New vaccine platform promotes rare protective B cells

A longstanding goal of immunotherapies and vaccine research is to induce antibodies in humans that neutralize deadly viruses such as HIV and influenza. Of particular interest are antibodies that are “broadly neutralizing,” meaning they can in principle eliminate multiple strains of a virus such as HIV, which mutates rapidly to evade the human immune system.

Researchers at MIT and the Scripps Research Institute have now developed a vaccine that generates a significant population of rare precursor B cells that are capable of evolving to produce broadly neutralizing antibodies. Expanding these cells is the first step toward a successful HIV vaccine.

The researchers’ vaccine design uses DNA instead of protein as a scaffold to fabricate a virus-like particle (VLP) displaying numerous copies of an engineered HIV immunogen called eOD-GT8, which was developed at Scripps. This vaccine generated substantially more precursor B cells in a humanized mouse model compared to a protein-based virus-like particle that has shown significant success in human clinical trials.

Preclinical studies showed that the DNA-VLP generated eight times more of the desired, or “on-target,” B cells than the clinical product, which was already shown to be highly potent.

“We were all surprised that this already outstanding VLP from Scripps was significantly outperformed by the DNA-based VLP,” says Mark Bathe, an MIT professor of biological engineering and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “These early preclinical results suggest a potential breakthrough as an entirely new, first-in-class VLP that could transform the way we think about active immunotherapies, and vaccine design, across a variety of indications.”

The researchers also showed that the DNA scaffold doesn’t induce an immune response when applied to the engineered HIV antigen. This means the DNA VLP might be used to deliver multiple antigens when boosting strategies are needed, such as for challenging diseases such as HIV.

“The DNA-VLP allowed us for the first time to assess whether B cells targeting the VLP itself limit the development of ‘on target’ B cell responses — a longstanding question in vaccine immunology,” says Darrell Irvine, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Bathe and Irvine are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Science. The paper’s lead author is Anna Romanov PhD ’25.

Priming B cells

The new study is part of a major ongoing global effort to develop active immunotherapies and vaccines that expand specific lineages of B cells. All humans have the necessary genes to produce the right B cells that can neutralize HIV, but they are exceptionally rare and require many mutations to become broadly neutralizing. If exposed to the right series of antigens, however, these cells can in principle evolve to eventually produce the requisite broadly neutralizing antibodies.

In the case of HIV, one such target antibody, called VRC01, was discovered by National Institutes of Health researchers in 2010 when they studied humans living with HIV who did not develop AIDS. This set off a major worldwide effort to develop an HIV vaccine that would induce this target antibody, but this remains an outstanding challenge.

Generating HIV-neutralizing antibodies is believed to require three stages of vaccination, each one initiated by a different antigen that helps guide B cell evolution toward the correct target, the native HIV envelope protein gp120.

In 2013, William Schief, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps, reported an engineered antigen called eOD-GT6 that could be used for the first step in this process, known as priming. His team subsequently upgraded the antigen to eOD-GT8. Vaccination with eOD-GT8 arrayed on a protein VLP generated early antibody precursors to VRC01 both in mice and more recently in humans, a key first step toward an HIV vaccine.

However, the protein VLP also generated substantial “off-target” antibodies that bound the irrelevant, and potentially highly distracting, protein VLP itself. This could have unknown consequences on propagating target B cells of interest for HIV, as well as other challenging immunotherapy applications.

The Bathe and Irvine labs set out to test if they could use a particle made from DNA, instead of protein, to deliver the priming antigen. These nanoscale particles are made using DNA origami, a method that offers precise control over the structure of synthetic DNA and allows researchers to attach viral antigens at specific locations.

In 2024, Bathe and Daniel Lingwood, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute, showed this DNA VLP could be used to deliver a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in mice to generate neutralizing antibodies. From that study, the researchers learned that the DNA scaffold does not induce antibodies to the VLP itself, unlike proteins. They wondered whether this might also enable a more focused antibody response.

Building on these results, Romanov, co-advised by Bathe and Irvine, set off to apply the DNA VLP to the Scripps HIV priming vaccine, based on eOD-GT8.

“Our earlier work with SARS-CoV-2 antigens on DNA-VLPs showed that DNA-VLPs can be used to focus the immune response on an antigen of interest. This property seemed especially useful for a case like HIV, where the B cells of interest are exceptionally rare. Thus, we hypothesized that reducing the competition among other irrelevant B cells (by delivering the vaccine on a silent DNA nanoparticle) may help these rare cells have a better chance to survive,”  Romanov says.

Initial studies in mice, however, showed the vaccine did not induce sufficient early B cell response to the first, priming dose.

