New Scientist reporter Chelsea Whyte spotlights Prof. Regina Barzilay’s quest to revolutionize cancer treatment by applying AI techniques in ways that could help doctors detect cancer earlier. Barzilay explains that she is committed to, "applying the best technologies available to what we care about the most – our health.”
In this video, Prof. Canan Dagdeviren speaks with STAT about her group’s work developing a new, self-powered implantable device that can be used to relay information about the human body. “The physical patterns of human beings contain information in coded ways, and we would like to decode and understand what these patterns are telling us,” Dagdeviren explains.
Researchers from a number of universities, including MIT, have developed a new refillable, implantable device that can deliver drugs to the heart tissue to help treat a heart attack, reports Xinhua. "After a heart attack we could use this device to deliver therapy to prevent a patient from getting heart failure," explains Prof. Ellen Roche.
MIT researchers have developed a surgical technique that allows the central nervous system to send movement commands to a robotic prosthesis, writes Allen Cone for United Press International. Cone explains that the new technique allows for “more stable and efficient” control over the movement of the prosthetic device.
STAT reporters Gideon Gil and Matthew Orr describe a “pioneering” surgical technique from researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital that allows prosthetics to operate like human limbs. Prof. Hugh Herr, “himself a rock climber who lost both his legs to frostbite as a teen, describes his goal as nothing short of eliminating disability."
In an article for The Wall Street Journal about blockchain, Tomio Geron highlights MedRec, a system being developed by MIT researchers that would allow patients to manage their own medical records. “With MedRec, if a baby has been given vaccinations by different doctors,” reports Geron, “all of that information can be accessed from the blockchain.”
Prof. Hugh Herr and his team in the Biomechatronics Group are developing prosthetics that “respond to neural commands with the flexibility and speed of regular limbs,” writes Eillie Anzilotti for Fast Company. In a process pioneered by the group, “doctors leave the tendons and nerve endings intact so they can continue to feed sensations down past where the human leg ends,” Anzilotti says.
Jenny Anderson of Quartz describes a new study from MIT’s McGovern Institute and others showing that back-and-forth banter proved much more predictive of a child’s language development than the number of words spoken to them. “[MIT graduate student Rachel] Romeo and her colleagues believe that these conversational turns help to actually rewire and grow kids’ brains,” writes Anderson.
Researchers at MIT have developed a “kirigami” film, based off of the ancient paper-folding technique of the same name, that can be used for bandaging tricky areas like the knee or elbow, writes David Grossman for Popular Mechanics. “We are the first group to find, with a systematic mechanism study, that a kirigami design can improve a material’s adhesion,” says postdoc and lead researcher Ruike Zhao.
Researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have programmed CRISPR to “in essence, make edits when significant cellular events occur,” writes Kristin Brown for Gizmodo. “All this adds up to the potential of CRISPR as not just a gene-editing powerhouse, but a multifunctional tool that also works as a biosensor, a medical detective, and an invaluable instrument for basic research.”
A new study from the McGovern Institute suggest “that one of the most effective ways to stimulate children’s brains from a young age is back-and-forth conversation,” writes Elise Takaham for The Boston Globe. “We think that it’s because back-and-forth conversation is not only about hearing more words, it’s also about practicing paying attention to someone else and involves lots of emotional and social bonding,” said Prof. John Gabrieli.
Originally created by the Zhang Lab in 2017, CRISPR tool SHERLOCK has been improved upon to be three times more sensitive for detecting viruses and infections using an inexpensive test strip. Sharon Begley writes for STAT News, “A paper strip, like in a pregnancy test, is dipped into a sample, and if a line appears, the target molecule was detected — no instruments required.”
A gene-editing tool called SHERLOCK, developed in Prof. Feng Zhang’s lab, allows for faster detection of infections and viruses, such as Zika and Dengue fever. “It does this by combining different types of CRISPR enzymes, which are unleashed together to target distinct bits of DNA and RNA, another of the major biological molecules found in all forms of life,” writes Alessandra Potenza for The Verge.
During an appearance on WGBH’s Greater Boston, Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with Jim Braude about her research and the experience of winning a MacArthur grant. Barzilay explains that the techniques she and her colleagues are developing to apply machine learning to medicine, “can be applied to many other areas. In fact, we have started collaborating and expanding.”
Prof. Regina Barzilay, recipient of a 2017 MacArthur grant, speaks to Radio Boston’s Meghna Chakrabarti about her research. Barzilay explains that data is not currently used in the medical field “to select treatments, to personalize it, or to help the patients reduce their uncertainty about the outcomes. I really strongly felt it has to be changed.”