Tag: Medicine

James Fujimoto, Eric Swanson, and David Huang win Lasker Award

The Lasker Foundation has named James Fujimoto ’79, SM ’81, PhD ’84, the Elihu Thomson Professor in Electrical Engineering and principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), a recipient of the 2023 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for his groundbreaking work on optical coherence tomography. Fujimoto shares the award with Eric Swanson SM […]

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Computational model helps with diabetes drug design

For diabetes patients who must give themselves frequent insulin injections, the risk of low blood sugar can be life-threatening. A potential solution is a type of engineered insulin that circulates in the body and springs into action only when needed. Researchers working on this type of “glucose-responsive insulin” (GRI) hope that it could be injected […]

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Elon Musk’s Neuralink begins accepting human patients for trials of its brain implant

Head over to our on-demand library to view sessions from VB Transform 2023. Register Here Do you want to put an implant designed by Elon Musk’s company Neuralink — perhaps best known for killing 1,500 test animals — into your brain? Are you at least 22 years old and do you have quadriplegia (loss of […]

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How to keep people out of the emergency room

Encouraging immigrants to visit primary care doctors creates a striking decline in costly emergency room use, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT economist. The findings are from a New York City program that helped arrange medical appointments for undocumented immigrants with limited incomes, from May 2016 to June 2017. Those who received […]

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An implantable device could enable injection-free control of diabetes

One promising approach to treating Type 1 diabetes is implanting pancreatic islet cells that can produce insulin when needed, which can free patients from giving themselves frequent insulin injections. However, one major obstacle to this approach is that once the cells are implanted, they eventually run out of oxygen and stop producing insulin. To overcome […]

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Study explains why certain immunotherapies don’t always work as predicted

Cancer drugs known as checkpoint blockade inhibitors have proven effective for some cancer patients. These drugs work by taking the brakes off the body’s T cell response, stimulating those immune cells to destroy tumors. Some studies have shown that these drugs work better in patients whose tumors have a very large number of mutated proteins, […]

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How an archeological approach can help leverage biased data in AI to improve medicine

The classic computer science adage “garbage in, garbage out” lacks nuance when it comes to understanding biased medical data, argue computer science and bioethics professors from MIT, Johns Hopkins University, and the Alan Turing Institute in a new opinion piece published in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The rising […]

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Smart pill can track key biological markers in real-time

Researchers from MIT, Boston University, and elsewhere report a smart pill the size of a blueberry that could be a game changer in the diagnosis and treatment of bowel diseases. That’s because it is the first technology compatible with ingestion that can automatically detect — and report on in real time — key biological molecules […]

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MIT engineers design more powerful RNA vaccines

RNA vaccines against Covid-19 have proven effective at reducing the severity of disease. However, a team of researchers at MIT is working on making them even better. By tweaking the design of the vaccines, the researchers showed that they could generate Covid-19 RNA vaccines that produce a stronger immune response, at a lower dose, in […]

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Molecule reduces inflammation in Alzheimer’s models

Though drug developers have achieved some progress in treating Alzheimer’s disease with medicines that reduce amyloid-beta protein, other problems of the disease, including inflammation, continue unchecked. In a new study, scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT describe a candidate drug that in human cell cultures and Alzheimer’s mouse models reduced […]

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Kimberly Rose Bennett awarded HHMI Gilliam Fellowship

Kimberly Rose Bennett, a PhD candidate in the Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) program within the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), has been selected by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to be one of the 50 Gilliam Fellows for 2023. Bennett is the first HST student to receive this prestigious fellowship. The […]

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Laser-based system achieves noncontact medical ultrasound imaging

Researchers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory and their collaborators at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Ultrasound Research and Translation (CURT) have developed a new medical imaging device: the Noncontact Laser Ultrasound (NCLUS). This laser-based ultrasound system provides images of interior body features such as organs, fat, muscle, tendons, and blood vessels. The system also measures […]

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A new way to evaluate the impact of medical research

Scientific journals and research papers are evaluated by a metric known as their “impact factor,” which is based on how many times a given paper is cited by other papers. However, a new study from MIT and other institutions suggests that this measure does not accurately capture the impact of medical papers on health outcomes […]

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