After redesigning the DNA VLPs, Romanov and colleagues found that a smaller diameter version with 60 instead of 30 copies of the engineered antigen dramatically out-performed the clinical protein VLP construct, both in overall number of antigen-specific B cells and the fraction of B cells that were on-target to the specific HIV domain of interest. This was a result of improved retention of the particles in B cell follicles in lymph nodes and better collaboration with helper T cells, which promote B cell survival.

Overall, these improvements enabled the particles to generate eightfold more on-target B cells than the vaccine consisting of eOD-GT8 carried by a protein scaffold. Another key finding, elucidated by the Lingwood lab, was that the DNA particles promoted VRC01 precursor B cells toward the VRC01 antibody more efficiently than the protein VLP.

“In the field of vaccine immunology, the question of whether B cell responses to a targeted protective epitope on a vaccine antigen might be hindered by responses to neighboring off-target epitopes on the same antigen has been under intense investigation,” says Schief, who is also vice president for protein design at Moderna. “There are some data from other studies suggesting that off-target responses might not have much impact, but this study shows quite convincingly that reducing off-target responses by using a DNA VLP can improve desired on-target responses.”

“While nanoparticle formulations have been great at boosting antibody responses to various antigens, there is always this nagging question of whether competition from B cells specific for the particle’s own structural antigens won’t get in the way of antibody responses to targeted epitopes,” says Gabriel Victora, a professor of immunology, virology, and microbiology at Rockefeller University, who was not involved in the study. “DNA-based particles that leverage B cells’ natural tolerance to nucleic acids are a clever idea to circumvent this problem, and the research team’s elegant experiments clearly show that this strategy can be used to make difficult epitopes easier to target.”

A “silent” scaffold

The fact that the DNA-VLP scaffold doesn’t induce scaffold-specific antibodies means that it could be used to carry second and potentially third antigens needed in the vaccine series, as the researchers are currently investigating. It also might offer significantly improved on-target antibodies for numerous antigens that are outcompeted and dominated by off-target, irrelevant protein VLP scaffolds in this or other applications.

“A breakthrough of this paper is the rigorous, mechanistic quantification of how DNA-VLPs can ‘focus’ antibody responses on target antigens of interest, which is a consequence of the silent nature of this DNA-based scaffold we’ve previously shown is stealth to the immune system,” Bathe says.

More broadly, this new type of VLP could be used to generate other kinds of protective antibody responses against pandemic threats such as flu, or potentially against chemical warfare agents, the researchers suggest. Alternatively, it might be used as an active immunotherapy to generate antibodies that target amyloid beta or tau protein to treat degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, or to generate antibodies that target noxious chemicals such as opioids or nicotine to help people suffering from addiction.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health; the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard; the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; the National Science Foundation; the Novo Nordisk Foundation; a Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute; the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences; the Gates Foundation Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery; the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center; the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and the U.S. Army Research Office through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/jeIP1AF

“Essential” torch heralds the start of the 2026 Winter Olympics

Before the thrill of victory; before the agony of defeat; before the gold medalist’s national anthem plays, there is the Olympic torch. A symbol of unity, friendship, and the spirit of competition, the torch links today’s Olympic Games to its heritage in ancient Greece.

The torch for the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympic Games and Paralympic Games was designed by Carlo Ratti, a professor of the practice for the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the director of the Senseable City Lab in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

A native of Turin, Italy, and a respected designer and architect worldwide, Ratti’s work and that of his firm, Carlo Ratti Associati, has been featured at various international expositions such as the French Pavilion at the Osaka Expo (World’s Fair) in 2025 and the Italian Pavilion at the Dubai Expo in 2020. Their design for The Cloud, a 400-foot tall spherical structure that would serve as a unique observation deck, was a finalist for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, but ultimately not built.

Ratti relishes the opportunity to participate in these events.

“You can push the boundaries more at these [venues] because you are building something that is temporary,” says Ratti. “They allow for more creativity, so it’s a good moment to experiment.”

Based on his previous work, Ratti was invited to design the torch by the Olympic organizers. He approached the project much as he instructs his students working in his lab.

“It is about what the object or the design is to convey,” Ratti says. “How it can touch people, how it can relate to people, how it can transmit emotions. That’s the most important thing.”

To Ratti, the fundamental aspect of the torch is the flame. A few months before the games begin, the torch is lit in Olympia, Greece, using a parabolic mirror reflecting the sun’s rays. In ancient Greece, the flame was considered “sacred,” and was to remain lit throughout the competition. Ratti, familiar with the history of the Olympic torch, is less impressed with designs that he deems overwrought. Many torches added superfluous ornamentation to its exterior much like cars are designed around their engines, he says. Instead, he decided to strip away everything that wasn’t essential to the flame itself.

