The Massachusetts Life Sciences Center is awarding Dana-Farber Cancer Institute a $1.82 million grant titled, Mass Spectrometry Metabolomics Solutions for Highly Scalable Integrated OMics: Charting Metabolic Contributions to Disease Development and Therapeutic Outcomes. This award will help support a new facility at Dana-Farber that will provide cutting-edge metabolomics tools for scientists, including a unique technology for systematic application of discovery metabolomics…
The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Boston’s Brigham and Women Hospital (Brigham) announce their newly founded Diagnostic Accelerator (Brigham-Wyss DxA). By combining the institutions’ broad clinical and multi-disciplinary bioengineering expertise, the Brigham-Wyss DxA will enable the fast creation of diagnostic technologies through deep collaborations in a process driven by previously unmet needs. The Brigham-Wyss DxA…
By implementing a long-term, prospective approach to the development of celiac disease, a collaborative group of researchers has identified substantial microbial changes in the intestines of at-risk infants before disease onset. Using advanced genomic sequencing techniques, MassGeneral Hospital for Children (MGHfC) researchers, along with colleagues from institutions in Italy and the University of Maryland, College Park, uncovered distinct preclinical alterations in several…
Sarah Cleveland is as passionate about her work studying T cells in the lab of Eric S. Huseby, PhD, professor of pathology, as she is about the need for diversity in academia. “It’s so cool to me how our body can either learn to attack itself or attack foreign objects. It can tell the difference, and it can remember things.…
Messenger RNAs (mRNAs) are our cells’ intermediaries as genes become proteins. In order for the instructions in our genes to be carried out, first their DNA sequences are copied into mRNA, and then that mRNA is used as a template to create proteins that do the work of the cell. Early in development, eggs and embryos use mRNA supplied by…
Significant amounts of atherosclerotic plaque have been found in the coronary arteries of people with HIV, even in those considered by traditional measures to be at low-to-moderate risk of future heart disease, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open. This finding emerged from the global REPRIEVE (Randomized Trial to Prevent Vascular Events in HIV) study, in which Harvard…
Current clinical interventions for infectious diseases are facing increasing challenges due to the ever-rising number of drug-resistant microbial infections, epidemic outbreaks of pathogenic bacteria, and the continued possibility of new biothreats that might emerge in the future. Effective vaccines could act as a bulwark to prevent many bacterial infections and some of their most severe consequences, including sepsis. According to…
In March of 2020, thousands of scientists around the world united to answer a pressing and complex question: what genetic factors influence why some COVID-19 patients develop severe, life-threatening disease requiring hospitalization, while others escape with mild symptoms or none at all? A comprehensive summary of their findings to date, published in Nature, reveals 13 loci, or locations in the human…
Microscopists have long sought a way to produce high-quality, deep-tissue imaging of living subjects in a timely fashion. To date, they have had to choose between image quality or speed when looking into the inner workings of complex biological systems. A better imaging system would have a powerful impact on researchers in biology and in neuroscience, experts say. Now Dushan N.…
Slender probes equipped with electrodes, optical channels, and other tools are widely used by neuroscientists to monitor and manipulate brain activity in animal studies. Now, scientists at MIT have devised a way to make these usually rigid devices become as soft and pliable as their surroundings when they are implanted in the brain. Their new multifunctional devices are less intrusive…