News & Events

System could help with diagnosing and treating noncommunicative patients. Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a system that measures a patient’s pain level by analyzing brain activity from a portable neuroimaging device. The system could help doctors diagnose and treat pain in unconscious and noncommunicative patients, which could reduce…

Researchers identify nearly 8,000 strains of bacteria, while also clarifying their genetic and metabolic context. The human digestive tract is home to thousands of different strains of bacteria. Many of these are beneficial, while others contribute to health problems such as inflammatory bowel disease. Researchers from IMES/MIT and the Broad…

New technique could help doctors determine whether patients are at risk from elevated pressure. Traumatic brain injuries, as well as infectious diseases such as meningitis, can lead to brain swelling and dangerously high pressure in the brain. If untreated, patients are at risk for brain damage, and in some cases…

Smart materials change properties in response to specific DNA sequences; could be used in a variety of devices. The CRISPR genome-editing system is best-known for its potential to correct disease-causing mutations and add new genes into living cells. Now, a team from MIT and Harvard University has deployed CRISPR for…

A course that combines machine learning and health care explores the promise of applying artificial intelligence to medicine. MIT professors David Sontag and Peter Szolovits don’t assign a textbook for their class, 6.S897HST.956 (Machine Learning for Healthcare), because there isn’t one. Instead, students read scientific papers, solve problem sets based on current topics like opioid…

Hacking Nanomedicine kicks off a series of events to develop an idea over time. A traditional hackathon focuses on computer science and programming, attracts coders in droves, and spans an entire weekend with three stages: problem definition, solution development, and business formation. Hacking Nanomedicine, however, recently brought together graduate and postgraduate students…

Along the genome, proteins form liquid-like droplets that appear to boost the expression of particular genes. In recent years, MIT scientists have developed a new model for how key genes are controlled that suggests the cellular machinery that transcribes DNA into RNA forms specialized droplets called condensates. These droplets occur…

Hundreds of thousands of colon cells offer new clues into what goes wrong in an inflammatory bowel disease and why some patients don’t respond to drugs. Inflammatory bowel diseases are chronic, painful disorders of the intestine that afflict roughly 1.5 million people in the United States. Yet the underlying mechanisms…

Discovery could enable longer lasting and better functioning of devices—including pacemakers, breast implants, biosensors, and drug delivery devices Researchers from the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) at MIT, the National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway) and AMBER, the SFI Research Centre for Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research…

Noninvasive device could benefit patients with kidney disease, congestive heart failure, or dehydration. For patients with kidney failure who need dialysis, removing fluid at the correct rate and stopping at the right time is critical. This typically requires guessing how much water to remove and carefully monitoring the patient for…