What is “essential”

“Essential” — the official name for the 2026 Winter Olympic torch — was designed to perform regardless of the weather, wind, or altitude it would encounter on its journey from Olympia to Milan. The process took three years with many designs created, considered, and discussed with the local and global Olympic committees and Olympic sponsor Versalis. And, as with Ratti’s work at MIT, researchers and engineers collaborated in the effort.

“Each design pushed the boundaries in different directions, but all of them with the key principle to put the flame at the center,” says Ratti who wanted the torch to embody “an ethos of frugality.”

At the core of Ratti’s torch is a high-performance burner powered by bio-GPL produced by energy company ENI from 100 percent renewable feedstocks. Furthermore, the torch can be recharged 10 times. In previous years, torches were used only once. This allowed for a 10-fold reduction in the number of torches created.

Also unique to this torch is its internal mechanism, which is visible via a vertical opening along its side, allowing audiences to see the burner in action. This reinforces the desire to keep the emphasis on the flame instead of the object.

In keeping with the requisite for minimalism and sustainability, the torch is primarily composed of recycled aluminum. It is the lightest torch created for the Olympics, weighing just under 2.5 pounds. The body is finished with a PVD coating that is heat resistant, letting it shift colors by reflecting the environments — such as the mountains and the city lights — through which it is carried. The Olympic torch is a blue-green shade, while the Paralympic torch is gold.

The torch won an honorable mention in Italy’s most prestigious industrial design award, the Compasso d’Oro.

The Olympic Relay

The torch relay is considered an event itself, drawing thousands as it is carried to the host city by hundreds of volunteers. Its journey for the 2026 Olympics started in late November and, after visiting cities across Greece, will have covered all 110 Italian provinces before arriving in Milan for the opening ceremony on Feb. 6.

Ratti carried the torch for a portion of its journey through Turin in mid-January — another joyful invitation to this quadrennial event. He says winter sports are his favorite; he grew up skiing where these games are being held, and has since skied around the world — from Utah to the Himalayas.

In addition to a highly sustainable torch, there was another statement Ratti wanted to make: He wanted to showcase the Italy of today and of the future. It is the same issue he confronted as the curator of the 2025 Biennale Architettura in Venice titled “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective: an architecture exhibition, but infused with technology for the future.”

“When people think about Italy, they often think about the past, from ancient Romans to the Renaissance or Baroque period,” he says. “Italy does indeed have a significant past. But the reality is that it is also the second-largest industrial powerhouse in Europe and is leading in innovation and tech in many fields. So, the 2026 torch aims to combine both past and future. It draws on Italian design from the past, but also on future-forward technologies.”

“There should be some kind of architectural design always translating into form some kind of ethical principles or ideals. It’s not just about a physical thing. Ultimately, it’s about the human dimension. That applies to the work we do at MIT or the Olympic torch.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/LVa4tGz

3D-printed metamaterials that stretch and fail by design

Metamaterials — materials whose properties are primarily dictated by their internal microstructure, and not their chemical makeup — have been redefining the engineering materials space for the last decade. To date, however, most metamaterials have been lightweight options designed for stiffness and strength.

New research from the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering introduces a computational design framework to support the creation of a new class of soft, compliant, and deformable metamaterials. These metamaterials, termed 3D woven metamaterials, consist of building blocks that are composed of intertwined fibers that self-contact and entangle to endow the material with unique properties.

“Soft materials are required for emerging engineering challenges in areas such as soft robotics, biomedical devices, or even for wearable devices and functional textiles,” explains Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor and associate professor of mechanical engineering.

In an open-access paper published Jan. 26 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from Portela’s lab provide a universal design framework that generates complex 3D woven metamaterials with a wide range of properties. The work also provides open-source code that allows users to create designs to fit specifications and generate a file for printing or simulating the material using a 3D printer.

“Normal knitting or weaving have been constrained by the hardware for hundreds of years — there’s only a few patterns that you can make clothes out of, for example — but that changes if hardware is no longer a limitation,” Portela says. “With this framework, you can come up with interesting patterns that completely change the way the textile is going to behave.”

Possible applications include wearable sensors that move with human skin, fabrics for aerospace or defense needs, flexible electronic devices, and a variety of other printable textiles.

The team developed general design rules — in the form of an algorithm — that first provide a graph representation of the metamaterial. The attributes of this graph eventually dictate how each fiber is placed and connected within the metamaterial. The fundamental building blocks are woven unit cells that can be functionally graded via control of various design parameters, such as the radius and pitch of the fibers that make up the woven struts.

