News & Events

In a Science Friday short film, “Breakthrough: Connecting the Drops,” Professor Lydia Bourouiba shows how she designs tests to study infectious disease transmission. First aired in April 2017, the video is one of a six-part series “Breakthrough: Portraits of Women in Science,” which Science Friday is releasing at select theaters nationwide in…

Collins Lab member, Ally Huang has been named as a winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2018 Student E-Poster Competition in the Education category for her presentation – an introduction of a low-cost synthetic biology educational kit. These shelf-stable, freeze-dried, cell-free reactions are activated by water,…

Microscopic flaws in material structure can lead to stent deformation after implantation. Many patients with heart disease have a metal stent implanted to keep their coronary artery open and prevent blood clotting that can lead to heart attacks. One drawback to these stents is that long-term use can eventually damage…

Novel technology could allow researchers to develop and test new antimalaria drugs. One of the biggest obstacles to eradicating malaria is a dormant form of the parasite that lurks in the livers of some patients. This dormant form is resistant to most antimalarial drugs and can reawaken months or years…

The Institute for Medical Engineering and Science’s Alex K. Shalek, is among the eight MIT researchers awarded with the 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship. Professor Shalek is the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Career Development Assistant Professor of Health Sciences and Technology as well as an assistant professor of chemistry. Awarded annually…

Mechanical engineering researchers are developing new and innovative ways to improve health care. In 2006, a discovery opened up a new world of possibility for treating diseases. For the first time, researchers created stem cells without using embryos. Adult skin cells were reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs,…

Vision impairment is a major global issue. More than 2 billion people worldwide don’t have access to corrective lenses. Getting eyeglasses prescriptions is especially difficult in developing countries. Optometrists are generally located in urban centers and rarely see patients from rural areas, so many people suffer from uncorrected impairments. According…

Replacing daily pills with a weekly regimen could help patients stick to their dosing schedule. Researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a capsule that can deliver a week’s worth of HIV drugs in a single dose. This advance could make it much easier for patients to…

A novel algorithm enables statistical analysis of time series data. Whether it’s tracking brain activity in the operating room, seismic vibrations during an earthquake, or biodiversity in a single ecosystem over a million years, measuring the frequency of an occurrence over a period of time is a fundamental data analysis…