What if training your immune system to attack cancer cells was as easy as training it to fight Covid-19? Many people believe the technology behind some Covid-19 vaccines, messenger RNA, holds great promise for stimulating immune responses to cancer. But using messenger RNA, or mRNA, to get the immune system to mount a prolonged and aggressive attack on cancer cells — while leaving healthy cells alone — has been a major challenge. The MIT spinout Strand Therapeutics is attempting to solve that problem with an advanced class of mRNA molecules that are designed to sense what type of cells they en ..read more

When Albert E. Almada PhD ’13 embarks on a new project, he always considers two criteria instilled in him during his time as a graduate student in the Department of Biology at MIT. “If you want to make a big discovery, you have to approach it from a unique perspective — a unique angle,” Almada says. “You also have to be willing to dive into the unknown and go to the leading edge of your field.” This is not without its challenges — but with an innovative spirit, Almada says, one can find ways to apply technologies and approaches to a new area of research where a roadmap doesn’t yet exist. Now a ..read more

A team of MIT researchers will lead a $65.67 million effort, awarded by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), to develop ingestible devices that may one day be used to treat diabetes, obesity, and other conditions through oral delivery of mRNA. Such devices could potentially be deployed for needle-free delivery of mRNA vaccines as well. The five-year project also aims to develop electroceuticals, a new form of ingestible therapies based on electrical stimulation of the body’s own hormones and neural signaling. If successful, this approach could lead to new treatments ..read more

Sequencing all of the RNA in a cell can reveal a great deal of information about that cell’s function and what it is doing at a given point in time. However, the sequencing process destroys the cell, making it difficult to study ongoing changes in gene expression. An alternative approach developed at MIT could enable researchers to track such changes over extended periods of time. The new method, which is based on a noninvasive imaging technique known as Raman spectroscopy, doesn’t harm cells and can be performed repeatedly. Using this technique, the researchers showed that they could monitor ..read more

Some Covid-19 vaccines safely and effectively used lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to deliver messenger RNA to cells. A new MIT study shows that different nanoparticles could be used for a potential Alzheimer’s disease (AD) therapy. In tests in multiple mouse models and with cultured human cells, a newly tailored LNP formulation effectively delivered small interfering RNA (siRNA) to the brain’s microglia immune cells to suppress expression of a protein linked to excessive inflammation in Alzheimer’s disease. In a prior study, the researchers showed that blocking the consequences ..read more

Microbial sequence databases contain a wealth of information about enzymes and other molecules that could be adapted for biotechnology. But these databases have grown so large in recent years that they’ve become difficult to search efficiently for enzymes of interest. Now, scientists at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health have developed a new search algorithm that has identified 188 kinds of new rare CRISPR systems in bacterial genomes, encompa ..read more

A diverse set of species, from snails to algae to amoebas, make programmable DNA-cutting enzymes called Fanzors — and a new study from scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research has identified thousands of them. Fanzors are RNA-guided enzymes that can be programmed to cut DNA at specific sites, much like the bacterial enzymes that power the widely used gene-editing system known as CRISPR. The newly recognized diversity of natural Fanzor enzymes, reported Sept. 27 in the journal Science Advances, gives scientists an extensive set of programmable enzymes that might be adapted into ..read more

Neurons are talkers. They each communicate with fellow neurons, muscles, or other cells by releasing neurotransmitter chemicals at “synapse” junctions, ultimately producing functions ranging from emotions to motions. But even neurons of the exact same type can vary in their conversational style. A new open-access study in Cell Reports by neurobiologists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory highlights a molecular mechanism that might help account for the nuanced diversity of neural discourse. The scientists made their findings in neurons that control muscles in Drosop ..read more

RNA vaccines against Covid-19 have proven effective at reducing the severity of disease. However, a team of researchers at MIT is working on making them even better. By tweaking the design of the vaccines, the researchers showed that they could generate Covid-19 RNA vaccines that produce a stronger immune response, at a lower dose, in mice. Adjuvants are molecules commonly used to increase the immune response to vaccines, but they haven’t yet been used in RNA vaccines.  In this study, the MIT researchers engineered both the nanoparticles used to deliver the Covid-19 antigen, and the antig ..read more

Figuring out how hundreds of different kinds of brain cells develop from their unique expression of thousands of genes promises to not only advance understanding of how the brain works in health, but also what goes wrong in disease. A new MIT study that precisely probes this “molecular logic” in two neuron types of the Drosophila fruit fly shows that even similar cells push and pull many levers to develop distinct functions. In the study in Neuron, a team of neurobiologists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory found that the two closely related neuronal subtypes diff ..read more