MIT researchers have developed a new technique for making vaccines using freeze-dried cells, reports Ed Yong for The Atlantic. Yong explains that in addition to producing medicines, the technique provides a new way of “detecting important diseases, like Zika and Ebola, without relying on laboratories or sequencing machines.”
Eric Boodman writes for STAT that MIT researchers have developed a technique to produce biopharmaceuticals in remote locations. “Instead of making the drugs and then trying to keep them refrigerated over thousands of miles,” Boodman writes, the researchers, “want to give people the ingredients. These components don’t require refrigeration, and the instructions are as simple as they come: Just add water.”
Popular Science reporter Sarah Chodosh writes that MIT researchers have developed a strategy to deliver beneficial bacteria to the GI tract. The researchers used layers of different sugars "to coat individual cells of Bacillus coagulans, which is used to treat irritable bowel syndrome."
Prof. Linda Griffith speaks with Wired reporter Sarah Zhang about her work developing chips that can mimic human organs in an effort to better understand interactions between the immune system and the liver. Griffith is currently working to connect at least 10 miniature organs on a chip to study, for example, how breast cancer can spread to the liver.
NPR's Martha Bebinger speaks with Prof. Allan Myerson about the system he and his colleagues developed to manufacture drugs on demand. “These are portable units so you can put them on the back of a truck and take them anywhere,” he explains. “If there was an emergency, you could have these little plants located all over.”
In a roundup of top science images of the week, Popular Science reporter Claire Maldarelli highlights a new machine developed by MIT researchers “that can synthesize multiple kinds of drugs, including antidepressants, antihistamines, and a local anesthetic.”
Scientific American reporter Bob Roehr writes that MIT researchers have developed a manufacturing system that can produce a variety of drugs. The researchers created a “drug-producing process that is not only faster but also more precise, more efficient and cheaper than production methods now in use," explains Roher.
Science reporter Robert Service writes that MIT researchers have developed a drug synthesis machine that can produce a variety of medications. Service writes that such a machine “could someday help pharmaceutical companies meet unexpected surges in demand and help health officials respond to disasters and medical emergencies worldwide by producing medicines when and where they are needed.”
Wired reporter Sarah Zhang writes about a new proposal from Prof. Andrew Lo to use Wall Street to help lower health care costs. Zhang explains that Lo’s proposal would “theoretically make cures available to more patients, incentivizing the drug industry to make those instead of mitigators.”
In an article for The New York Times, Austin Frakt speaks with Prof. Benjamin Roin about how to encourage drug companies to undertake studies examining whether medications may have multiple uses. Roin suggests that to make such studies feasible, there could be a “universal electronic prescribing system that tracks prescriptions and conditions for which they’re intended.”
In an interview with the BBC, Prof. Heidi Williams argues that there should be more incentives for developing cancer prevention techniques and treatments for early-stage cancers. "If you look at drugs that get approved by the FDA, they all tend to be for very late stage cancer patients,” says Williams.