In the Media

Mapping the human genome, accomplished a decade ago, was heralded for laying the foundation for understanding genetic variation and links to a wide range of diseases. But genes can be switched on and off by many chemical modifications, aka "epigenetic marks." Now Manolis Kellis, EECS professor and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Broad Institute has led an NIH group that has created a similar map of the human epigenome. This work will lead to a global map towards understanding fundamental developmental and disease processes in humans. Read more.

In 2008, the World Health Organization announced a global effort to eradicate malaria, which kills about 800,000 people every year. As part of that goal, scientists are trying to develop new drugs that target the malaria parasite during the stage when it infects the human liver — crucial because some strains of malaria can lie dormant in the liver for several years before flaring up. Read more.

Madrid-MIT M+Visión Team wins 2015 Singapore Challenge. Luca Giancardo, PhD and the neuroQWERTY team awarded $100,000 for the best proposal to help elderly to “Age in Place” with their technology. Read more.

CSAIL postdoc and member of the MIT Computational Biology Group, Andreas Pfenning and collaborators at Duke University have reported findings on large data studies comparing song bird genomics with humans and primates. Vocal-learning birds and primates have common genes that could help pinpoint genetic disorders in humans such as stuttering or Huntington's Disease. Read more.

EECS professor Ron Weiss has teamed with Mechanical Engineering professor Domitilla Del Vecchio and students from multiple departments at MIT to create a device that allows large biological circuits that behave with predictability nearly like that of electronic circuits. The work published this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology, has many applications -- particularly biosensing. Read more.

Timothy Lu, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering has come up with a new reason to engineer E. coli — so that genomic memory can be both long-term and analog -- not just on or off. The work appears in the latest online issue of Science and in The Scientist magazine. Read more.

Mehmet Fatih Yanik has teamed to create a drug delivery pipeline using nanoparticles — enabling rapid testing in zebrafish for eventual delivery to human subjects of biologics, including antibodies, peptides, RNA and DNA. Read more.

Cited for her work as doctor, engineer and scientist to design nano and micro technologies that pioneer new ways to understand and fight disease, Sangeeta N. Bhatia, the John J. (1929) and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) has been awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize. Read more.

Sangeeta Bhatia, was interviewed recently by Jeremey Hobson on Boston NPR radio station WBUR's noon news program "Here and Now" about her work creating miniature livers for testing drugs. Listen to the podcast.

Rahul Sarpeshkar, professor in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and head of the Analog Circuits and Biological Systems Group in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) is featured by the Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) at MIT for his work that blends both biological (wet) and electronic analog circuits (dry) in research that could lead to newly engineered immune cells that could detect cancer cells and kill them, for example. Read more.

Researchers at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL) including Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering, recent EECS PhD graduate Marcus Yip, EECS graduate student Rui Jin and research scientist Nathan Ickes, together with physicians from Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI), have developed a new, low-power signal-processing chip that could lead to a cochlear implant that requires no external hardware. The implant would be wirelessly recharged -- taking just two minutes -- and would run for about eight hours on each charge. Read more.

Manolis Kellis, associate professor of computer science at MIT has teamed with a former CSAIL postdoc to combine work developing algorithms that predict how strands of RNA are likely to unfold with a team of computational biologists at MIT and with experimental biologists at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to identify biologically meaningful RNA folds within living cells. Published in Nature this week, this work shows promised for understanding RNA machinery -- a major avenue towards understanding genetic and biological function in living cells.