BBC Click spotlights a new semi-autonomous, wearable robot developed by MIT researchers that takes different types of measurements from the skin to identify conditions such as skin cancer. “The doctor can see your whole body, but the doctor doesn’t pick up the small changes in your skin conditions, which the robot can do,” says graduate student Artem Dementyev.
Boston Herald reporter Alexi Cohan highlights a new lab at MIT, led by Prof. Tyler Jacks, that will investigate how the immune system can be used to treat and manage pancreatic cancer. “In the long term we hope that the work that we are doing will help us diagnose the disease at even early stage and maybe even prevent it altogether,” Jacks explains.
MIT researchers have developed a machine learning system that could reduce the number of chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments that glioblastoma patients receive, reports the Xinhua News Agency. The system “finds an optimal treatment plan, with the lowest possible potency and frequency of doses that should still reduce tumor sizes,” Xinhua explains.
MIT researchers have developed a sensor that can determine if cancer cells are responding to a certain chemotherapy drug. “Another potential use is to screen patients before they receive such drugs, to see if the drugs will be successful against each patient's tumor,” writes Li Xia for Xinhua.
New Scientist reporter Chelsea Whyte spotlights Prof. Regina Barzilay’s quest to revolutionize cancer treatment by applying AI techniques in ways that could help doctors detect cancer earlier. Barzilay explains that she is committed to, "applying the best technologies available to what we care about the most – our health.”
MIT researchers found that the effectiveness of the chemotherapy drug methotrexate increases when supplemented with a common dietary amino acid, writes Victoria Forster of Forbes. Prof. David Sabatini, a co-author on the study, “is hopeful about the prospects for supplementation improving the therapy in the future,” says Forster.
By using “nanoparticle ‘backpacks’ with immune-stimulating drugs,” MIT researchers were able to enhance T cells and destroy solid tumors without harmful side effects, reports Allen Cone of UPI. "We found you could greatly improve the efficacy of the T cell therapy with backpacked drugs that help the donor T cells survive and function more effectively,"explains Prof. Darrell Irvine.
STAT reporter Justin Chen writes about a new study that examines why patients with pancreatic cancer often experience significant weight loss. Prof. Matt Vander Heiden explains that the findings show, “pancreatic cancer patients clearly have a lot of tissue wasting and whether it’s good or bad, we can now say that it’s not necessarily bad at diagnosis.”
A new paper co-authored by Prof. Omer Yilmaz and Prof. David Sabatini found that fasting substantially “improves stem cells' ability to regenerate,” reports Xinhua. The researchers hope this finding could lead to new drug treatments that “stimulate regeneration without requiring patients to fast, which is difficult for most people.”
Research published in Science Translational Medicine suggests that inflammation caused by tumor removal surgery may actually encourage the emergence of new tumors. Daniel Uria for UPI reports that the study, led by Prof. Robert Weinberg, identified “perioperative anti-inflammatory treatment” as a way to substantially reduce the likelihood of “early metastatic recurrence in breast cancer patients.”
New research from MIT and the Whitehead Institute suggests that “the body’s own mechanism for healing” may cause cancerous cells to spread after breast cancer-related surgeries, reports Karen Weintraub for WBUR CommonHealth. “The post-surgical wound-healing response somehow releases…cells that have already spread to distant sites in the body,” explains Prof. Robert Weinberg, “releasing them from the constraints that have previously prevented them from growing actively.”
Led by Prof. Tim Lu, Senti Biosciences has received $53 million in venture capital funding to launch their startup that will focus on cancer therapies, writes Jonathan Shieber for TechCrunch. Ideally, these therapies “are able to be controlled (programmed) at the cellular level and respond to conditions in a variety of ways,” Shieber explains.
Originally created by the Zhang Lab in 2017, CRISPR tool SHERLOCK has been improved upon to be three times more sensitive for detecting viruses and infections using an inexpensive test strip. Sharon Begley writes for STAT News, “A paper strip, like in a pregnancy test, is dipped into a sample, and if a line appears, the target molecule was detected — no instruments required.”
A gene-editing tool called SHERLOCK, developed in Prof. Feng Zhang’s lab, allows for faster detection of infections and viruses, such as Zika and Dengue fever. “It does this by combining different types of CRISPR enzymes, which are unleashed together to target distinct bits of DNA and RNA, another of the major biological molecules found in all forms of life,” writes Alessandra Potenza for The Verge.
Paul Solman of PBS Newshour speaks to Prof. Andrew Lo about getting investors to finance research into treatments for cancer and genetic diseases. “We now have the opportunity to treat disease in many, many different ways. We just don’t have enough money to explore all of the different pathways,” explains Prof. Lo.