“Because this framework allows these metamaterials to be tailored to be softer in one place and stiffer in another, or to change shape as they stretch, they can exhibit an exceptional range of behaviors that would be hard to design using conventional soft materials,” says Molly Carton, lead author of the study. Carton, a former postdoc in Portela’s lab, is now an assistant research professor in mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland.

Further, the simulation framework also allows users to predict the deformation response of these materials, capturing complex phenomena such as self-contact within fibers and entanglement, and design to predict and resist deformation or tearing patterns.

“The most exciting part was being able to tailor failure in these materials and design arbitrary combinations,” says Portela. “Based on the simulations, we were able to fabricate these spatially varying geometries and experiment on them at the microscale.”

This work is the first to provide a tool for users to design, print, and simulate an emerging class of metamaterials that are extensible and tough. It also demonstrates that through tuning of geometric parameters, users can control and predict how these materials will deform and fail, and presents several new design building blocks that substantially expand the property space of woven metamaterials.

“Until now, these complex 3D lattices have been designed manually, painstakingly, which limits the number of designs that anyone has tested,” says Carton. “We’ve been able to describe how these woven lattices work and use that to create a design tool for arbitrary woven lattices. With that design freedom, we’re able to design the way that a lattice changes shape as it stretches, how the fibers entangle and knot with each other, as well as how it tears when stretched to the limit.”

Carton says she believes the framework will be useful across many disciplines. “In releasing this framework as a software tool, our hope is that other researchers will explore what’s possible using woven lattices and find new ways to use this design flexibility,” she says. “I’m looking forward to seeing what doors our work can open.”

The paper, “Design framework for programmable three-dimensional woven metamaterials,” is available now in the journal Nature Communications. Its other MIT-affiliated authors are James Utama Surjadi, Bastien F. G. Aymon, and Ling Xu.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/zyZtPxa

Terahertz microscope reveals the motion of superconducting electrons

You can tell a lot about a material based on the type of light you shine at it: Optical light illuminates a material’s surface, while X-rays reveal its internal structures and infrared captures a material’s radiating heat.

Now, MIT physicists have used terahertz light to reveal inherent, quantum vibrations in a superconducting material, which have not been observable until now.

Terahertz light is a form of energy that lies between microwaves and infrared radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum. It oscillates over a trillion times per second — just the right pace to match how atoms and electrons naturally vibrate inside materials. Ideally, this makes terahertz light the perfect tool to probe these motions.

But while the frequency is right, the wavelength — the distance over which the wave repeats in space — is not. Terahertz waves have wavelengths hundreds of microns long. Because the smallest spot that any kind of light can be focused into is limited by its wavelength, terahertz beams cannot be tightly confined. As a result, a focused terahertz beam is physically too large to interact effectively with microscopic samples, simply washing over these tiny structures without revealing fine detail.

In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, the scientists report that they have developed a new terahertz microscope that compresses terahertz light down to microscopic dimensions. This pinpoint of terahertz light can resolve quantum details in materials that were previously inaccessible.

The team used the new microscope to send terahertz light into a sample of bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide, or BSCCO (pronounced “BIS-co”) — a material that superconducts at relatively high temperatures. With the terahertz scope, the team observed a frictionless “superfluid” of superconducting electrons that were collectively jiggling back and forth at terahertz frequencies within the BSCCO material.

“This new microscope now allows us to see a new mode of superconducting electrons that nobody has ever seen before,” says Nuh Gedik, the Donner Professor of Physics at MIT.

By using terahertz light to probe BSCCO and other superconductors, scientists can gain a better understanding of properties that could lead to long-coveted room-temperature superconductors. The new microscope can also help to identify materials that emit and receive terahertz radiation. Such materials could be the foundation of future wireless, terahertz-based communications, that could potentially transmit more data at faster rates compared to today’s microwave-based communications.

“There’s a huge push to take Wi-Fi or telecommunications to the next level, to terahertz frequencies,” says Alexander von Hoegen, a postdoc in MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory and lead author of the study. “If you have a terahertz microscope, you could study how terahertz light interacts with microscopically small devices that could serve as future antennas or receivers.”

In addition to Gedik and von Hoegen, the study’s MIT co-authors include Tommy Tai, Clifford Allington, Matthew Yeung, Jacob Pettine, Alexander Kossak, Byunghun Lee, and Geoffrey Beach, along with collaborators at Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and the Brookhaven National Lab.

Hitting a limit

Terahertz light is a promising yet largely untapped imaging tool. It occupies a unique spectral “sweet spot”: Like microwaves, radio waves, and visible light, terahertz radiation is nonionizing and therefore does not carry enough energy to cause harmful radiation effects, making it safe for use in humans and biological tissues. At the same time, much like X-rays, terahertz waves can penetrate a wide range of materials, including fabric, wood, cardboard, plastic, ceramics, and even thin brick walls.

