Currently there are no objective, easily assessed diagnostic markers for Alzheimer’s disease, and no good therapeutic options. Taking an agnostic approach, proteomics expert Hanno Steen, PhD, and neurobiologist Judith Steen, PhD, who share a lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, teamed up to analyze proteomics data from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that bathes the brain, combining data from 10 different study cohorts, most…
Inspired by sutures developed thousands of years ago, MIT engineers have designed “smart” sutures that can not only hold tissue in place, but also detect inflammation and release drugs. The new sutures are derived from animal tissue, similar to the “catgut” sutures first used by the ancient Romans. In a modern twist, the MIT team coated the sutures with…
Antibodies that can disarm a virus, known as neutralizing antibodies, are key to the body’s ability to fight off infection. MIT chemists have come up with a new way to identify these neutralizing antibodies in a blood sample, by analyzing how antibodies interact with sugar molecules found on the surface of a viral protein. The new test could help…
The strongest risk factor for developing asthma is the presence of allergies, but it’s unclear why only some individuals with allergies go on to develop asthma. A team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has identified the key differences in the airway response to allergens between people with allergic asthma and people with allergies but no asthma. The…
When Ben Deverman joined the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in 2018, he was tackling a longstanding challenge in his research. Deverman had spent years at CalTech building a technology that could quickly screen large numbers of inactivated adeno-associated virus (AAV) — viral vectors that don’t cause disease but are engineered to deliver potentially life-changing gene therapies to specific cells in…
Brigham and Women’s Hospital on May 9 announced the establishment of the Gene Lay Institute of Immunology and Inflammation of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. The institute’s primary areas of research will include basic understanding of immune-mediated diseases, aging, and cancer and translation of this knowledge to the development of new immunotherapies.
For the first time, molecules dating to the Stone Age have been revived in the lab. This breakthrough was made possible only after scientists achieved another first — they successfully reconstructed the genomes of ancient microorganisms up to 100,000 years old, said Christina Warinner, associate professor of anthropology at Harvard and a senior author on the new study. “That’s 90,000 years older…
Cancer immunotherapy has transformed the treatment of many types of cancer. Yet, for reasons that remain poorly understood, not all patients get the same benefit from these powerful therapies. One potent factor in treatment outcome appears to be an individual’s gut microbiota — the trillions of microorganisms that live in the human intestine — according to new research led by…
A new clinical tool developed by a team of researchers led by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute pinpoints which Clonal hematopoiesis patients are at highest risk for cancer progression. Their work was published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine Evidence. “We’ve been able to detect clonal hematopoiesis in patients for years now,” said Dana-Farber hematologist-oncologist and lead author Lachelle D.…
Over the past 100 million years, mammals have adapted to nearly every environment on Earth. Scientists with the Zoonomia Project have been cataloging the diversity in mammalian genomes by comparing DNA sequences from 240 species that exist today, from the aardvark and the African savanna elephant to the yellow-spotted rock hyrax and the zebu. This week, in several papers in…