Clinical trials using patients’ own immune cells to target tumors have yielded promising results. However, this approach usually works only if the patients also receive large doses of drugs designed to help immune cells multiply rapidly, and those drugs have life-threatening side effects.

Now a team of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers has devised a way to deliver the necessary drugs by smuggling them on the backs of the cells sent in to fight the tumor. That way, the drugs reach only their intended targets, greatly reducing the risk to the patient.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Spectroscopy Laboratory are working on a noninvasive way to measure blood glucose levels using light, to minimize the pain and inconvenience of pricking the patients fingers for several times a day to draw blood for testing.

First envisioned by Michael Feld, the late MIT professor of physics and former director of the Spectroscopy Laboratory, the technique uses Raman spectroscopy, a method that identifies chemical compounds based on the frequency of vibrations of the bonds holding the molecule together.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered that a kind of sugar molecule common to chimpanzees, gorillas and other mammals but not found in humans provokes a strong immune response in some people, likely worsening conditions in which chronic inflammation is a major issue.

This non-human sialic acid sugar is an ingredient in some biotechnology drugs, and may be limiting or undermining their therapeutic effectiveness in some patients, the scientists reported. However, they also propose a simple modification to the drug-making process that could solve the problem.

Results from a new study suggest that oral contraceptives and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may yield additional benefit of protecting against the formation and rupture of brain aneurysms in women.

According to the lead author of the study, Dr. Michael Chen, neurointerventionalist at Rush University Medical Center, the retrospective, case-control study was initiated due to the observation that in the two largest brain aneurysm trials to date, cerebral aneurysms occurred most frequently in post-menopausal women.

A new process that simultaneously combines the light and heat of solar radiation to generate electricity could offer more than double the efficiency of existing solar cell technology, say the Stanford University engineers who discovered it and proved that it works.

The process, called 'photon enhanced thermionic emission,' or PETE, could reduce the costs of solar energy production enough for it to compete with oil as an energy source.