Harvard Medical School has developed a H1N1-tracking iPhone app. The app is a project of HMS Mobile, which sounds like a British Navy ship, but says it’s a Harvard Medical group dedicated to helping people deal with day-to-day health emergencies.
Also — that’ll be two bucks. Just around the corner, those anti-capitalist hippies at Children’s Hospital, working with the MIT Media Lab, released their own, free H1N1 tracking app last month.
That’s two H1N1 apps sprouting from about one city block — If things keep up like this, pretty soon you should be able to use your mobile phone to track H1N1 germs chasing you down the street in real-time, or see the normally invisible H1N1 crawling over people’s faces in an augmented reality app, exposing them as the feverish, congested zombies they are.
Good news for lab animals who have had heart attacks: Harvard researchers have grown a strip of beating mouse heart muscle from embryonic stem cells, according to the Globe’s White Coat Notes blog. The breakthrough will be detailed tomorrow in the journal Science.
Sure, it’s no human ear growing out of a mouse’s back, but it gets stem cell research that much closer to making replaceable parts for humans, or making a heart like a carburator.
Not to be outdone by the unnerving motion of a robot made from “jammable slurry,” one of the researchers compares the heart-muscle strip to a “fruit roll-up.” Delicious.
Invo Bioscience has a very special announcement to make — it is the proud parent of a fertility device that has produced its first baby.
The Beverly-based medical device firm’s Invocell device was launched in the Middle East early this year, and a healthy baby arrived on September 29 to a Pakistani mother. The mother, who is 40, was trying to get pregnant for 16 years.
The procedure involves combining sperm and eggs in a device that is implanted in the woman for three days to incubate. Then one or two resulting embryos are transferred to the uterus so it can implant and the pregnancy can continue.
The announcement is sweet because in the life sciences, tangible results are few and far between. Creating a drug, for instance, takes at least ten years and up to $1 billion. For medical devices, the FDA approval process is somewhat quicker and easier. But researchers and company executives alike still must possess tremendous patience and stamina getting life science products to market. There are many more failures than successes. And success is often measured in little increments, such as extending the life of a cancer patient for a few weeks.
But you can’t be a little pregnant. A woman in Pakistan can now happily attest to that.
Tonight is Game 1 of the Red Sox’ five-game divisional series against the Angels, which creates two near-certainties: Another Sox/Yankees ALCS; and “worker productivity” becoming an oxymoron at offices throughout New England tomorrow. This thing doesn’t start till 9:37 p.m., for Hendu’s sake, and postseason baseball tends to go well with alcohol.
But what baseball taketh away, it can also giveth, or whatever. The sport has inspired some nifty innovations in analytics, robotics and … let’s call it life sciences.
MIT News Office photo
• In spring training, the Sox, who even give their IT guy World Series rings, supplemented hitting coach Dave Magadan with the MIT Media Lab, naturally. For the last few years, researchers from the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments Group, has been strapping sensors to minor leagers while they’re batting at the Sox camp at Fort Myers. The info from accelerometers and gyroscopes could provide insight on differences in swing mechanics during a hot streak or a slump.
• Using an arm developed at MIT, University of Tokyo researchers have developed baseball-playing robots that could make the Fall Classic either more interesting, or entirely pointless, to watch. Think of all the time and money the Sox would save on scouting, not to mention free agency. And J.D. Drew would presumably be injured far less often if he were a robot. (more…)
An international research team led by investigators at the Broad Institute has decoded the genome for … wait for it … the crop disease that caused the Irish potato famine.
The organism that triggered the famine in the mid-19th century, resulting in a huge influx of Irish immigrants into the Boston area, is alive and well. It is now threatening this season’s tomato and potato crops across much of the United States.
The culprit is called Phytophthora infestans. At first, researchers thought it was a fungus, but now they are calling it a “water mold.” This makes a lot of sense, since water molds thrive in cool wet places, like much of Northern Europe. It’s so powerful it can destroy entire fields of potatoes, tomatoes or other veggies in a few days.