Owing to these distinctive properties, terahertz light is being actively explored for applications in security screening, medical imaging, and wireless communications. In contrast, far less effort has been devoted to applying terahertz radiation to microscopy and the illumination of microscopic phenomena. The primary reason is a fundamental limitation shared by all forms of light: the diffraction limit, which restricts spatial resolution to roughly the wavelength of the radiation used.

With wavelengths on the order of hundreds of microns, terahertz radiation is far larger than atoms, molecules, and many other microscopic structures. As a result, its ability to directly resolve microscale features is fundamentally constrained.

“Our main motivation is this problem that, you might have a 10-micron sample, but your terahertz light has a 100-micron wavelength, so what you would mostly be measuring is air, or the vacuum around your sample,” von Hoegen explains. “You would be missing all these quantum phases that have characteristic fingerprints in the terahertz regime.”

Zooming in

The team found a way around the terahertz diffraction limit by using spintronic emitters — a recent technology that produces sharp pulses of terahertz light. Spintronic emitters are made from multiple ultrathin metallic layers. When a laser illuminates the multilayered structure, the light triggers a cascade of effects in the electrons within each layer, such that the structure ultimately emits a pulse of energy at terahertz frequencies.

By holding a sample close to the emitter, the team trapped the terahertz light before it had a chance to spread, essentially squeezing it into a space much smaller than its wavelength. In this regime, the light can bypass the diffraction limit to resolve features that were previously too small to see.

The MIT team adapted this technology to observe microscopic, quantum-scale phenomena. For their new study, the team developed a terahertz microscope using spintronic emitters interfaced with a Bragg mirror. This multilayered structure of reflective films successively filters out certain, undesired wavelengths of light while letting through others, protecting the sample from the “harmful” laser which triggers the terahertz emission.

As a demonstration, the team used the new microscope to image a small, atomically thin sample of BSCCO. They placed the sample very close to the terahertz source and imaged it at temperatures close to absolute zero — cold enough for the material to become a superconductor. To create the image, they scanned the laser beam, sending terahertz light through the sample and looking for the specific signatures left by the superconducting electrons.

“We see the terahertz field gets dramatically distorted, with little oscillations following the main pulse,” von Hoegen says. “That tells us that something in the sample is emitting terahertz light, after it got kicked by our initial terahertz pulse.”

With further analysis, the team concluded that the terahertz microscope was observing the natural, collective terahertz oscillations of superconducting electrons within the material.

“It’s this superconducting gel that we’re sort of seeing jiggle,” von Hoegen says.

This jiggling superfluid was expected, but never directly visualized until now. The team is now applying the microscope to other two-dimensional materials, where they hope to capture more terahertz phenomena.

“There are a lot of the fundamental excitations, like lattice vibrations and magnetic processes, and all these collective modes that happen at terahertz frequencies,” von Hoegen says. “We can now resonantly zoom in on these interesting physics with our terahertz microscope.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy and by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/qg9eASB

MIT winter club sports energized by the Olympics

With the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics officially kicking off today, several of MIT’s winter sports clubs are hosting watch parties to cheer on their favorite players, events, and teams.

Members of MIT’s Curling Club are hosting a gathering to support their favorite teams. Co-presidents Polly Harrington and Gabi Wojcik are rooting for the United States.

“I’m looking forward to watching the Olympics and cheering for Team USA. I grew up in Seattle, and during the Vancouver Olympics, we took a family trip to the games. The most affordable tickets were to the curling events, and that was my first exposure to the sport. Seeing it live was really cool. I was hooked,” says Harrington.

Wojcik says, “It’s a very analytical and strategic sport, so it’s perfect for MIT students. Physicists still don't entirely agree on why the rocks behave the way they do. Everyone in the club is welcoming and open to teaching new people to play. I’d never played before and learned from scratch. The other advantage of playing is that it is a lifelong sport.”

The two say the biggest misconception about curling, other than that it is easy, is that it is played on ice skates. It’s neither easy nor played on skates. The stone, or rock, as it is often called, weighs 43 pounds, and is always made from the same weathered granite from Scotland so that the playing field, or in this case, ice, is even.

Both agree that playing is a great way to meet other students from MIT that they might not otherwise have the chance to.

Having seen the American team at a recent tournament, Wojcik is hoping the team does well, but admits that if Scotland wins, she’ll also be happy. Harrington met members of the U.S. men's curling team, Luc Violette and Ben Richardson, when curling in Seattle in high school, and will be cheering for them.

