[Editors] MIT Research Digest - May 2004

Wed May 5 15:29:04 EDT 2004

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MIT RESEARCH DIGEST - May 2004

A monthly tip-sheet for journalists of recent research
advances at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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For more information on Research Digest items, contact:
Elizabeth Thomson, MIT News Office
Phone: (617) 258-5402 * mailto:thomson at mit.edu

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IN THIS ISSUE: Target: Breast Cancer * Toward Cleaner Air
Blurry Faces & The Brain * Environmental Virtual Campus
Clones from Olfactory Cells * GenePattern
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Target: Breast Cancer
A breast cancer treatment based on MIT radar research that was 
originally aimed at detecting space-borne missiles is showing promise 
in the final phase of clinical testing.  Preliminary results 
presented April 21 at the 9th International Congress on Hyperthermic 
Oncology show that women with early-stage breast cancer who received 
the MIT treatment prior to lumpectomy had a 43 percent reduction in 
the incidence rate of cancer cells found close to the surgical 
margins. This is important because additional breast surgery and/or 
radiation therapy are often recommended for patients that have cancer 
cells close to the edge of the lumpectomy surgical margin. The 
treatment, in which microwave energy focused externally on the breast 
is delivered to tumors prior to lumpectomy, was developed by Dr. Alan 
Fenn of MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The goal is to use focused heat to 
kill tumor cells and reduce additional surgery. The current results 
are based on the 64 women who have completed the study. Celsion Corp. 
exclusively licenses the focused microwave thermotherapy technology 
from MIT and is funding the current clinical studies. The US Air 
Force funded Fenn's original Lincoln Lab research.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2004/breastcancer.html

Toward Cleaner Air
State regulators are required to develop formal plans describing the 
monitoring programs, emissions standards and other measures they will 
undertake to ensure that their regions meet federal clean air laws. 
Now an MIT study can help them obtain reasonable estimates of the 
emissions reductions they could achieve by including solar-generated 
electricity in their plans. Researchers at MIT's Laboratory for 
Energy and the Environment's Analysis Group for Regional Electricity 
Alternatives (AGREA) used information from numerous databases, 
including that of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to look 
at how emissions reductions from solar photovoltaic systems vary 
across the contiguous 48 states. Their results confirm that emissions 
reductions from resources such as solar and wind generation and 
electricity conservation are highly dependent on exactly where they 
are used and the relation between the solar resource and electric 
system demand.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/2004/apr14/solar.html

Blurry Faces & The Brain
MIT scientists are reporting new insights into how the human brain 
recognizes objects, especially faces, in work that could lead to 
improved machine vision systems, diagnostics for certain neurological 
conditions and more. Look at a photo of people running a marathon. 
The lead runners' faces are quite distinct, but we can also make out 
the faces of those farther in the distance. Zoom in on that distant 
runner, however, "and you'll see that there's very little intrinsic 
face-related information, such as eyes and a nose. Yet somehow we can 
classify that blob as a face," said Professor Pawan Sinha of the 
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Yet performing this task 
reliably is beyond even the most advanced computer-recognition 
systems. In an April issue of Science, Sinha's team shows that a 
specific brain region that's activated by clear images of faces is 
also strongly activated by very blurred images, just so long as 
surrounding contextual cues (such as a body) are present. In other 
words, the neural circuitry in the human brain can use context to 
compensate for extreme levels of image degradations. Funding was from 
the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, the National 
Center for Research Resources, the Mental Illness and Neuroscience 
Discovery Institute, a National Defense Science and Engineering 
Graduate Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and a John Merck 
Scholars Award.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/2004/apr07/vision.html

Environmental Virtual Campus
MIT's Environmental Virtual Campus (EVC), an award-winning web-based 
tool designed to aid colleges' compliance with federal environmental 
regulations and implement "green" practices, has attracted more than 
10,000 visitors from 71 countries since it went public six months 
ago. The EVC, free to users at http://www.c2e2.org/evc, provides 
information about campuses' environmental compliance and green 
practices, including recycling, pollution prevention and energy 
savings. The tool allows users to navigate a virtual campus and 
identify the regulatory requirements and best management practices 
applicable to nine generic areas on a typical campus that are subject 
to federal environmental regulation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/2003/dec03/ehs.html

Clones from Olfactory Cells
Many scientists believe that the further a cell is from the embryonic 
stem cell stage, the harder it is to make a successful clone using 
that cell's genetic material. Now, researchers at MIT and the 
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have cloned mice using 
olfactory neurons -- cells far removed from the embryonic state. 
What's more, the mice have a full range of smell, offering new 
information about central nervous system development. For the study, 
published Feb. 15 in the online edition of Nature, researchers 
successfully cloned mice from nuclei taken from olfactory cells, 
something that until now was thought impossible. But a team of 
researchers led by Rudolf Jaenisch and Andrew Chess, scientists at 
Whitehead and professors in the MIT Department of Biology, and by 
Richard Axel of Columbia University showed that even a cell as highly 
specialized as an olfactory neuron can produce successful clones. 
This work was funded by the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2004/olfactory.html

GenePattern
A new, free software package developed by the Broad Institute of MIT 
and Harvard makes it easier and faster for scientists to capture the 
molecular signatures of cells in a particular state--information 
that's crucial to disease diagnosis and prognosis. Almost all cells 
in an organism have the same genes, but those genes are expressed 
differently under different conditions such as tissue type and 
developmental stage. Technologies developed over the last 10 to 15 
years have enabled scientists to measure the expression levels of all 
the genes in a cell during a single experiment, giving a molecular 
profile or signature of the cell. The new software, dubbed 
GenePattern, allows researchers to better analyze--and share--the 
copious data resulting from these experiments. Among other things, it 
can be used to perform custom gene expression analysis experiments, 
record and replay analyses, and use tools from many different 
software sources within a single interface. The work was supported by 
the National Cancer Institute.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/2004/apr14/gene.html

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Published by the News Office * Massachusetts Institute of Technology