Spotlight
By Sri Gowtham Thakku and Avilash Cramer
This past January, we traveled to South Africa as part of the IAP class HST.434: Evolution of an Epidemic. The class, taught by IMES Professor Bruce Walker and Dr. Howard Heller and offered to MIT undergraduates, examines the medical, scientific, public health and policy responses to a new disease, by focusing on the evolution of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As two graduate students enrolled in HST’s Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) PhD program, our official role in the class was as Teaching Assistants, but we ended up finding ourselves more as students – listening, absorbing and learning.
Leading up to the trip, we had two days of preparatory lectures and an extensive list of readings to complete, which most of us did on our long flights to Durban. While these were helpful in building a foundation of knowledge surrounding the HIV/AIDS epidemic, they were hardly preparation for all our interactions with the people we met — the young women living through the epidemic in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, the healthcare providers working to fight it, the researchers searching for a cure — their warmth, friendliness and boundless optimism couldn’t possibly be captured in a lecture or journal article.
By Thomas Gurry, Samuel Finlayson, Travis Hughes, and Travis Zack
In the spring of 2015, a couple of researchers at the recently launched MIT Center for Microbiome Informatics & Therapeutics (CMIT), including the Center’s co-director, Prof. Eric Alm, converged on a study design to better understand the impact of individual dietary micronutrients on gut microbiome composition.
The main difficulty we faced was finding a way to measure the effect of these micronutrients against a diet background that was identical in all study participants. After several iterations and discussions with nutritionists and other experts, we converged on using Ensure, a liquid nutritional meal replacement used in clinical contexts, as the sole source of nutrition during the study period. This would guarantee that the chemical composition of every participants’ diet was identical, and addressed one of the main concerns with previous microbiome-related diet studies.
Carnegie Mellon University announced Dec. 5 that Emery N. Brown, the Associate Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT, the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital has won the 2018 Dickson Prize in Science.
“Dr. Brown is one of the world’s leading physician-scientists,” Carnegie Mellon said in announcing the award.
For their promising work in the life sciences, HST alums Tyler Clites '17 and Cheryl Cui '18 were two of Forbes magazine's 2019 30 Under 30 for healthcare. Congratulations Tyler and Cheryl!
Tyler Clites, 28
Postdoctoral associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"I build human cyborgs," says MIT researcher Tyler Clites. In his doctoral work, he designed a way to make prosthetic limbs that communicate sensations of joint position and movement directly to the nervous system. This involves a new way of performing amputation surgery and a robotic control system. It has been tried in 12 patients.
Cheryl Cui, 28
Co-founder, Nest. Bio
In 2017 biomedical engineer Cheryl Cui founded Nest.Bio, a venture fund that has close to $100 million under management and invested in eight life science startups. Earlier this year she also launched Nest.Bio Labs, which is a Cambridge, Massachusetts office and lab hub that now houses 12 biotech companies.
Researchers at MIT and MGH, in a new paper first-authored by HST student Varesh Prasad and co-authored by Professor Thomas Heldt, unveil a model for predicting whether ER sepsis patients need life-saving, but potentially harmful, vasopressors. Read more in the MIT News story below.
By Rob Matheson, MIT News Office
Researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have developed a predictive model that could guide clinicians in deciding when to give potentially life-saving drugs to patients being treated for sepsis in the emergency room.
Sepsis is one of the most frequent causes of admission, and one of the most common causes of death, in the intensive care unit. But the vast majority of these patients first come in through the ER. Treatment usually begins with antibiotics and intravenous fluids, a couple liters at a time. If patients don’t respond well, they may go into septic shock, where their blood pressure drops dangerously low and organs fail. Then it’s often off to the ICU, where clinicians may reduce or stop the fluids and begin vasopressor medications such as norepinephrine and dopamine, to raise and maintain the patient’s blood pressure.
"Hey,Charlie" is the brainchild of HST MEMP PhD Alum Emily Lindemer. An app offering continual support via gentle reminders and words of caution, it's an ideal tool for those on the road to addiction recovery. Learn more in the MIT News story below.
