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Drug development

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Tech Explorist

Tech Explorist reporter Amit Malewar writes that researchers from Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) have “demonstrated a new way to manufacture human red blood cells (RBCs) that cuts the culture time by half compared to existing methods.”

Freakonomics Radio

On this episode of Freakonomics, Prof. Andrew Lo discusses the economics of drug development. “It’s important that we get the pricing of these vaccines correct so that they provide both a reasonable rate of return to investors who have risked their capital to develop these vaccines, while at the same time making sure that there’s no price gouging going on and that ultimately we provide access to everybody,” says Lo.

The New Yorker

Writing for The New Yorker, Bernard Avishai spotlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s work exploring the need for a revolution in financial engineering to help spur the development of vaccines, and how a vaccine megafund could have assisted in bringing the Covid-19 pandemic under control. “The more I studied this, the more I realized that finance actually plays a huge role in drug development,” says Lo, “in many cases, way too big a role.”

Science

Writing for Science, Derek Lowe spotlights how MIT researchers are developing a platform that could be used to automate the production of molecules for use in medicine, solar energy and more. “The eventual hope is to unite the software and the hardware in this area,” reports Lowe, “and come up with a system that can produce new compounds with a minimum of human intervention.”

Guardian

MIT researchers have engineered wasp venom to kill bacteria, reports Chukwuma Muanya for The Guardian. The researchers found that the altered peptides wiped out the antibiotic-resistant bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa within four days.

Forbes

Forbes reporter Fiona McMillan writes that MIT researchers have engineered an anti-bacterial peptide found in wasp venom in an effort to create a new antibiotic. McMillan writes that the researchers, “gained new insight into which structural attributes work best, either alone or in combination. In this way, they were able to tweak the peptide’s structure to obtain optimal function.”

Xinhuanet

MIT researchers have repurposed the toxic venom found in wasps to create a new drug that could potentially be used to kill bacteria, reports the Xinhua news agency. “The venom-derived peptide is believed to kill microbes by disrupting bacterial cell membranes,” Xinhua explains.

Boston Herald

Boston Herald reporter Jordan Graham writes that MIT researchers have used the venom from a South American wasp to engineer a new type of antibiotic. “The idea here is to take that very well-crafted toxin and turn it into something that can be useful for humans and our society,” explains César de la Fuente Nunez, a postdoc at MIT.

PBS NewsHour

Prof. Linda Griffith speaks with Hari Sreenivasan of PBS NewsHour about her work developing a new “body on a chip” that could allow researchers to test new drugs on organ tissue. Griffith explains that the device models how different organs and cells communicate in the human body, which is “really important for things like arthritis, Alzheimer's, where you've got multiple organs involved.”

The Wall Street Journal

Prof. Linda Griffith speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Mark Ellwood about her work developing a new device that allows researchers to test how a drug affects the human body. Ellwood notes that the technology that Griffith and her team have created “could prove vital for rapidly releasing new vaccines.”

NIH

A team of researchers led by Prof. J. Christopher Love has developed a system to produce on-demand clinical-grade vaccines and drugs, writes Dr. Francis Collins on the NIH Director’s Blog. In addition to allowing on site production for hospitals the systems could also “produce biologic treatments specially tailored to attack the cancer of a particular individual,” suggests Collins.

Yahoo News

Researchers at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology are part of a team that developed a potential treatment for drug-resistant malaria, which is expected to be publicly available within the next decade. The research “could lead to other drugs against cancer and infectious diseases such as dengue and tuberculosis,” writes Casandra Wong for Yahoo! News.

STAT

Writing for STAT, Karen Weintraub spotlights Prof. J. Christopher Love’s work developing a new desktop drug manufacturing process that can produce thousands of doses of biopharmaceuticals on demand. “I think in the long run there’ll be an opportunity to think about manufacturing for patients in a new way,” says Love.

Xinhuanet

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.

Boston Globe

Boston Globe reporter Jonathan Saltzman writes about how MIT alumnus Bernat Olle’s startup, Vedanta Biosciences, Inc., is looking to “collect a sample of every type of bacteria that lives in the gut.” The hope is to one day use what’s learned from this ‘library’ to help treat diseases.