The Curling Club team practices and competes in tournaments in the New England area from late September until mid-March and always welcomes new members, no previous experience is necessary to join.

Figure Skating Club

The MIT Figure Skating Club is also excited for the 2026 Olympics and has been watching preliminary events (nationals) leading up to the games with great anticipation. Eleanor Li, the current club president, and Amanda (Mandy) Paredes Rioboo, former president, say holding small gatherings to watch the Olympics is a great way for the team to bond further.

Li began taking skating lessons at age 14 and fell in love with the sport right away, and has been skating ever since. Paredes Rioboo started lessons at age 5 and practices in the mornings with other club members, saying, “there is no better way to start the day.”

The Figure Skating Club currently has 120 members and offers a great way to meet friends who share the same passion. Any MIT student, regardless of skill level, is welcome to join the club.

Li says, “We have members ranging from former national and international competitors to people who are completely new to the ice.” Adding that her favorite part of skating is, “the freeing feeling of wind coming at you when you’re gliding across the ice! And all the life lessons learned — time management, falling again and again, and getting up again and again, the artistry and expressiveness of this beautiful sport, and most of all the community.”

Paredes Rioboo agrees. “The sport taught me discipline, to work at something and struggle with it until I got good at it. It taught me to be patient with myself and to be unafraid of failure.”

“The Olympics always bring a lot of buzz and curiosity around skating, and we’re excited to hopefully see more people come to our Saturday free group lessons, try skating for the first time, and maybe even join the club,” says Li.

Li and Paredes Rioboo are ready to watch the games with other club members. Li says, “I’m especially excited for women’s singles skating. All of the athletes have trained so hard to get there, and I’m really looking forward to watching all the beautiful skating. Especially Kaori Sakamoto.”

“I’m excited to watch Alysa Liu and Ami Nakai,” adds Paredes Rioboo.

Students interested in joining the Figure Skating Club can find more information here.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/xj5woh8

SMART launches new Wearable Imaging for Transforming Elderly Care research group

What if ultrasound imaging is no longer confined to hospitals? Patients with chronic conditions, such as hypertension and heart failure, could be monitored continuously in real-time at home or on the move, giving health care practitioners ongoing clinical insights instead of the occasional snapshots — a scan here and a check-up there. This shift from reactive, hospital-based care to preventative, community and home-based care could enable earlier detection and timely intervention, and truly personalized care.

Bringing this vision to reality, the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, has launched a new collaborative research project: Wearable Imaging for Transforming Elderly Care (WITEC). 

WITEC marks a pioneering effort in wearable technology, medical imaging, research, and materials science. It will be dedicated to foundational research and development of the world’s first wearable ultrasound imaging system capable of 48-hour intermittent cardiovascular imaging for continuous and real-time monitoring and diagnosis of chronic conditions such as hypertension and heart failure. 

This multi-million dollar, multi-year research program, supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program, brings together top researchers and expertise from MIT, Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore), and the National University of Singapore (NUS). Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) is WITEC’s clinical collaborator and will conduct patient trials to validate long-term heart imaging for chronic cardiovascular disease management.

“Addressing society’s most pressing challenges requires innovative, interdisciplinary thinking. Building on SMART’s long legacy in Singapore as a hub for research and innovation, WITEC will harness interdisciplinary expertise — from MIT and leading institutions in Singapore — to advance transformative research that creates real-world impact and benefits Singapore, the U.S., and societies all over. This is the kind of collaborative research that not only pushes the boundaries of knowledge, but also redefines what is possible for the future of health care,” says Bruce Tidor, chief executive officer and interim director of SMART, who is also an MIT professor of biological engineering and electrical engineering and computer science.

Industry-leading precision equipment and capabilities

To support this work, WITEC’s laboratory is equipped with advanced tools, including Southeast Asia’s first sub-micrometer 3D printer and the latest Verasonics Vantage NXT 256 ultrasonic imaging system, which is the first unit of its kind in Singapore.

Unlike conventional 3D printers that operate at millimeter or micrometer scales, WITEC’s 3D printer can achieve sub‑micrometer resolution, allowing components to be fabricated at the level of single cells or tissue structures. With this capability, WITEC researchers can prototype bioadhesive materials and device interfaces with unprecedented accuracy — essential to ensuring skin‑safe adhesion and stable, long‑term imaging quality.

Complementing this is the latest Verasonics ultrasonic imaging system. Equipped with a new transducer adapter and supporting a significantly larger number of probe control channels than existing systems, it gives researchers the freedom to test highly customized imaging methods. This allows more complex beamforming, higher‑resolution image capture, and integration with AI‑based diagnostic models — opening the door to long‑duration, real‑time cardiovascular imaging not possible with standard hospital equipment.

