_{Photo: Bryce Vickmark}

MIT professor Sangeeta Bhatia has developed a new paper diagnostic that can detect cancer by identifying biomarkers in the patient's urine.

Cancer rates in developing nations have climbed sharply in recent years, and now account for 70 percent of cancer mortality worldwide. Early detection has been proven to improve outcomes, but screening approaches such as mammograms and colonoscopy, used in the developed world, are too costly to be implemented in settings with little medical infrastructure.  

To address this gap, MIT engineers have developed a simple, cheap, paper test that could improve diagnosis rates and help people get treated earlier. The diagnostic, which works much like a pregnancy test, could reveal within minutes, based on a urine sample, whether a person has cancer. This approach has helped detect infectious diseases, and the new technology allows noncommunicable diseases to be detected using the same strategy.

The technology, developed by MIT professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Sangeeta Bhatia, relies on nanoparticles that interact with tumor proteins called proteases, each of which can trigger release of hundreds of biomarkers that are then easily detectable in a patient’s urine.

Arturo Vegas hits the play button on his tablet computer. A video pops up showing the inside of a monkey's abdomen. “You see this blistering?” asks Vegas, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. He points to the lining of the abdominal cavity onto which hundreds of tiny balls resembling semi-translucent fish eggs are attached. “Those are all capsules, and what we're trying to do here is wash them out with a saline solution.” A large needle comes into view and squirts the capsules with fluid in an effort to retrieve them for analysis. They don't budge.

Insulin-producing islet cells could hold the secret to curing type 1 diabetes—if only scientists could figure out a way to encapsulate and transplant them into the body. But first, the right biocompatible material must be found to hold these precious cells. A team of bioengineers thinks it has discovered one. Elie Dolgin reports.

A recent study from Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has uncovered features of the genetic code that may end a long-standing controversy in molecular biology and revolutionize the way many drugs and biofuels are currently produced.

Daniel B. Goodman, a graduate student in the HST program, and George M. Church, the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at HMS, led the study.

When rare “words” (codons) are present near the start of bacterial genes, working copies of the gene don’t fold as readily into structures that block protein production. To find out whether the rare words themselves or lack of roadblocks increased protein production, Wyss Institute researchers synthesized 14,000 snippets of DNA with rare codons, roadblocks, both, or neither (individual pixels in this diagram), inserted them into genes, and measured how much protein they produced. Those with rare codons and roadblocks no longer made more protein (green pixels). That showed that rare codons work by removing roadblocks. (Credit: Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University)

About 10 percent of the U.S. population suffers from dyslexia, a condition that makes learning to read difficult. Dyslexia is usually diagnosed around second grade, but the results of a new study from MIT could help identify those children before they even begin reading, so they can be given extra help earlier.

The study, done with researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital, found a correlation between poor pre-reading skills in kindergartners and the size of a brain structure that connects two language-processing areas.