Of the 4,000 Americans waiting for heart transplants, only 2,500 will receive new hearts in the next year. Even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, the biggest risk is the their bodies will reject the new heart and launch a massive immune reaction against the foreign cells. To combat the problems of organ shortage and decrease the chance that a patient's body will reject it, researchers have been working to create synthetic organs from patients' own cells. Now a team of scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School has gotten one step closer, using adult skin cells to regenerate functional human heart tissue, according to a study published recently in the journal Circulation Research.
In recent years, researchers have figured out that the constellation of diseases known as cancer is in fact hundreds of distinct diseases. Though each one may manifest itself a little differently, diagnosing the type of cancer is extremely difficult, and makes a huge difference in how doctors treat the disease. Now researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have teamed up with doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital to develop a computer model that can pull in a patient's data to suggest diagnoses to their physicians. The researchers published their work earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
By day, Seok-Hyun Yun and Malte Gather are physicists at Massachusetts General Hospital. But at night, for the past four years, they worked on making a human cell behave like a laser. They built their human laser out of the same three components found in all lasers: a pump source, which provides the initial light energy; an optical cavity, which concentrates the light from the pump source into a beam; and a gain medium, a substance in which electrons are excited until they reach a higher-energy state and simultaneously release that energy as a beam of photons-laser light.
