The power of ‘convergence’ In white paper, MIT scientists discuss potential for revolutionary advances in biomedicine and other fields.
A new model for scientific research known as “convergence” offers the potential for revolutionary advances in biomedicine and other areas of science, according to a white paper issued today by 12 leading MIT researchers. The white paper, presented Tuesday morning at a forum hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), says that the United States should capitalize on the trend of convergence — which involves the merger of life, physical and engineering sciences — to foster the innovation necessary to meet the growing demand for accessible, affordable health care.
“Convergence is a broad rethinking of how all scientific research can be conducted, so that we capitalize on a range of knowledge bases, from microbiology to computer science to engineering design,” MIT Institute Professor and Nobel Laureate Phillip Sharp, one of the report’s authors, told the AAAS forum.
“It entails collaboration among research groups but, more deeply, the integration of disciplinary approaches that were originally viewed as separate and distinct. This merging of technologies, processes and devices into a unified whole will create new pathways and opportunities for scientific and technological advancement.”
Sharp and the other MIT authors say that convergence offers the potential for a “Third Revolution” in biomedicine that may be as profound as the two life-science revolutions that preceded it: the breakthroughs accompanying the development of molecular and cellular biology, and the sequencing of the human genome, which has made it possible to identify the genetic foundations of many diseases.
Convergence also provides a blueprint for addressing the country’s future medical and healthcare challenges, which will only increase as the population ages and diseases such as Alzheimer’s become more prevalent. However, federal investment in biomedical research is critical — “and a smart investment if we are to keep our biomedical research the finest in the world,” said Sharp. As an example, he cited NIH investments in heart-disease research, which average $4 per year per American and have helped to cut the incidence of fatal heart attacks and stroke by more than 60 percent since 1975.
A new model
The report, “The Third Revolution: The Convergence of the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering,” noted the impact that convergence is already having in a broad array of fields.
Just as advances in information technology, materials, imaging, nanotechnology and related fields — coupled with advances in computing, modeling and simulation — have transformed the physical sciences, so are they are beginning to transform life science. The result is critical new biology-related fields, such as bioengineering, computational biology, synthetic biology and tissue engineering.
At the same time, biological models (understanding complex, self-arranged systems) are already transforming engineering and the physical sciences, making possible advances in biofuels, food supply, viral self assembly and much more.
The report gives particular focus to biomedicine, a field that is already being transformed by convergence. At MIT, for example, scientists are using nanoparticles to transport time-release anticancer drugs directly to cancerous cells, developing drugs that fight diseases without damaging healthy tissues and cells, and improving new predictive models of disease.
Recommendations
The report says providing adequate financial support and a well-organized focus within NIH for convergence research are key to the success of the convergence model, as is encouraging investigation that crosses existing research boundaries. Among the report’s other recommendations are establishing a convergence “ecosystem,” which would build connections across funding agencies; reforming the peer-review process to support interdisciplinary grants; and educating, expanding and supporting the next generation of convergence researchers.
Other MIT speakers at the forum included Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a winner of the Millennium Technology Prize and the National Medal of Science; Paula Hammond, the Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering; and Tyler Jacks, director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and the David H. Koch Professor of Biology.
Commentators at the forum included Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg of the Food and Drug Administration; Thomas Kalil, deputy director for policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Dr. Alan Guttmacher, director of the National institute of Child Health and Human Development at NIH; and Dr. Keith Yamamoto, professor and executive vice dean, University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine, and chair of the Coalition for Life Sciences.
Reference Link
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/convergence-0104.html
Courtesy
HT Media
Cellphones reveal emerging disease outbreaks
YOUR cellphone could be a key tool in the fight against disease by relaying a telltale signature of illness to doctors and agencies monitoring new outbreaks.
“This technology is an early warning system,” says Anmol Madan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose team concluded that you can spot cases of flu by looking for changes in the movement and communication patterns of infected people.
Epidemiologists know that disease outbreaks change mobility patterns, but until now have been unable to track these patterns in any detail. So Madan and colleagues gave cellphones to 70 students in an undergraduate dormitory. The phones came with software that supplied the team with anonymous data on the students’ movements, phone calls and text messages. The students also completed daily surveys on their mental and physical health.