Together, these technologies allow WITEC to accelerate the design, prototyping, and testing of its wearable ultrasound imaging system, and to demonstrate imaging quality on phantoms and healthy subjects.

Transforming chronic disease care through wearable innovation 

Chronic diseases are rising rapidly in Singapore and globally, especially among the aging population and individuals with multiple long-term conditions. This trend highlights the urgent need for effective home-based care and easy-to-use monitoring tools that go beyond basic wellness tracking.

Current consumer wearables, such as smartwatches and fitness bands, offer limited physiological data like heart rate or step count. While useful for general health, they lack the depth needed to support chronic disease management. Traditional ultrasound systems, although clinically powerful, are bulky, operator-dependent, can only be deployed episodically within the hospitals, and are limited to snapshots in time, making them unsuitable for long-term, everyday use.

WITEC aims to bridge this gap with its wearable ultrasound imaging system that uses bioadhesive technology to enable up to 48 hours of uninterrupted imaging. Combined with AI-enhanced diagnostics, the innovation is aimed at supporting early detection, home-based pre-diagnosis, and continuous monitoring of chronic diseases.

Beyond improving patient outcomes, this innovation could help ease labor shortages by freeing up ultrasound operators, nurses, and doctors to focus on more complex care, while reducing demand for hospital beds and resources. By shifting monitoring to homes and communities, WITEC’s technology will enable patient self-management and timely intervention, potentially lowering health-care costs and alleviating the increasing financial and manpower pressures of an aging population.

Driving innovation through interdisciplinary collaboration

WITEC is led by the following co-lead principal investigators: Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering and professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT; Joseph Sung, senior vice president of health and life sciences at NTU Singapore and dean of the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine); Cher Heng Tan, assistant dean of clinical research at LKCMedicine; Chwee Teck Lim, NUS Society Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NUS and director of the Institute for Health Innovation and Technology at NUS; and Xiaodong Chen, distinguished university professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering within NTU. 

“We’re extremely proud to bring together an exceptional team of researchers from Singapore and the U.S. to pioneer core technologies that will make wearable ultrasound imaging a reality. This endeavor combines deep expertise in materials science, data science, AI diagnostics, biomedical engineering, and clinical medicine. Our phased approach will accelerate translation into a fully wearable platform that reshapes how chronic diseases are monitored, diagnosed and managed,” says Zhao, who serves as a co-lead PI of WITEC.

Research roadmap with broad impact across health care, science, industry, and economy

Bringing together leading experts across interdisciplinary fields, WITEC will advance foundational work in soft materials, transducers, microelectronics, data science and AI diagnostics, clinical medicine, and biomedical engineering. As a deep-tech R&D group, its breakthroughs will have the potential to drive innovation in health-care technology and manufacturing, diagnostics, wearable ultrasonic imaging, metamaterials, diagnostics, and AI-powered health analytics. WITEC’s work is also expected to accelerate growth in high-value jobs across research, engineering, clinical validation, and health-care services, and attract strategic investments that foster biomedical innovation and industry partnerships in Singapore, the United States, and beyond.

“Chronic diseases present significant challenges for patients, families, and health-care systems, and with aging populations such as Singapore, those challenges will only grow without new solutions. Our research into a wearable ultrasound imaging system aims to transform daily care for those living with cardiovascular and other chronic conditions — providing clinicians with richer, continuous insights to guide treatment, while giving patients greater confidence and control over their own health. WITEC’s pioneering work marks an important step toward shifting care from episodic, hospital-based interventions to more proactive, everyday management in the community,” says Sung, who serves as co‑lead PI of WITEC.

Led by Violet Hoon, senior consultant at TTSH, clinical trials are expected to commence this year to validate long-term heart monitoring in the management of chronic cardiovascular disease. Over the next three years, WITEC aims to develop a fully integrated platform capable of 48-hour intermittent imaging through innovations in bioadhesive couplants, nanostructured metamaterials, and ultrasonic transducers.

As MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, SMART is committed to advancing breakthrough technologies that address pressing global challenges. WITEC adds to SMART’s existing research endeavors that foster a rich exchange of ideas through collaboration with leading researchers and academics from the United States, Singapore, and around the world in key areas such as antimicrobial resistance, cell therapy development, precision agriculture, AI, and 3D-sensing technologies.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/9TAmhZI

New tissue models could help researchers develop drugs for liver disease

More than 100 million people in the United States suffer from metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), characterized by a buildup of fat in the liver. This condition can lead to the development of more severe liver disease that causes inflammation and fibrosis.

