases for
To deliver the CRISPR components the researchers employed a technique known as high-pressure injection which uses a high-powered syringe to rapidly discharge the material into a vein.
The research was funded by the National Cancer Institute the National institutes of health and the Marie D. and Pierre Casimir-Lambert Fund u
The research was funded by the Harvard Neurodiscovery Center, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation,
injected by the phage into the pathogen, to cause the bacteria to shine very brightly,
making it, according to Sample6, the world first nrichment-free pathogen diagnostic system. For instance if one strain of a pathogen needs identification, roducers usually grow the bacteria out to large numbers before they can detect it,
Lu says. his is slow, and obviously not ideal for the food industry. All these improvements contribute to the assay speed,
But it started as a potential therapeutic, when Lu was an MD/Phd student in the MIT-Harvard Health Sciences
Seeing phages as better antimicrobial treatments than antibiotics to which biofilms and bacteria can build immunity Lu, Sample6 cofounder and now vice president of operations Michael Koeris,
Faced with the financial crisis and challenges in commercializing therapeutics, they pivoted to diagnostics. They shopped their phages to bacteria-plagued industries such as oil and water treatment,
Thus, by sourcing from nature, we can adapt the platform to other pathogens and applications,
however, is most likely in health care, with the potential for clinical diagnostics or rapid detection of contamination in hospital rooms with the aim of decreasing the 1. 7 million cases of hospital-associated infections recorded in the United states each year.
With the assay, Lu says Sample6 hopes to bring synthetic biology, and specifically phages, to microbial detection across many fields.
Theye used in therapeutics, theye found in hydrogels, and theye used to control drug delivery.
Theye also used as biological probes to image cancer and to study processes inside cells,
Accelerated manufacturing Therapeutic peptides usually consist of a chain of 30 to 40 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
and rapidly test new peptides to treat cancer and other diseases, as well as more effective variants of existing peptides, such as insulin, Pentelute says.
they created an antibody mimic that has 130 amino acids, as well as a 113-amino-acid enzyme produced by bacteria.
Lai Fellowship, an Astrazeneca Distinguished Graduate student Fellowship, the National Institute of General Medical sciences, and the National institutes of health M
as well as serve as plant-based biosensors and stress reducers. By adapting the sensors to different targets,
pesticides, fungal infections, or exposure to bacterial toxins. They are also working on incorporating electronic nanomaterials, such as graphene, into plants. ight now,
#How tumors escape About 90 percent of cancer deaths are caused by tumors that have spread from their original locations.
MIT cancer biologists have discovered now that certain proteins in this structure, known as the extracellular matrix, help cancer cells make their escape.
but not less aggressive tumors, and found that four of those proteins are critical to metastasis. The findings could lead to new tests that predict which tumors are most likely to metastasize,
and may also help to identify new therapeutic targets for metastatic tumors, which are extremely difficult to treat. he problem is,
all the current drugs are targeted to primary tumors. Once a metastasis appears, in many cases, there nothing you can do about it,
says Richard Hynes, leader of the research team and a member of MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. n principle,
one could imagine interfering with some of these extracellular proteins and blocking metastasis in a patient.
Patients whose tumors have a greater abundance of extracellular matrix proteins have a poorer prognosis, but until now, scientists did not know why. he matrix has really been understudied,
the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research in MIT Department of biology. his study couldn have been done five to 10 years ago.
Researchers in Hyneslab previously developed a method for identifying extracellular matrix proteins by enriching them from tumors
To compare the extracellular matrix proteins found in different tumor types, the researchers implanted metastatic and nonmetastatic human breast cancer cells into mice.
They identified 118 extracellular matrix proteins that were found in both types of tumors. However, there were also several dozen proteins that were abundant in either metastatic or nonmetastatic tumors,
but not both. Manipulating the environment It appears that metastatic tumors as well as the supportive cells that surround them, secrete certain proteins into the extracellular matrix to make it easier for them to escape
Many of the proteins overexpressed in the more aggressive tumors are activated by the same cellular signaling pathways,
the researchers analyzed five of the proteins that are elevated in highly aggressive tumors and found that four of them are necessary for metastasis to occur.
tumors failed to spread. his elegant study sheds new light into the extracellular matrix proteins involved in various steps of the metastatic cascade,
a professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical school and Massachusetts General Hospital. ur knowledge about the abundance of extracellular matrix proteins in tumors has been limited.
The researchers also compared their results with human tumor samples and found that when the proteins they had identified in mice were overexpressed in human tumors,
the patients had lower survival rates. It would be impractical to do this kind of large-scale protein screen in patients,
but it could be possible to test samples for certain proteins using antibodies, say the researchers,
who are now developing such antibodies. hat could become part of a kit that doctors would use to distinguish a patient who has a tumor that going to metastasize,
so they would follow the patient differently from a patient with a tumor they know won metastasize,
The researchers are now seeking extracellular matrix proteins that are overexpressed in other metastatic cancers, including colon and pancreatic cancers.
which escaped tumor cells often metastasize such as the bone, liver, and lungs make them more receptive to invading cancer cells.
#A paper diagnostic for cancer Cancer rates in developing nations have climbed sharply in recent years
and now account for 70 percent of cancer mortality worldwide. Early detection has been proven to improve outcomes
and colonoscopy used in the developed world are too costly to be implemented in settings with little medical infrastructure.
To address this gap MIT engineers have developed a simple cheap paper test that could improve diagnosis rates
whether a person has cancer. This approach has helped detect infectious diseases and the new technology allows noncommunicable diseases to be detected using the same strategy.
The technology developed by MIT professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Sangeeta Bhatia relies on nanoparticles that interact with tumor proteins called proteases each
of which can trigger release of hundreds of biomarkers that are then easily detectable in a patient s urine.
When we invented this new class of synthetic biomarker we used a highly specialized instrument to do the analysis says Bhatia the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical engineering and Computer science.
Bhatia who is also a member of MIT s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science is the senior author of a paper describing the particles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Feb 24.
Amplifying cancer signalsin 2012 Bhatia and colleagues introduced the concept of a synthetic biomarker technology to amplify signals from tumor proteins that would be hard to detect on their own.
These proteins known as matrix metalloproteinases (MMPS) help cancer cells escape their original locations by cutting through proteins of the extracellular matrix which normally holds cells in place.
These particles congregate at tumor sites where MMPS cleave hundreds of peptides which accumulate in the kidneys
To create the test strips the researchers first coated nitrocellulose paper with antibodies that can capture the peptides.
and are exposed to several invisible test lines made of other antibodies specific to different tags attached to the peptides.
The technology can also easily be modified to detect multiple types of peptides released by different types or stages of disease.
Extending this technology to detection by strip tests is a big leap forward in bringing its use to outpatient clinics and decentralized health settings.
In tests in mice the researchers were able to accurately identify colon tumors as well as blood clots.
Bhatia says the technology would likely first be applied to high-risk populations such as people who have had cancer previously
or had a family member with the disease. Eventually she would like to see it used for early detection throughout developing nations.
I think it would be great to bring it back to this setting where point-of-care image-free cancer detection
whether it s in your home or in a pharmacy clinic could really be transformative Bhatia says.
With the current version of the technology patients would first receive an injection of the nanoparticles then urinate onto the paper test strip.
The team is also working to identify signatures of MMPS that could be exploited as biomarkers for other types of cancer as well as for tumors that have metastasized.
The research was funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship a Mazumdar-Shaw International Oncology Fellowship the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National institutes of health
the Burroughs Wellcome Fund the National Cancer Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute u
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