Biological Engineering

The newly titled ‘MindHandHeart Community Innovation Fund’ seeks to leverage the creativity and problem-solving skills of MIT students, staff, and faculty to increase awareness about mental health, build communities of support, promote life skills, foster resiliency, and advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and racial justice at MIT.

MindHandHeart announces a record 24 Community Innovation Fund projects

Fund has launched a special summer round to spearhead projects addressing mental health, well-being, and racial justice at MIT.

July 31, 2020

“Traditional drug development processes are very linear, and they take many years,” says MIT Professor Ram Sasisekharan, pictured here. “If you’re going to get something to humans fast, you can’t do it linearly, because then the best-case scenario for testing in humans is a year to 18 months. If you need to develop a drug in six months or less, then a lot of these things need to happen i...

Rapid antibody development yields possible treatment for yellow fever

The experimental drug has shown promise in early-stage clinical trials conducted in Singapore.

July 29, 2020

“The biology [around gut bacteria’s influence on health] is fairly complex, and we’re still in the early days of unravelling it, but there have been a number of clinical studies that have reported benefits to restoring gut health, and that’s our north star: the clinical data,” Finch co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Smith PhD ’14 says.

Finch Therapeutics unleashes the power of the gut

The company is developing treatments that restore gut bacteria in people struggling with a range of diseases.

July 23, 2020

Students in the biological engineering capstone design class showcase their proposed solutions to food and water security challenges over Zoom.

Engineering superpowered organisms for a more sustainable world

MIT students explore algal water purifiers, programmable soil bacteria, and other biological engineering approaches to food and water security.

July 22, 2020

Out of a total of 200 research proposals, 26 projects were selected and awarded $5.4 million to continue AI research to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 in the areas of medicine, urban planning, and public policy.

Faculty receive funding to develop artificial intelligence techniques to combat Covid-19

C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute awards $5.4 million to top researchers to steer how society responds to the pandemic.

July 17, 2020

By folding DNA into a virus-like structure, MIT researchers have designed HIV-like particles that provoke a strong immune response from human immune cells grown in a lab dish.

Engineers use “DNA origami” to identify vaccine design rules

In lab tests, virus-like DNA structures coated with viral proteins provoke a strong immune response in human B cells.

June 29, 2020

Using a new calcium indicator that accumulates in the cell bodies of neurons (boxes at right), MIT neuroscientists are able to more accurately image neuron activity. Traditional calcium indicators (boxes at left) can generate crosstalk that blurs the images.

A focused approach to imaging neural activity in the brain

New molecule for imaging calcium in neurons reduces crosstalk from neighboring neurons.

June 26, 2020

Colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (pink) heavily infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (green). MIT researchers are using computational models of protein interactions to design a peptide that can bind to coronavirus proteins and shuttle them into a cellular pathway that breaks them down.

Experimental peptide targets Covid-19

Computational modeling yields a protein fragment that could bind to coronavirus spike proteins and destroy them.

June 22, 2020

Researchers present at the MIT-Takeda launch event earlier this year.

MIT-Takeda program launches

Research projects will harness the power of artificial intelligence to positively impact human health.

June 18, 2020

Graduate student and lead author Lauren Stopfer in the lab

Counting your antigens

A new platform that precisely quantifies antigens presented on cell surfaces may help researchers and clinicians improve the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapies.

June 2, 2020

2020 MIT Fulbright scholars include Sandra Walter, Srimayi Tenali, William Pinney, Talia Khan, Anshula Gandhi, Booker Schelhaas, Christien Williams, Ivy Li, Kedi Hu, and Max Kessler.

Eleven from MIT awarded 2020 Fulbright Fellowships

Graduating seniors and recent alumni will spend upcoming year abroad on Fulbright grants.

May 22, 2020

Clockwise from upper left: Angela Belcher, Bruce Walker, Jianzhu Chen, Feng Zhang, Siqi Zheng, and Lee Gehrke

Six from MIT awarded research funding to address Covid-19

Multi-institutional MassCPR initiative announces more than $16.5 million to support 62 Boston-area projects.

May 19, 2020

By replacing oxygen with sulfur in the DNA backbone to make a phosphorothioate modification, bacteria protect their DNA from invading viruses without changing the genetic code in the DNA.

SMART researchers uncover new anti-phage defense mechanisms

Discovery explains why some bacteria have been able to defend against phage therapy, opens new ways to overcome existing challenges.

May 13, 2020

Shriya Srinivasan of MIT is the $15,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize “Cure it!” Graduate Winner for her Cutaneous Mechanoneural Interface (CMI), a new type of surgical process for amputee patients that would allow a person to sense what their prosthesis feels.

Top collegiate inventors awarded 2020 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize

Students around the country recognized for innovative solutions to better single-use plastic, spacecraft and aircraft fuel gauges, surgery techniques, and more.

April 29, 2020

Michael Yaffe with colleague at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

3 Questions: Michael Yaffe on treating Covid-19 patients with acute respiratory distress

MIT professor and intensivist/trauma surgeon explains the new challenges that Covid-19 brings to treating patients in acute respiratory distress.