The MIT Life Sciences and Health Collaborative (MIT HEALS), which launched on Wednesday, December 4th, focuses on global health challenges by bringing together experts across fields like engineering, biology, neuroscience, AI, and public health.

“Many of today’s big life science challenges are so complex that they’re not addressable by just one area of expertise or through one particular approach,” says Katharina Ribbeck, Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of MIT Biological Engineering. “You also have to engineer solutions that are scalable, equitable, and accessible. That may take sociologists, public health experts, and economists collaborating with engineers and biologists.”

The day-long launch of MIT HEALS began with a welcome from MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and included faculty presentations on transformative research, as well as panel discussions and a poster session highlighting research from the MIT community across the life sciences.

Sparking Collaboration

The poster session, Revolutions in Life Sciences & Engineering, held in the Kresge Lobby and Tent included over 100 research projects in areas such as diagnostics, women’s health, neuroscience, mental health, and more. Poster session co-chair Ribbick explains the motivations behind the event: “It’s intended to celebrate the MIT students who help implement and develop the big dreams we have for MIT HEALS. We also hope the poster session inspires new collaborations among people who might not ordinarily talk with each other.”

Poster committee co-chair Iain Cheeseman, Herman and Margaret Sokol Professor and Associate Department Head in the Department of Biology, adds that “MIT is an ideal place for these cross-pollinations – the disciplines represented in the poster session are truly vast, going far beyond biology, engineering, and computation to include architecture, climate science, public health policy, and more.”

The session was jam-packed with people chatting about research. “I can walk around and see potential intersections with my own work,” said MIT School of Engineering graduate student Sydney Bailes, who researches sleep and its connection to cognitive health in Associate Professor Laura Lewis’ lab. “For example, the machine learning and data science techniques I’ve seen others use here could help us get even more information from our data on sleep and cognitive health,” she says.

Benjamin Lahner, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) shares a similar sentiment: “I’ve seen so many really interesting medical device design projects today, and talked with a lot of other researchers about what they’re doing and how it potentially intersects with the research we’re doing on the human brain.”

Six of the research projects from the poster session are highlighted here.

Moving from passive to powered prostheses for amputees

Lower-limb amputation affects the mobility and quality of life of about 600,000 people in the United States. Most above-knee amputees use passive prostheses, which have no power, resulting in slower walking, gait asymmetry, and challenges on stairs and slopes. Researchers in the The K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics led by Hugh Herr, a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT’s Media Lab and Ed Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor of Neurotechnology at MIT and an investigator at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute are seeking to address the needs of this population.

For graduate student John McCullough working in Herr’s lab is personal: “so much of my family has had knee replacements, joint replacement, or hip replacements. Seeing my dad suffer so much pain made me care about this field and for all the people who have experienced losses.”

McCullough presented a powered knee-ankle prosthesis designed to address the shortcomings of passive prostheses. “I really love robotics,” he says, “which is so multidisciplinary. To make our powered prosthesis, you need to combine expertise in electronics, design, embedded systems, software, and mechanical design. You also have to collaborate with clinicians and patients to understand their perspectives.”

Improving sleep and cognitive health

Sleep plays an essential role in maintaining brain health and cognition across the human lifespan, largely through mechanisms such as neural slow waves and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow. Severe sleep impairments are associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.
“If we can understand the mechanisms underlying poor sleep and develop biomarkers of impaired waste clearance, we may be able to predict neurodegeneration and also intervene early to improve people’s cognitive health,” says Sydney Bailes, who works with Lewis, the Athinoula A. Martinos Associate Professor in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and EECS.

Bailes and her investigative team used a novel inflow-sensitive fast-fMRI technique with EEG to test whether aging affects arousal dynamics and CSF flow during sleep.

Personalizing Chemotherapy Dosage

Many chemotherapies are dosed on a body surface area basis, using an equation from a century ago that leveraged data from just 9 people. This approach ignores many factors, such as body composition and genetics, resulting in worse therapeutic outcomes.

“When I started my PhD,” says Louis DeRidder, a PhD candidate in medical engineering and medical physics, “it blew my mind that this century-old formula is still how we’re dosing chemotherapies. I wanted to develop a better solution for patients.”

To improve outcomes, DeRidder, a Mathworks Fellow in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), and his team developed a medical device that can personalize the dose of chemotherapy to the patient. The device, called CLAUDIA (the Closed-Loop AUtomated Drug Infusion regulator) measures the concentration of drug and changes the infusion rate in real time to keep the concentration of drug within the therapeutic window.