A characteristic signature of illness emerged from the data, which was gathered over a 10-week period in early 2009. Students who came down with a fever or full-blown flu tended to move around less and make fewer calls late at night and early in the morning. When Madan trained software to hunt for this signature in the cellphone data, a daily check correctly identified flu victims 90 per cent of the time.
The technique could be used to monitor the health status of individuals who live alone. Madan is developing a smartphone app that will alert a named contact, perhaps a relative or doctor, when a person’s communication and movement patterns suggest that they are ill.
Public health officials could also use the technique to spot emerging outbreaks of illness ahead of conventional detection systems, which today rely on reports from doctors and virus-testing labs. Similar experiments in larger groups and in different communities will have to be done first though.
Leon Danon at the University of Warwick, UK, is negotiating with the ministry of health of a northern European nation about a project that would combine the anonymous cellphone records of around 10,000 people with their health records to produce signatures of disease from a larger population.
Researchers will need to think hard about the causes of the changes they see in the cellphone data, says Nathan Eagle at MIT, who is working with Danon. Eagle looked at cellular data from a series of cholera outbreaks in Rwanda between 2006 and 2009. He saw a clear reduction in people’s movement, which may have been due to the disease. But the outbreak was caused by floods, which also limited mobility. Distinguishing between the two possible causes on the basis of phone data alone was impossible, he says.
Madan presented his paper last month at the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Doctors work on radiation problem to ease fears
Dr. Aaron Sodrickson, radiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who is researching the risks patients face from CT scans, poses in this undated handout.
(Reuters) – On a recent flight, Dr. Aaron Sodickson learned firsthand about the fallout from studies and media stories about radiation exposure from CT scans.
Sodickson, a radiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, was going to Washington, D.C., to meet with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to find ways to protect patients from getting too much radiation from CT scans.
“The woman sitting next to me on the plane had a lump in her neck. It was thought to be cancer,” Sodickson said in an interview.
The woman’s doctor had ordered a CT scan to help determine if the lump was cancerous.
“She refused because she thought she would die of the CT scan,” Sodickson said.
A CT scan assembles cross-section images of the body into a vivid picture that gives doctors a much better look at a patient that conventional X-rays, often eliminating the need for exploratory surgery. But too much radiation exposure is believed to raise the risk of cancer and scientists are working to cut down the risk from a CT scan.
A CT scan of the chest exposes a patient to more than 100 times the radiation of an X-ray and an abdominal CT scan is roughly equivalent to 400 chest X-rays.
A report last year by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement found that Americans receive seven times more radiation from diagnostic scans than in 1980. About 70 million CT scans were done on Americans in 2007, up from 3 million in 1980.
A three-year study of Americans aged 18 to 64 last August from a team at Emory University in Atlanta suggests as many as 4 million Americans a year are exposed to what they viewed as high doses of radiation.
Accidental radiation exposure became a major worry in October after the FDA said it was investigating more than 200 cases of patients being exposed to toxic doses of radiation from CT scans at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
“Patients are really scared,” Sodickson said.
BLAMING COMPANIES NOT A FIX
Regulators and lawmakers have responded with hearings and meetings with scanner makers, urging them to add safety mechanisms to their products to guard against errors.
To reduce radiation from routine scans, companies such as General Electric Co’s GE Healthcare are developing computer programs that let radiologists and technicians take sharp pictures while vastly reducing the radiation dose.
Doctors say placing all of the blame on equipment makers will not keep doctors from ordering too many scans. They say they need better tools to determine when scans are warranted.
“What our group is trying to do is to get a better understanding out there of what is the actual magnitude of risk from these scans,” Sodickson said.
Sodickson is one of a handful of U.S. physicians developing computerized programs to assess a patient’s risk from CT exposure and alert them when a scan may be a potentially risky choice. He wants to have the program available to patients by the end of August.
At Massachusetts General Hospital, radiologists have developed a similar program.
“We have taken the American College of Radiology’s appropriateness criteria and basically filled in the dots,” Dr. James Thrall, chief of radiology at Mass General and president of the American College of Radiology, said in an interview.
For example, Thrall said a CT scan is often ordered when a patient has a headache but it is generally not needed. Thrall’s team worked with the neurology department to put together a program asking a series of questions about the patient’s symptoms and giving a score to recommend a CT.