In hopes of discovering new treatments for these liver diseases, MIT engineers have designed a new type of tissue model that more accurately mimics the architecture of the liver, including blood vessels and immune cells.

Reporting their findings today in Nature Communications, the researchers showed that this model could accurately replicate the inflammation and metabolic dysfunction that occur in the early stages of liver disease. Such a device could help researchers identify and test new drugs to treat those conditions.

This is the latest study in a larger effort by this team to use these types of tissue models, also known as microphysiological systems, to explore human liver biology, which cannot be easily replicated in mice or other animals.

In another recent paper, the researchers used an earlier version of their liver tissue model to explore how the liver responds to resmetirom. This drug is used to treat an advanced form of liver disease called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), but it is only effective in about 30 percent of patients. The team found that the drug can induce an inflammatory response in liver tissue, which may help to explain why it doesn’t help all patients.

“There are already tissue models that can make good preclinical predictions of liver toxicity for certain drugs, but we really need to better model disease states, because now we want to identify drug targets, we want to validate targets. We want to look at whether a particular drug may be more useful early or later in the disease,” says Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation at MIT, a professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering, and the senior author of both studies.

Former MIT postdoc Dominick Hellen is the lead author of the resmetirom paper, which appeared Jan. 14 in Communications Biology. Erin Tevonian PhD ’25 and PhD candidate Ellen Kan, both in the Department of Biological Engineering, are the lead authors of today’s Nature Communications paper on the new microphysiological system.

Modeling drug response

In the Communications Biology paper, Griffith’s lab worked with a microfluidic device that she originally developed in the 1990s, known as the LiverChip. This chip offers a simple scaffold for growing 3D models of liver tissue from hepatocytes, the primary cell type in the liver.

This chip is widely used by pharmaceutical companies to test whether their new drugs have adverse effects on the liver, which is an important step in drug development because most drugs are metabolized by the liver.

For the new study, Griffith and her students modified the chip so that it could be used to study MASLD.

Patients with MASLD, a buildup of fat in the liver, can eventually develop MASH, a more severe disease that occurs when scar tissue called fibrosis forms in the liver. Currently, resmetirom and the GLP-1 drug semaglutide are the only medications that are FDA-approved to treat MASH. Finding new drugs is a priority, Griffith says.

“You’re never declaring victory with liver disease with one drug or one class of drugs, because over the long term there may be patients who can’t use them, or they may not be effective for all patients,” she says.

To create a model of MASLD, the researchers exposed the tissue to high levels of insulin, along with large quantities of glucose and fatty acids. This led to a buildup of fatty tissue and the development of insulin resistance, a trait that is often seen in MASLD patients and can lead to type 2 diabetes.

Once that model was established, the researchers treated the tissue with resmetirom, a drug that works by mimicking the effects of thyroid hormone, which stimulates the breakdown of fat.

To their surprise, the researchers found that this treatment could also lead to an increase in immune signaling and markers of inflammation.

“Because resmetirom is primarily intended to reduce hepatic fibrosis in MASH, we found the result quite paradoxical,” Hellen says. “We suspect this finding may help clinicians and scientists alike understand why only a subset of patients respond positively to the thyromimetic drug. However, additional experiments are needed to further elucidate the underlying mechanism.”

A more realistic liver model

In the Nature Communications paper, the researchers reported a new type of chip that allows them to more accurately reproduce the architecture of the human liver. The key advance was developing a way to induce blood vessels to grow into the tissue. These vessels can deliver nutrients and also allow immune cells to flow through the tissue.

“Making more sophisticated models of liver that incorporate features of vascularity and immune cell trafficking that can be maintained over a long time in culture is very valuable,” Griffith says. “The real advance here was showing that we could get an intimate microvascular network through liver tissue and that we could circulate immune cells. This helped us to establish differences between how immune cells interact with the liver cells in a type two diabetes state and a healthy state.”

As the liver tissue matured, the researchers induced insulin resistance by exposing the tissue to increased levels of insulin, glucose, and fatty acids.

As this disease state developed, the researchers observed changes in how hepatocytes clear insulin and metabolize glucose, as well as narrower, leakier blood vessels that reflect microvascular complications often seen in diabetic patients. They also found that insulin resistance leads to an increase in markers of inflammation that attract monocytes into the tissue. Monocytes are the precursors of macrophages, immune cells that help with tissue repair during inflammation and are also observed in the liver of patients with early-stage liver disease.

“This really shows that we can model the immune features of a disease like MASLD, in a way that is all based on human cells,” Griffith says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship program, NovoNordisk, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, and the Siebel Scholars Foundation.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/Af2xyPl