CIMIT blog

Tissue Engineering: Growing new organs, and more!

MIT News Office (December 14, 2012) — In the 1970s and 1980s, tissue engineers began working on growing replacement organs for transplantation into patients. While scientists are still targeting that goal, much of the tissue engineering research at MIT is also focused on creating tissue that can be used in the lab to model human disease and test potential new drugs.

This kind of disease modeling could have a great impact in the near term, says MIT professor Sangeeta Bhatia, who is developing liver tissue to study hepatitis C and malaria infection.

Read full article at web.mit.edu >>

Medical Devices Powered by the Ear Itself — MIT News Office

MIT News Office (November 7, 2012) — Deep in the inner ear of mammals is a natural battery — a chamber filled with ions that produces an electrical potential to drive neural signals. In today’s issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology, a team of researchers from MIT, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) demonstrate for the first time that this battery could power implantable electronic devices without impairing hearing.

The devices could monitor biological activity in the ears of people with hearing or balance impairments, or responses to therapies. Eventually, they might even deliver therapies themselves.

The work was funded in part by the Focus Center Research Program, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and the Bertarelli Foundation.

Read full story at web.mit.edu >>

New Device Could Allow Your Heartbeat to Power Pacemaker

sciencedaily.com (November 4, 2012) — An experimental device converted energy from a beating heart to provide enough electricity to power a pacemaker, in a study presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2012.

The findings suggest that patients could power their pacemakers -- eliminating the need for replacements when batteries are spent.

Read full story at sciencedaily.com >>

Automatic Building Mapping Could Help Emergency Responders: A prototype sensor array that can be worn on the chest automatically maps the wearer’s environment, recognizing movement between floors

MIT News Office (September 24, 2012) — MIT researchers have built a wearable sensor system that automatically creates a digital map of the environment through which the wearer is moving. The prototype system, described in a paper slated for the Intelligent Robots and Systems conference in Portugal next month, is envisioned as a tool to help emergency responders coordinate disaster response.



In experiments conducted on the MIT campus, a graduate student wearing the sensor system wandered the halls, and the sensors wirelessly relayed data to a laptop in a distant conference room. Observers in the conference room were able to track the student’s progress on a map that sprang into being as he moved.

Connected to the array of sensors is a handheld pushbutton device that the wearer can use to annotate the map. In the prototype system, depressing the button simply designates a particular location as a point of interest. But the researchers envision that emergency responders could use a similar system to add voice or text tags to the map — indicating, say, structural damage or a toxic spill.

Read full story at http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/automatic-building-mapping-0924.html >>

3-D Medical Scanner: New Handheld Imaging Device to Aid Doctors On the 'Diagnostic Front Lines'

science.com (October 2, 2012) — In the operating room, surgeons can see inside the human body in real time using advanced imaging techniques, but primary care physicians, the people who are on the front lines of diagnosing illnesses, haven't commonly had access to the same technology -- until now.

Engineers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have created a new imaging tool for primary care physicians: a handheld scanner that would enable them to image all the sites they commonly examine, and more, such as bacterial colonies in the middle ear in 3-D, or monitor the thickness and health of patients' retinas. The device relies on optical coherence tomography (OCT), a visualization technology that is similar to ultrasound imaging, but uses light instead of sound to produce the images.

Read full story at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121002150035.htm >>

Merging Tissue and Electronics: New tissue scaffold could be used for implantable therapeutic devices

web.mit.edu (August 27, 2012) — A team of researchers from MIT, Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital has now added a new element to tissue scaffolds: electronic sensors. These sensors, made of silicon nanowires, could be used to monitor electrical activity in the tissue surrounding the scaffold, control drug release or screen drug candidates for their effects on the beating of heart tissue.

Read full story on web.mit.edu >>

FDA approves ingestible sensor that transmits patient data to doctors

cbsnews.com (August 1, 2012) — Digestible sensors that can report medication adherence and vital signs have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The ingestible sensor, which was already been approved for use in Europe in 2011, can transmit information about the patient to medical professionals and help them customize care.

Read full story on cbsnews.com >>

New Method Provides Fast, Accurate, Low Cost Analysis of BRCA Gene Mutations in Breast Cancer

Contact: David Sampson, [email protected], 215-239-3171, Elsevier Health Sciences

Philadelphia, PA, August 6, 2012 – Individuals with mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes have a significantly higher risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers. Families at risk have been seeking genetic testing and counseling based on their mutation carrier status, but the standard method of direct sequencing is labor-intensive, costly, and it only targets a part of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. A group of Canadian scientists has developed a new sequencing approach to provide a more effective method of BRCA1/2 mutational analysis. Their work is published in the September issue of The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics.