But it turned out to be good news for the growth of Our Fair City. Perhaps Boston should institute a minor holiday — one that lets state and local workers take a day off, but doesn’t close the banks — in honor of good old Phytophthora infestans.
Without it, we might have few good pubs, no Larry Bird and no Dropkick Murphys.
Click the medals, and then the questions on the multimedia feature above to hear audio of the winners.
I dropped by Harvard last night before the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony — a Nobel Prize takeoff that honors research that makes people laugh, then think. Most of the ten prizewinners were assembled in the Sanders Theater prior to the show, which I was told would include a “Bernie Madoff-themed cabaret” — it’s not on YouTube yet, but you’ll be the first to know when it is. The show also featured a performance from the Boston Squeezebox Ensemble, and I cannot begin to imagine what that could possibly be.
Among the winners, Javier Morales and Miguel Apátiga, researchers at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, were honored for developing a process that makes diamond from tequila. Apátiga said one experiment used 25 million liters of booze.
Donald Unger cracked the knuckles of his left hand for more than 60 years to test his mother’s theory on arthritis, and picked up the Ig Nobel medicine prize for his efforts. Winning the award amazed him — Unger said he’s done great work in his time, but this wasn’t it. (more…)
A recent Wired magazine piece outlined the increasing effectiveness of the placebo effect. Biotechs are finding their drugs, new and old, are failing tests because they’re no more effective than a placebo.
In August, for example, Javelin Pharmacauticals reported in August that tests of its pain reliever, Ereska, returned a pain intensity difference between Ereska and placebos that fell short of clinical standards.
Taking a problem and turning it into an opportunity, Stephen Colbert, D.F.A.’s Prescott Pharmaceuticals is rolling out Vaxebo, a bag of sugar from which to make those increasingly effective sugar-pill placebos.
Worcester-based synthetic vaccine company Antigen Express Inc. is hard at work making the next generation of vaccines against both avian and swine flu.
The company wasn’t among the five pharmaceutical giants to be approved to produce the H1N1 vaccine that will be distributed throughout the U.S. in the next few weeks. In fact, Antigen Express is still waiting for the FDA to approve protocols for clinical trials of its H1N1 vaccine — company President Eric von Hofe said he expects those conversations to happen in the next few weeks. Von Hofe said the company is currently doing trials in Lebanon and is seeking approval to do clinical trials from European Union regulators as well.
The FDA has never approved a synthetic vaccine for prophylactic use. But von Hofe said that he thinks the regulator is starting to warm up to the novel technology.
“Back when there was the H5N1 (avian flu) scare, the FDA was very skeptical of synthetic vaccines. But then they tried to make a vaccine out of eggs and they just couldn’t do it because it was so toxic. Now I think they may be more open new technologies,” von Hofe said.
Antigen Express uses a combination of three peptides, which are strands of linked amino acids, to develop its vaccines. Von Hofe said the company discovered that one of the peptides the company is using for its H5N1 vaccine, also in development, is from a part of the virus that is identical with H1N1. So now the company has to identify the other two peptides for the combination, get approval from U.S. and/or EU regulators to start trials and do the trials. This whole process should take more than a year, which means the company won’t be a player in this year’s fight against pandemic flu.
… Unless things go horribly, horribly wrong. Von Hofe said that if the swine flu mutates halfway through the season, and the vaccines being manufactured now are ineffective, the government could push up the time lines for other vaccines in development, including, perhaps, Antigen Express’ vaccine.
MIT economist Esther Duflo, Harvard researchers Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan and Peter Huybers, Yale researchers Richard Prum and Mary Tinetti, and Project HEALTH founder Rebecca Onie each received $500,000 to further their research.
Mahadevan, above tries to answer everyday questions with applied mathematics — how cloth falls, or how skin wrinkles.
After the jump, watch video of the remaining New England grant recipients. (more…)
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