A group at Weill Cornell Medical Center and Columbia University Medical Center in New York has developed a computer-based system that extracts radiation dose information from CT scanners.
The information works even on older CT equipment and is calculated using a patient’s size and weight. The system is still in development but the hope is to allow patients to keep a digital record of their radiation exposure.
MANUFACTURERS RESPOND
Equipment manufacturers also are addressing the radiation problem. To reduce the risk of accidental overexposure, the Medical Imaging & Technology Alliance, an industry group, has started adding alerts to CT scanners to warn technicians when patients are getting too much radiation. GE and others have started to offer free training seminars for technicians.
GE and rivals Siemens AG, Toshiba Corp and Philips are working on ways to reduce the amount of radiation required to produce an image.
In 2008, GE launched Adaptive Statistical Iterative Reconstruction or ASIR, a software program that enhances the quality of CT images, allowing radiologists to use up to 50 percent less radiation to produce a high-quality scan.
Late last month, researchers at the International Society for Computed Tomography conference in San Francisco presented the first results of studies using GE’s next-generation software program, which may allow doctors to cut the radiation dose by 80 percent.
“We’re trying as an industry to stay in front of this but we can’t predict what the FDA will do,” Ken Denison, CT dose leader for General Electric Co’s GE Healthcare unit, said in a telephone interview.
Denison expects the FDA to continue collecting information and eventually issue new regulations.
Sodickson is worried the FDA is focusing too much on manufacturers. “Honestly, my concern is the FDA will overregulate it and make matters worse,” he said.
Sodickson said CT manufacturers do not have the medical training to get the best diagnosis from the machines. He likens it to a table saw manufacturer teaching carpenters how to cut wood.
“It’s not solvable by the manufacturers,” he said.
Thrall worries that patients and doctors will err on the side of caution and decide to skip needed scans, putting patients at risk.
As for the woman on the airplane, Sodickson used his own formula to estimate that the woman’s risk of cancer from a CT scan was less than 1 in 10,000 — far less than the risk from the mass in her neck.
She agreed to set up the scan the next day, he said.
Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6565Y820100608?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100
Courtesy
Thomson Reuters
MIT Researchers Print a Solar Cell on Paper
We love the idea of clean and green fuel. But they come with certain disadvantages. First one is they are heavy on pocket of a commoner. Second disadvantage is their power conversion rate is quite low. Last one is you need storage space to save all the power converted by a clean and green technology. Now MIT researchers are coming out of solar cells printed on paper. Though the technology still has to wait for years before it can be converted into a commercially viable entity but it’s an interesting development.
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Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have effectively coated paper with a solar cell. It is a part of a suite of research projects aimed at energy breakthroughs.
Susan Hockfield, MIT’s president, and Paolo Scaroni, CEO of Italian oil company Eni, formally dedicated the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Research Center. Eni financed the research project by investing $5 million into the center. This project is also financed by National Science Foundation. They are granting a fund of $2 million.
The MIT people took inspiration from the inkjet printer. They molded the solar paper panels on the similar lines. They used organic semi conductor material. The technique will be quite helpful in lowering the weight of solar panels. “If you could use a staple gun to install a solar panel, there could be a lot of value,” Vladimir Bulovic, director of the National Science Foundation, said.
MIT researchers utilized carbon-based dyes. The efficiency of paper based solar cells is not great, at around 1.5% to 2%. But Vladimir Bulovic says that one can use any material if it can be deposited at room temperature. He further says, “Absolutely, the trick was coming up with ways to use paper,” he said.
Prof. Karen Gleason is the head of the MIT research team. She has submitted a paper for scientific review but it has yet to be published. MIT and Eni have confirmed that this is the first time a solar cell has been printed on paper.
During the press conference, Paolo Scaroni said that Eni is funding the center because the company understands that hydrocarbons will eventually run out and believes that solar can be a replacement, although the currently available technology isn’t sufficient enough.
Paolo Scaroni said, “We are not very active (in alternative energy) today because we don’t believe today’s technologies are the answer of our problems.”
Reference Link
http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/mit-solar-cell-on-paper/
Courtesy
AE News Network
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