The end of modern medicine as we know it.” That’s how the then-director general of the World Health Organization characterized the creeping problem of antimicrobial resistance in 2012. Antimicrobial resistance is the tendency of bacteria, fungus and other disease-causing microbes to evolve strategies to evade the medications humans have discovered and developed to fight them. The evolution of these so-called…
New research suggests that centenarians — people who live to be at least 100 — have a diverse collection of viruses in their gut that could help protect them from infectious diseases. The findings, published today in Nature Microbiology, shed light on some of the biological pathways that may help centenarians live long, healthy lives.
The identification of a neurodegenerative disorder’s distributed pattern of atrophy—or atrophy “signature”— can lend insights into the cortical networks that degenerate in individuals with specific constellations of symptoms. In addition, this signature can be used as a biomarker to support early diagnoses and to potentially reveal pathological changes associated with said disorder. Here, we characterized the cortical atrophy signature of…
We’ve all recently gotten a crash-course in drug repurposing, thanks to near-daily news reports about efforts to identify existing medicines that could help treat COVID-19 in the early phase of the pandemic. A team of scientists at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University jumped into the fray in the spring of 2020, applying novel computational drug repurposing approaches to confront…
Genomic studies of cancer patients have revealed thousands of mutations linked to tumor development. However, for the vast majority of those mutations, researchers are unsure of how they contribute to cancer because there’s no easy way to study them in animal models. In an advance that could help scientists make a dent in that long list of unexplored mutations,…
Focal copy-number amplification is an oncogenic event. Although recent studies have revealed the complex structure1,2,3 and the evolutionary trajectories4 of oncogene amplicons, their origin remains poorly understood. Here we show that focal amplifications in breast cancer frequently derive from a mechanism—which we term translocation–bridge amplification—involving inter-chromosomal translocations that lead to dicentric chromosome bridge formation and breakage. In 780 breast cancer genomes, we…
Whitehead Institute Member Siniša Hrvatin has been named as one of the 15 researchers to be selected as 2023 Searle Scholars. The Searle Scholars Program supports the research of exceptional young faculty in the biomedical sciences and chemistry. Chosen by an advisory board of eminent scientists, Searle Scholars are considered among the most creative researchers pursuing careers in academic research.…
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…
