MIT engineers have devised a way to speed up the development of new drugs by rapidly testing how well they are absorbed in the small intestine. This approach could also be used to find new ways to improve the absorption of existing drugs so that they can be taken orally. Developing drugs that can be easily absorbed in the gastrointestinal…
Cabot Career Development Assistant Professor Gabriela Schlau-Cohen has been named one of 14 young faculty nationwide to be honored with a 2020 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program supports the research and teaching careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences, and, when choosing its Teacher-Scholars, the foundation seeks those who demonstrate…
After cities shut down and citizens were urged to stay home to slow the spread of Covid-19, scientists in major cities like Boston were suddenly far removed from their labs. At MIT, on-campus research was ramped down, reduced to only the most critical activities. That includes important work to better understand the virus and help stop the spread. In the…
Prestigious honor society announces more than 250 new members. Six MIT faculty members are among more than 250 leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced Thursday. One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the academy is also a leading center for independent policy…
In organ transplantation, infection and rejection are major causes of graft loss. They are linked by the net state of immunosuppression. To diagnose and treat these conditions earlier, and to improve long-term patient outcomes, refined strategies for the monitoring of patients after graft transplantation are needed. Here, we show that a fast and inexpensive assay based on CRISPR–Cas13 accurately detects…
In 2018, a 31-year-old woman checked into Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston with a respiratory infection so bad she had to be placed on oxygen. A trip to the hospital for lung trouble was nothing new for her — several times in the past, recurrent infections required her to stay under a doctor’s supervision for days until they blew…
Six years ago, bioengineer James Collins, Ph.D., and a scientist in his lab, Keith Pardee, had an idea: If you take out everything that’s inside a normal cell, that microscopic bit of goo that holds thousands of complex molecular machines, and freeze-dry it, would it still work? Unlike freeze-dried and reconstituted hiker’s meals, which are but a shadow of the…
When Brad Bernstein first looked at cancer tumors cell by cell in 2014, what he found dismayed him: he realized that in any single tumor, there is not one type of cancer cell at work but many. “I was a little depressed when I saw it,” says Bernstein, a pathologist at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…
The authors have discovered that the megakaryocyte integrin alpha5 is significantly upregulated in primary myelofibrosis, induced by a JAK2V617F+ mutation in mice. Importantly, the alpha5-fibronectin axis was identified as a new pathway by which the megakaryocytic lineage senses the bone marrow matrix to expand cell number in this pathology.
A survey of more than 4,000 researchers in the United States suggests that better coordination at an institutional and national level could make hundreds of thousands more tests for coronavirus available. The survey was prompted by a Nature investigation published on 9 April, revealing that several top university laboratories that have received regulatory approval to process tests for SARS-CoV-2 are operating at half their potential capacity.…