Turning mucus into scalable therapies

Mucus is our body’s first line of defense, accommodating host cells and beneficial microbes, while protecting us against pathogens and toxins. The project team’s research identified mucins, large gel-forming polymers that comprise mucus, as key functional components capable of regulating microbial communities, combating infections, and stabilizing inflammation.

“I came to MIT as a microbiologist with a background in ecology and evolution,” says Kelsey Wheeler, a research scientist in the Ribbeck Lab. “I wanted to figure out foundational things about how the body manages microbial communities. But what brought me back to the lab is a question – how can we use these naturally-inspired mechanisms to develop new therapies against problematic pathogens?”

Wheeler and her research team reformatted mucins into new, scalable therapies and developed a platform to monitor changes in mucin properties across healthy and diseased states. They aim to better understand complex conditions like cancer and inflammatory disease and leverage the natural mechanisms employed by the body to preserve health.

Personalized medical devices for stroke prevention

While personalized medicine has advanced rapidly in the pharmaceutical space, medical devices still largely rely on 20th-century paradigms like mass-production and standardization.

A research team is developing a technology that will allow clinicians to generate personalized, shape-matching medical devices directly inside the patient’s own body, all in a same-day, minimally-invasive, point-of-care procedure. This project applies this personalized device technology toward left atrial appendage occlusion, a promising non-pharmacological stroke prevention technique for atrial fibrillation patients.
“We’re essentially seeking to extend the concept of 3D printing, bringing it directly inside the patient,” says Connor Verheyen, a HST postdoctoral researcher at the Wyss Institute. “With our flexible adaptive technique, patients should be able to just come in and have a procedure done in a day, because it’s performing to their anatomy.”

A brain-to-video generative machine learning model

The human brain processes 11 million bits of information per second, compressing most of it in ways still largely unknown. What if we could access this information through brain signals?

The project team developed a brain-to-video generative machine learning model to reconstruct observed short video clips from fMRI signals. A robust evaluation suite shows that their model achieves state-of-the-art video reconstruction performance.

“We know that the brain encodes really complex information,” says Benjamin Lahner, a doctoral student working with the method, developed in the lab of CSAIL Senior Research Scientist Aude Oliva. “But my main question is, can we extract that? People are watching videos and encoding the information to understand what the video is. Now can we extract that information from the brain and reconstruct what they actually saw?”

Listed below are the winners, postdoc, graduate, and undergraduate, in each category.

FUNDAMENTAL DISCOVERY

Postdoc

Eugene Lee (Biology/Bob Horwitz lab), “A brain-gonad-embryo adrenergic relay modulates intergenerational temporal learning”

Graduate

Diego Detrés (Biology/Sanchez-Rivera lab), “Functional mapping of genetic constraints in disordered proteins using high-throughput genome editing”
Sunhee Bae (Chemistry/Kiessling lab), “Functional mapping of genetic constraints in disordered proteins using high-throughput genome editing”

Undergraduate

Huda Abdelghani (Chemistry/Drennan and Shoulders labs): “Structural and Biophysical Characterization of Type I Collagens Cpro Domain”

IMPACTING HUMAN HEALTH

Postdoc

Kira Podolsky (Chemistry/Raines lab): “Humanizing Women’s Health Research with Living Patient Avatars”
Lauren Pruett (BE/Griffith lab): “Humanizing Women’s Health Research with Living Patient Avatars”

Graduate

Louis DeRidder (HST/Langer and Traverso labs): “A clinically translatable, closed-loop drug delivery system for the personalization of chemotherapy dosing”

Undergraduate

Lara Ozkan (Media lab, Canan): “Conformable Ultrasound Breast Patch: cUSBr-Patch”
Anika Wadhera (Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard; Wong lab) “Spatiotemporal immune heterogeneity during cutaneous wound repair”

BREAKTHROUGH SYNERGIES

Postdoc

Thomas Fryer (Medial lab, Kevin Esvelt) “Scaling experimental validation of de novo protein design: applications in snake antivenom discovery”

Graduate

Adam Gierlach (Energy Efficient Circuits and Systems Group + Lab for Translational Engineering, Chandrakasan) “An ingestible device for gastric electrophysiology”
Mirna Kheir Gouda (BE, Voigt) ”Coupling nylon monomer degradation to the synthesis of high value products”

Undergraduate

Alexandra Volkova (EECS & Biology/ Coley Lab); “High-Throughput Parallel Chemistry Cost Considerations and Bayesian Optimization in SPARROW”