"A comprehensive understanding of BRCA1/2 genotypes and the associated tumor phenotypes is needed to establish targeted therapies," notes lead investigator Hilmi Ozcelik, PhD, of the Fred A. Litwin Centre for Cancer Genetics, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. "Recent studies have suggested that certain chemical inhibitors are effective for the treatment of breast cancer in patients with BRCA1/2 mutations. Therefore, availability of new, affordable, and comprehensive technologies to screen for these mutations will be critical to identify patient-candidates for targeted therapies."

The investigators used a technique called long range PCR to generate amplified BRCA1/2 fragments, known as amplicons, from the DNA of 12 familial breast cancer patients. The amplicons were screened using deep sequencing, also known as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), which allows for the simultaneous screening of millions of DNA molecules, thereby dramatically increasing speed and throughput. While conventional screening methods target only the exons of BRCA1/2, deep sequencing can screen the entire genomic region, including introns and untranslated regions. The specimens had been previously analyzed using conventional methods, allowing for a comparison of results.

In addition to identifying one genetic variant that was missed due to human error, the new method successfully identified all of the expected BRCA1/2 variants. They identified both exonic and exon/intron boundary variants. The test was done at a very low cost, and with a turnaround time of 12 days. "One of the key advantages of workflow of long-range PCR is the ability to visually detect large genomic duplications, deletions, and insertions," notes Dr. Ozcelik. "When combined with next generation sequencing, long range PCR can be a powerful tool in the detection of BRCA variants in the clinical setting. Our method confirmed the presence of variants with very high accuracy, and without false-positive results."

Long-range PCR and next generation sequencing identified a wide range of intronic BRCA1/2 variants, both commonly occurring and rare, that individually or in combination may impact BRCA1/2 function. Dr. Ozcelik notes that despite a small sample size, the data shows great variability in the number, type, and frequency of variants that can be identified from familial breast cancer patients.

"Our challenge now is to establish analytical methods that systematically investigate this more comprehensive data in order to provide better risk information for clinical management of the disease," says Dr. Ozcelik. "Given the extensive level of genetic information acquired from each patient, profiles can be constructed in breast cancer patients compared to population controls to produce a more effective means of generating BRCA1/2-associated risk to the individuals and their families.

View original release at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-08/ehs-nmp080312.php.

How Man-Made Jellyfish Could Help Heart Patients

By Francie Diep, InnovationNewsDaily Staff Writer

A half-inch-long juvenile jellyfish pulses and swims much like any of its compatriots in oceans all over the world. The major difference? It's entirely man-made. "It's a biohybrid robot. It's part animal, it's part synthetic material," said Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard University who led the jellyfish-building effort.

The ultimate aim of Parker's little jellyfish isn't to build animals, however. It's to build artificial hearts for transplants in the future. Parker, who has long studied heart cells, chose to reproduce a jellyfish first, so he could learn the basics of biological pumps. "The jellyfish was a first step in that we built a functioning pump with designer specs," he told InnovationNewsDaily. "We're going to continue to try it to ratchet it up by building harder and harder things until we're ready for the heart."

His new artificial jellyfish is made from a combination of a thin, silicone material that's used in breast implants and heart cells harvested from unborn rats. Parker and his colleagues from Harvard and the California Institute of Technology analyzed a real jellyfish to learn exactly how the proteins in its body align with each other, then reproduced those alignments in the artificial design. A computer program the researchers wrote helped them quantitatively measure of how well the artificial design matched the natural one.

Along the way, they learned that that alignment is crucial for the jellyfish pumping motion to work correctly, Parker said. They also found that heart muscle protein and the jellyfish's muscle networks are similar to one another. "I don't think this is by accident. I think there's a way that nature builds muscular pumps," Parker said.

To get the jellyfish to move, researchers apply electricity to a tank of water with the human-made jelly inside. The rat heart cells in the jellyfish contract simultaneously in response to the electrical signal, just as jellyfish muscle cells do when the jelly pumps its body to swim.

The resulting motion looks much like the motion of a real jellyfish in its juvenile stage just before adulthood, Parker and his colleagues wrote in a paper they published (July 22) in the journal Nature Biotechnology. The artificial jelly creates the same vortexes underneath the jellyfish's bell as the real deal does and otherwise moves the water around it in similar ways, they wrote.

Besides serving as a first template to making artificial octopuses, artificial stingrays and finally an artificial heart, Parker said he has patented his jellyfish as an artificial pump that drug companies can use to test heart medications that are still in their early stages of development.

Even as he outlines all the uses an artificial jellyfish can have — as a way to learn about real, live, pumping hearts or as a testing ground for drugs — he seems just as excited about the coolness factor of building an animal many people find fascinating. "There's this great jellyfish thing over at the New England Aquarium and it really captures the imagination," he said. The New England Aquarium is just a few miles away from his lab at Harvard.

"Now that I've got a 3-year-old daughter, I'm trying hard to build things she will appreciate," he said.

View original post with images by Francie Diep at http://www.innovationnewsdaily.com/1436-man-jellyfish-heart-patients.html.