In the Media

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.

Along with 9 other finalists, EECS graduate student Cody Gilleland presented his dream research proposal in April to Regeneron. He was named inaugural recipient, based on his presentation to essentially bring Moore's law to early stage drug delivery by designing a new system for developing and validating drug targets (prior to mouse model trials).

Detecting early-stage malarial infection of blood cells is a diagnostic that has recently come closer to reality through the work of MIT's Anantha Chandrakasan, EECS Department Head, and Subra Suresh, former MIT Dean of Engineering, now president of Carnegie Mellon University. The work, which has been published Aug. 8 in the journal Lab on a Chip, is potentially applicable to detecting other infections and diseases.