[Editors] MIT Research Digest - July 2005

Thu Jul 7 14:01:58 EDT 2005

MIT News Office
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MIT Research Digest - July 2005
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For Immediate Release
THURSDAY, JULY 7, 2005
For more information or for available photos contact:
Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
Phone: 617-258-5402
Email: thomson at mit.edu

A monthly tip-sheet for journalists of recent research
advances at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For the latest MIT research news, go to
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/research.html

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IN THIS ISSUE: Nanoprinter * Robots for Stroke Patients 
Supercool Matter * Engineered Muscles * Lung Stem Cells 
Synthetic Genomics & Society * Cancer ID
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NANOPRINTER
Just as the printing press revolutionized the creation of reading matter, a "nano-printing" technique developed at MIT could enable the mass production of nano-devices currently built one at a time. The most immediate candidate for this innovation is the DNA microarray, a nano-device used to diagnose and understand genetic illnesses such as Alzheimer's and certain types of cancer. The ability to mass-produce these complex devices would make DNA analysis as common and inexpensive as blood testing, and thus greatly accelerate efforts to discover the origins of disease. The demand for ever-shrinking devices of ever-increasing complexity in areas from biomedicine to information technology has spurred several research efforts toward high-resolution, high-throughput nano-printing techniques. Professor Francesco Stellacci and graduate student Arum Amy Yu, both in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, have developed a printing method that is unmatched in both information content per printing cycle and resolution. The work is funded by MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation and the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/printer-0518.html

ROBOTS FOR STROKE PATIENTS
Clinical trials have already shown that an MIT robotic arm can help stroke patients regain movement faster. Now MIT pioneers in the field of robotic therapy  are hoping a robotic gym full of machines targeted at different parts of the  body will significantly improve stroke patients' movement in arms, wrists,  hands, legs and ankles. To that end the researchers have created a new Anklebot, and on July 1, MIT and the Baltimore Veterans Administration Medical Center established a Center of Excellence on Task-Oriented Exercise and Robotics in Neurological Diseases to further such work on lower extremity movement. "This heralds a transition of therapeutic robotics from research to practice, similar to when computers went from being specialized number-crunchers for engineering and science to the ubiquitous consumer appliances for word-processing and presentation that we use today," said MIT Professor Neville Hogan, a principal investigator in the work who holds appointments in mechanical engineering and brain and cognitive sciences. The work is funded by the NIH, the Veterans Administration and a N.Y. State Score Award.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/stroke-robot.html

SUPERCOOL MATTER
MIT scientists have brought a supercool end to a heated race among physicists: They have become the first to create a new type of matter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity. Their work, reported in Nature, is closely related to the superconductivity of electrons in metals. Observations of superfluids may help solve lingering questions about high-temperature superconductivity, which has widespread applications for magnets, sensors and energy-efficient transport of electricity, said Wolfgang Ketterle, a Nobel laureate who heads the MIT group and is a professor of physics as well as a principal investigator in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics. Seeing the superfluid gas so clearly is such a dramatic step that Dan Kleppner, director of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, said, "This is not a smoking gun for superfluidity. This is a cannon." The research was supported by the NSF, the Office of Naval Research, NASA and the Army Research Office.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/matter.html

ENGINEERED MUSCLES
For years, a major obstacle has dashed the hopes of creating "replacement parts" for the human body: the lack of an internal, nourishing blood system in engineered tissues. Without it, thicker tissues can't thrive, a fact that has confined tissue engineering's practical application to thin skin, which can recruit blood vessels from underlying tissue. Now, researchers in Institute Professor Robert Langer's lab at MIT have used a novel cocktail of cells, including endothelial cells derived from human embryonic stem cells, to coax in vitro muscle tissue to develop its own vascular network, a process called pre-vascularization. When implanted in living mice and rats, these tissues integrated more robustly with the body's own tissues than similar implants without blood vessels. The human derivation of the endothelial cells is key for clinical use in humans to avoid an immune rejection, but this was the first time that this particular type of cell had been isolated. Credit for that goes to researcher Shulamit Levenberg, co-author with Langer and colleagues of a paper on the work in Nature Biotechnology. The work was funded by the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/langer-muscle.html

LUNG STEM CELLS 
Researchers at the MIT Center for Cancer Research have discovered the first stem cells of the lung, cells that could be responsible for one type of lung cancer. This finding may aid in the development of early detection strategies for lung cancer, the leading cause of death from cancer worldwide. The work appears in the journal Cell. "This work has identified a new population of cells that links the normal biology of the lung to lung cancer development," said Tyler Jacks, a professor of biology, Director of the Center for Cancer Research and leader of the MIT team. Support for this work comes from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Cancer Institute, and the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/cancer-lung.html

SYNTHETIC GENOMICS & SOCIETY
At a time when biologists are faced with more ethics and security concerns than ever, three organizations--MIT, the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.-- announced June 28 a new project to examine the societal implications of synthetic genomics, a new field involving the development of viruses and cells using designed and engineered DNA. The 15-month study will explore the risks and benefits of this emerging technology, as well as possible safeguards to prevent abuse, including bioterrorism. It will be jointly directed by Drew Endy of MIT, Robert M. Friedman of the Venter Institute and Gerald L. Epstein of CSIS. "The project will serve as a model for policy makers, scientists and engineers who are evaluating potential 'dual-use' research," said Endy, an assistant professor in MIT's Biological Engineering Division and co-founder of the MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/syntheticbio.html

CANCER ID
Despite significant progress in understanding the genetic changes in many different cancers, the diagnosis and classification of tumor type remains, at best, an imperfect art. This could change quickly, thanks to the findings of a group of researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, MIT and St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. The work, reported in a June issue of Nature, focuses on microRNAs (miRNAs), small, noncoding RNA molecules that control the levels of proteins made from transcribed genes. The scientists found a surprisingly accurate correlation between the 217 known human miRNAs and the development and differentiation of tumors. They did so by developing a new technology that could also be the basis for an easy and inexpensive diagnostic test. "This study opened our eyes to how much more there is to learn about genomic approaches to cancer," said Todd Golub, senior author of the paper. Golub is a core faculty member and director of the Cancer Program at the Broad Institute, an investigator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator (HHMI) at Harvard Medical School. This work was supported by HHMI.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/cancer-mirnas.html

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Elizabeth A. Thomson
Assistant Director, Science & Engineering News
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
News Office, Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
617-258-5402 (ph); 617-258-8762 (fax)
<thomson at mit.edu> 

<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www>
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