Health

Prof. Lonnie Petersen speaks with Benjamin Rachlin, executive editor of MIT Horizon, about the future of space medicine in an article for The Boston Globe. “The next generation of flight surgeons might work from orbit. They might accompany a crew on a long-term mission, like a medic with a platoon,” writes Rachlin. “There is no standard yet for medical care in space. Doctors are inventing it.” Petersen notes that: “Space is like New York. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”

MassLive reporter Scott Kirsner spotlights Claire Beskin MBA '22, CEO and founder of Empallo, a virtual clinic for heart care aimed at preventing cardiac issues before they happen. “It handles everything from scheduling to prescriptions to billing,” writes Kirsner. “Empallo’s approach, Beskin said, is ‘virtual first,’ meaning it tries to give patients an online consult with a doctor when possible, and send them into the office when necessary.” 

Prof. Hugh Herr speaks with Bloomberg Businessweek Daily host Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec about his work creating bionic limbs that combine human physiology with electromechanics. “I really realized how limited the current prosthetic technology was and I dedicated my life as a young man to really advance the field and enable extraordinary technology that will allow people to do what they want again, to move again and have the bodies that they seek," says Herr. 

Writing for Forbes, Senior Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota 08, SM '16, MBA '16 explains the CARES framework, a new model for founders looking to integrate ethics into their company.  “Biotechnology can cure, extend and transform life,” writes Hayes-Mota. “But based on my experiences, its full potential can only be realized when innovation and ethics advance together. To every scientist-founder at the edge of discovery: How can your business plan not only explain how you’ll succeed, but also why your success should exist?” 

Prof. Linda Griffith speaks with Science Friday host Flora Lichtman about her work studying endometriosis. “I did a lot of things in the regenerative medicine space. But I had an epiphany that there’s so many chronic and inflammatory disease that we don’t know how to treat so I started building models of human organs and tissues in the lab using what we called microfluidic chips,” Griffith explains. “When I got asked about endometriosis, it was actually a perfect application for this kind of approach because we really need to study the lesions very carefully in the lab in ways that is very hard to study in patients.” 

MIT researchers have developed a new AI tool, dubbed “DrugReflector,” aimed at speeding up the drug discovery process, reports William A. Haseltine for Forbes. The researchers used DrugReflector to test tested almost 9,600 drugs in different human cell types.“This system was 17 times more accurate than older computational methods and improved as it used honest lab feedback,” writes Haseltine. 

Writing for STAT, Senior Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota 08, SM '16, MBA '16 examines how the closure of local pharmacies across the country poses a significant public health risk, particularly for Americans in rural communities who, like Hayes-Mota’s father, “depend on their local pharmacy not only for medicine, but for survival.” Hayes-Mota emphasizes that “addressing this crisis requires three urgent steps: supporting underserved areas with targeted incentives and mobile or telepharmacy services, investing in the workforce through safe staffing and career pathways, and granting pharmacists provider status with expanded scope of practice.”

Prof. Alex Shalek and his colleagues developed a deep-learning model called DrugReflector aimed at speeding up the process of drug discovery, reports Heidi Ledford for Nature. “They used DrugReflector to find chemicals that can affect the generation of platelets and red blood cells — a characteristic that could be useful in treating some blood conditions,” explains Ledford. The researchers found that “DrugReflector was up to 17 times more effective at finding relevant compounds than standard, brute-force drug screening that depends on randomly selecting compounds from a chemical library.”

Prof. Linda Griffith speaks with Nature reporter Cassandra Willyard about her work developing lab-made organoids to help study the root causes of endometriosis. Griffith has been working to develop “a model of abnormal endometrial tissue that the researchers can use to test therapies for the condition,” writes Willyard. “Because blood vessels are crucial to maintaining this tissue, Griffith knew she wanted to include them. To do this, she and her colleagues placed the organoid on a microfluidic chip surrounded by cells that form blood vessels.” 

Financial Times reporter Melissa Heikkilä spotlights how MIT researchers have uncovered evidence that increased use of AI tools by medical professionals risks “leading to worse health outcomes for women and ethnic minorities.” One study found that numerous AI models “recommended a much lower level of care for female patients,” writes Heikkilä. “A separate study by the MIT team showed that OpenAI’s GPT-4 and other models also displayed answers that had less compassion towards Black and Asian people seeking support for mental health problems.” 

Prof. Rosalind Picard speaks with Bloomberg reporters Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec about technological advancements in wearable technology and how advances in the field could positively impact women’s healthcare. “The opportunities are huge for health with wearables and especially for women’s health,” says Picard. “There are so many conditions that are different for women than for men, and they’re not only vastly understudied but the kind of data is very under sampled.” 

Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with Newsweek reporter Katherine Fung about the how hospitals around the world around increasingly adopting new technologies. “Countries with a centralized healthcare system, or centralized healthcare records, can do a much better job because they have so much data and so much ability to monitor what AI tools are doing," says Barzilay. 

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Newsweek reporter Jasmine Laws about the anticipated price increase in employer health benefit plans for the coming year. Due to higher costs, “some may stop taking up employer coverage altogether while others may move to less expensive plans,” explains Gruber. 

Beth Pollack, a research scientist in the Department of Biological Engineering, speaks with The Guardian’s Science Weekly hosts Madeleine Finaly and Ian Sample about her research on chronic fatigue syndrome (MF CFS) and other chronic illnesses. “There are a number of interesting treatments addressing the different aspects of immune disfunction with different immunomodulators,” says Pollack. 

Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with Newsweek reporter Alexis Kayser about how new AI tools are implemented in health care settings. “You need to know how to safely bring it into the [health care] system," says Barzilay. "There is a new science, which is the science of implementation."