By Eva Charles Anna Frederick
In the spring of 2016, while Emily Lindemer was working toward her PhD at MIT, she was also struggling with something closer to home: watching someone she knew well fall in and out of recovery from opioid addiction.
Like many people in recovery, Lindemer’s friend had his ups and downs. There were promising periods of sobriety followed by relapses into old habits. As the months went by, Lindemer began to see patterns.
For example, when he lost his driver's license — a common occurrence for people struggling with substance abuse who have run-ins with police — he had to call his friends to give him rides to work. If the friends he called for a lift were also people he used drugs with, Lindemer says, he’d relapse within a week.
“His relapses were predictable almost to a T, just based on the people he was associating with — who he was talking to, calling, texting, and hanging out with,” she says.
This realization turned out to be an inspiration. What if, she thought, there was a way to provide gentle moments of pause to people struggling with substance-abuse disorders?
On Oct. 15, four alumni of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology were elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), each securing one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. Benjamin Ebert, Jennifer Elisseeff, Matthew Meyerson, and Janey Wiggs were among 85 newly elected members recognized for their “outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service in science, medicine, health, and policy in the U.S. and around the globe,” according to the NAM. Ebert, Meyerson, and Wiggs are HST MD alumni, while Elisseeff is a graduate of HST's MEMP PhD program.
The NAM was founded in 1970 as the Institute of Medicine, and is one of three academies comprising the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The organization is a nonprofit providing objective guidance on the topics of health, science, and technology. More than 2,000 members strong, it has distinguished itself as a reliable source for credible advice on topics related to human health, and aims to secure a healthy future for all.
The 2018 InCube Competition
In case you were wondering why people were living in a glass cube in front of Stata
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a fishbowl?
The weekend of Sept. 21, Paolo Adajar ’21, Eswar Anandapadmanaban ’19, Sam Solomon ’20, Erica Yuen G, and I ate, slept, and worked in a glass cube on North Court for four days. This was the 2018 InCube Competition, an international hackathon/pitch competition led by ETH Zurich Entrepreneur Club. There were five cubes, each with a different challenge from its respective sponsor.
Our challenge, sponsored by Stryker, was to design the ambulance of the future. Over the four days, we met with paramedics from ProEMS, medical directors in the Boston area, engineers and designers from Stryker, and you! If you walked by the cube while we were there, there was a good chance we would come out to see what you thought of our work.
An Engineer in a White Coat
A medical engineering student's lasting impressions of clinical medicine.
I am not a medical student. Yet I had the privilege of spending 5 weeks in the life of one at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA, as part of my Medical Engineering PhD program. It was one of the most educational and eye-opening experiences of my career - a beautifully diverse introduction to clinical care and a world removed from my usual day to day as a scientist and engineer. I've come to think about these 5 weeks as a birds-eye view of a day in the clinic. Clinical medicine is an interplay between two parallel worlds that seldom overlap. In one universe, there are humans as potential patients, going about their lives. The investment banker, the professor, the retired grandparent, the great-grandparent, the recent immigrant. In another, there is the constant churning of different hospital units and departments, the emergency room (ER), wards, surgery, clinic, GI, all referring patients to receive some care from each other, be it interventional, diagnostic, or a brief consult. The interaction of these two worlds can be seamless, but more often than not is like a spinning wheel trying to get traction on solid ground - rocky at first and hopefully steady soon thereafter. By observing this interplay first hand I have come to realize a few different points...
Avilash Cramer, an HST MEMP doctoral candidate, was granted the John R. Cameron* Young Investigator award at the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) annual meeting. Avilash’s award was given for his presentation titled “A Stationary Computed Tomography Module Using Photocathode-Driven X-Ray Sources.”
Avilash works in the lab of Dr. Rajiv Gupta, Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School, who directs the Advanced X-ray Imaging Sciences Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. In a collaboration between labs at MIT, HMS, MGH, and NASA, Dr. Gupta’s group is developing portable computed tomography (CT) systems that operate without any moving parts, using a novel, miniature x-ray source that they have invented. Since their system is both lighter and cheaper than conventional x-ray systems, Avilash and Dr. Gupta are hopeful that their work can bring CT imaging to ambulatory care and to clinics in rural and low-income communities.