Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Peter Coy spotlights how the loss of several people close to Prof. Andrew Lo inspired him to explore how the field of finance could help advance treatments for orphan diseases. “Finance plays a huge role, sometimes way too big a role, in how drugs get developed,” says Lo. Fixing the financing model, could have a “tremendous, tremendous impact on health care.”
Writing for STAT, Prof. Emeritus Jeffrey Harris explores how community health centers “can play a crucial role in reducing the burden of the Covid-19 epidemic in the difficult winter months to come. They can serve as critical safety valves at a time when acute care hospitals and emergency rooms are saturated with patients.”
Wired reporter Will Knight spotlights how MIT researchers built a machine learning system that can help predict which patients are most likely to develop breast cancer. “What the AI tools are doing is they're extracting information that my eye and my brain can't,” says Constance Lehman, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and division chief of breast imaging at MGH.
Writing for The New York Times, Prof. Amy Finkelstein examines the difficulties posed by trying to reduce waste in health care spending. “If something becomes more expensive, people will buy less of it,” writes Finkelstein. “And the empirical evidence is overwhelming: When patients have to pay more, they use less medical care. The problem is they use less of all types of care.”
Fortune reporters Jeremy Kahn and Jonathan Vanian highlight MIT startup Macro-Eyes, which is focused on using AI to improve health care in low and middle-income countries.
A new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that the economic damage from Covid-19 is more widespread nationwide than mortality impacts, reports Roni Caryn Rabin and Gina Kolata for The New York Times. “Health crises concentrated in one part of the country and one age group may have substantial economic spillovers that are felt throughout the rest of the country and on other age groups,” the authors wrote.
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has awarded Prof. Regina Barzilay a $1 million prize for her work advancing the use of AI in medicine, reports John McCormick for The Wall Street Journal. "Regina is brilliant, has very high standards, and is committed to helping others,” says Prof. James Collins. “And I think her experience with—her personal experience with cancer—has motivated her to apply her intellectual talents to using AI to advance health care.”
The AP highlights how Prof. Regina Barzilay has been named the inaugural winner of a new award given by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for her work “using computer science to detect cancer and discover new drugs has won a new $1 million award for artificial intelligence.”
Prof. Regina Barzilay has been named the inaugural recipient of the Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence to Benefit Humanity for her work developing new AI techniques to help improve health care, reports Rebecca Robbins for STAT. Robbins writes that Barzilay is focused on turning the “abundance of research on AI in health care into tools that can improve care.”
Tech Explorist reporter Amit Malewar writes that researchers from Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) have “demonstrated a new way to manufacture human red blood cells (RBCs) that cuts the culture time by half compared to existing methods.”
A study co-authored by Prof. Jonathan Gruber finds that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate did not significantly impact coverage rates, reports Sarah Kliff for The New York Times. “The mandate made a difference, but not a huge difference in terms of the numbers of people signing up,” says Gruber.
Washington Post reporter Rachel Lerman highlights how MIT researchers developed a robotic system that uses UV light to disinfect spaces. “By knowing the geometry of the space — usually represented as a map — the robot can compute a patrolling trajectory and speed to expose all surfaces to the dosage that neutralizes the pathogens,” explains Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL.
A wireless system developed by CSAIL researchers can monitor movement and vital signs without using video, while also preserving privacy, reports Darrell Etherington for TechCrunch. “The system has the potential to be used at long-term care and assisted living facilities to provide a higher standard of support, while also ensuring that the privacy of the residents of those facilities is respected,” writes Etherington.
Writing for Scientific American, Carolyn Barber spotlights how researchers from MIT are developing cheap, fast and easy to use diagnostics for Covid-19 that can deliver results in minutes. “They are called lateral flow assays, but manifestly they are paper-strip tests that have an antibody embedded on filter paper,” writes Barber. “If a saliva sample has coronavirus present, the antibody will bind that viral antigen, turning the test positive, much like a pregnancy test works.”
Writing for The Washington Post, Prof. Robin Wolfe Scheffler underscores the importance of not only pursuing coronavirus vaccine development initiatives, but also “addressing the social and political factors that exacerbate disease and limit the access of many Americans to basic medical care.”