Anne Trafton, MIT News Office

MIT and Harvard University researchers have engineered E. coli cells that can be used to study how bacteria at an infection site respond to antibiotic treatment, allowing scientists to learn more about how existing antibiotics work and potentially help them to develop new drugs. In the new study, which appears in the Aug. 31 issue of Cell Host…

Using a new strategy that can rapidly generate customized RNA vaccines, MIT researchers have devised a new vaccine candidate for the Zika virus. The vaccine consists of strands of genetic material known as messenger RNA, which are packaged into a nanoparticle that delivers the RNA into cells. Once inside cells, the RNA is translated into…

MIT researchers have devised a way to make tumor cells more susceptible to certain types of cancer treatment by coating the cells with nanoparticles before delivering drugs. By tethering hundreds of tiny particles to the surfaces of tumor cells in the presence of a mechanical force, the researchers made the cells much more vulnerable to…

Manufacturing small proteins known as peptides is usually very time-consuming, which has slowed development of new peptide drugs for diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and bacterial infections. To help speed up the manufacturing process, MIT researchers have designed a machine that can rapidly produce large quantities of customized peptides. Their new tabletop machine can form…

Within the inner ear, thousands of hair cells detect sound waves and translate them into nerve signals that allow us to hear speech, music, and other everyday sounds. Damage to these cells is one of the leading causes of hearing loss, which affects 48 million Americans. Each of us is born with about 15,000 hair…

Many scientists are pursuing ways to treat disease by delivering DNA or RNA that can turn a gene on or off. However, a major obstacle to progress in this field has been finding ways to safely deliver that genetic material to the correct cells. Encapsulating strands of RNA or DNA in tiny particles is one…

Researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have designed and demonstrated a small voltaic cell that is sustained by the acidic fluids in the stomach. The system can generate enough power to run small sensors or drug delivery devices that can reside in the gastrointestinal tract for extended periods of time. This type of…

Drugs that contain one or more fluorine atoms tend to be more stable, more powerful, and easier for the body to absorb. For those reasons, drug developers would like to be able to incorporate fluorine or a fluorine-containing unit known as trifluoromethyl into new experimental drugs, but this has been very difficult to do. Now,…

MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers have demonstrated that they can deliver strands of RNA efficiently to colon cells, using bursts of ultrasound waves that propel the RNA into the cells. Using this approach, the researchers dramatically turned down the production of a protein involved in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), in mice. “What we…

Researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a new drug capsule that remains in the stomach for up to two weeks after being swallowed, gradually releasing its drug payload. This type of drug delivery could replace inconvenient regimens that require repeated doses, which would help to overcome one of the major obstacles…

Many chemotherapy drugs work by damaging cancer cells’ DNA so severely that the cells are forced to commit cellular suicide. However, these drugs don’t work for all patients: If cells can repair the DNA damage, they may survive treatment. MIT researchers have now developed a way to test cells’ ability to perform several different types…

Nanoparticles offer a promising way to deliver cancer drugs in a targeted fashion, helping to kill tumors while sparing healthy tissue. However, most nanoparticles that have been developed so far are limited to carrying only one or two drugs. MIT chemists have now shown that they can package three or more drugs into a novel…

The genome-editing system known as CRISPR allows scientists to delete or replace any target gene in a living cell. MIT researchers have now added an extra layer of control over when and where this gene editing occurs, by making the system responsive to light. With the new system, gene editing takes place only when researchers…