Most diabetes patients must carefully monitor their blood sugar levels and inject insulin multiple times per day, to help keep their blood sugar from getting too high. As a possible alternative to those injections, MIT researchers are developing an implantable device that contains insulin-producing cells. The device encapsulates the cells, protecting them from immune rejection, and […]
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Drugs that block enzymes called tyrosine kinases are among the most effective targeted therapies for cancer. However, they typically work for only 40 to 80 percent of the patients who would be expected to respond to them. In a new study, MIT researchers have figured out why those drugs don’t work in all cases: Many […]
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When patients undergo general anesthesia, doctors can choose among several drugs. Although each of these drugs acts on neurons in different ways, they all lead to the same result: a disruption of the brain’s balance between stability and excitability, according to a new MIT study. This disruption causes neural activity to become increasingly unstable, until […]
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MIT researchers have discovered that two common genetic mutations that cause Rett syndrome each set off a molecular chain of events that compromises the structural integrity of developing brain blood vessels, making them leaky. The study traces the problem to overexpression of a particular microRNA (miRNA-126-3p), and shows that tamping down the miRNA’s levels helps […]
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MIT neuroscientists have figured out how the brain is able to focus on a single voice among a cacophony of many voices, shedding light on a longstanding neuroscientific phenomenon known as the cocktail party problem. This attentional focus becomes necessary when you’re in any crowded environment, such as a cocktail party, with many conversations going […]
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More than 10,000 Americans who suffer from chronic liver disease are on a waitlist for a liver transplant, but there are not enough donated organs for all of those patients. Additionally, many people with liver failure aren’t eligible for a transplant if they are not healthy enough to tolerate the surgery. To help those patients, […]
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Studying gene expression in a cancer patient’s cells can help clinical biologists understand the cancer’s origin and predict the success of different treatments. But cells are complex and contain many layers, so how the biologist conducts measurements affects which data they can obtain. For instance, measuring proteins in a cell could yield different information about the […]
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Numerous potential treatments for neurological conditions, including autism spectrum disorders, have worked well in mice but then disappointed in humans. What would help is a non-invasive, objective readout of treatment efficacy that is shared in both species. In a new open-access study in Nature Communications, a team of MIT researchers, backed by collaborators across the […]
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The signals that drive many of the brain and body’s most essential functions — consciousness, sleep, breathing, heart rate, and motion — course through bundles of “white matter” fibers in the brainstem, but imaging systems so far have been unable to finely resolve these crucial neural cables. That has left researchers and doctors with little […]
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A longstanding goal of immunotherapies and vaccine research is to induce antibodies in humans that neutralize deadly viruses such as HIV and influenza. Of particular interest are antibodies that are “broadly neutralizing,” meaning they can in principle eliminate multiple strains of a virus such as HIV, which mutates rapidly to evade the human immune system. […]
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More than 100 million people in the United States suffer from metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), characterized by a buildup of fat in the liver. This condition can lead to the development of more severe liver disease that causes inflammation and fibrosis. In hopes of discovering new treatments for these liver diseases, MIT engineers […]
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