Focus: Hidden - Massachusetts

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Pancreatic cancer, the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States, is often diagnosed at a late stage, when curative treatment is no longer possible. A team led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has now identified and validated an accurate 5-gene classifier for discriminating early pancreatic cancer from non-malignant tissue. Described online in the journal Oncotarget, the finding is a promising advance in the fight against this typically fatal disease.

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An outbreak of multidrug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in Papua New Guinea may well become a replay of the disastrously delayed response to the West African Ebola pandemic, says Jennifer Furin, Harvard Medical School lecturer on global health and social medicine, in a commentary she co-authored with Helen Cox, senior lecturer in the Division of Medical Microbiology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

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The Wellesley College Concert Series hosts global superstar Wu Man on campus in April to perform with the Shanghai Quartet, one of the foremost chamber music ensembles in the world. The concert features the ancient Chinese pipa instrument and blends East and West.

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The Babson Energy and Environment Club will host its 10th Annual Babson Energy and Environment Conference on Friday, April 1st at Babson College.

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The horrific bombings in Brussels on Monday morning killed dozens and injured hundreds at the city’s airport and a train station, leaving another European nation reeling after a terrorist attack and generating more questions about the ongoing fight against terrorism.

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Tufts University School of Medicine Match Day 2016 included our fourth cohort of Maine Track MD students. The Maine Track MD program is a partnership between Tufts University and Maine Medical Center.

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Babson College will host the first-ever Babson India Symposium on April 16, 2016. The new event will provide a stage for global business leaders, entrepreneurs, and academicians alike to share in their experiences about India’s emergent business world, burgeoning opportunities, and how to further unlock the country’s potential.

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Promising research from Tufts University's School of Engineering has earned one faculty member the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award and two faculty members Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. Department of Energy.

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Krista Jenkins, professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, has studied differences regarding issues of politics and feminism between women college students and their mothers.

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Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, will be the commencement speaker on June 5 at Williams. Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert will speak at baccalaureate on June 4.

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Two Olin College professors have launched a website focused on making DIY tools accessible to help people with disabilities perform daily tasks and, along the way, offer a more expansive view of the Maker movement. Since its launch the site has touched a chord among educators and the medical and adaptive technology community, resulting in more than 7,000 visitors—and many more thousands of page views—in just the first few weeks.

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Williams College's Center for Development Economics will host a global poverty conference featuring Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and other noted economists April 7-8.

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Harvard Medical School graduate student Thomas Graham explains the techniques he used to peer into how DNA double-strand breaks are repaired. Video: Stephanie Dutchen Dozens of times per day in each of the trillions of dividing cells in our bodies, the double strands that form our DNA may break and need to be fixed. Harvard Medical School scientists have now devised a way to watch how these essential repairs get made in real time and at previously unattainable resolution, allowing them to discover individual steps in the repair process and identify which proteins are involved in each.

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Our brains are marvels of connectivity, packed with cells that continually communicate with one another. This communication occurs across synapses, the transit points where chemicals called neurotransmitters leap from one neuron to another, allowing us to think, to learn and to remember. Researchers have known that these synapses often need a boost to send information across neuronal divides.

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Scientists from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center show that PGC1 alpha works through the NAD "aging molecule" to guard against stress; research offers new therapeutic target for acute kidney injury, a widespread problem for hospitalized patients

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Tumors induced by oncogenes can be both prevented and normalized using light to control electric signaling among cells. The findings in frogs extend the application of optogenetics from neurons and the brain to cancer and provide proof of principle for a novel class of therapies which use light to override the action of oncogenic mutations.

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Four Amherst College Supreme Court experts--including two former clerks to justices--will discuss the filling of Antonin Scalia’s seat

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Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers are leading a multicenter genetic study of prostate cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa to try to find new information about the genetic etiology of prostate cancer.

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Olin College of Engineering and North Hill, a senior living community in Needham, Mass., announce the third annual North Hill-Olin College Fund for Innovation in Aging event to be held Tuesday, April 12, 2016, at Olin College from 5:00 pm-8:00 pm. The event is free and open to the public.

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Babson College will launch a pilot Summer Venture Program (SVP) at its San Francisco campus this summer, following seven years of continued success at the main campus in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Applications are open now through April 1, and students from either location, as well as alumni in San Francisco, are eligible to apply.

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Olin College professor working on proof of concept system to deploy drones into a wildfire and send back information in real time, potentially saving lives and livelihoods in the process.

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Video: Rick Groleau As doctors and researchers explore the effectiveness of treating cancer patients with combinations of chemotherapy drugs, their attention has largely been focused on how much of each drug to give. A new study has found that achieving best results may also require looking into how much time should pass between delivering one drug and the next.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman will be the speaker for Olin College’s 11th commencement, which will be held on May 15, 2016.

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In a national clinical trial led by Joslin Diabetes Center’s Beetham Eye Institute, ultrawide field (UWF) scanning technology significantly improved the ability of experts at a remote central location to identify diabetic retinopathy in a patient, and to judge whether the eye disease warranted referring the patient to an ophthalmologist for further care.

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Nutrition scientists from the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston with support from AARP Foundation are introducing an updated MyPlate for Older Adults icon to help older adults develop and maintain healthy eating patterns.

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When a diamond miner named Sahr arrived at the Ebola treatment unit in Kenema, Sierra Leone, in December 2014, he saw red fences surrounding the area where people with suspected and confirmed cases of the disease were to be treated and he panicked. The colorful barricades reminded him of the horror he experienced in 1996 as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war, when rebel fighters attached red cloths to their guns during live battles.

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BOSTON – While the protective connection between moderate alcohol consumption and heart health has been well-studied, new research from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health suggests that the association is more complicated than is widely accepted. Researchers found that in the hour following even moderate consumption of alcohol, the risk of heart and stroke doubled.

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Researchers at Schepens Eye Research Institute of Massachusetts Eye and Ear have shown a link between mitochondrial dysfunction in corneal endothelial cells and the development of Fuchs’ Endothelial Corneal Dystrophy. This study, published today in the journal, Antioxidants & Redox Signaling, is the first study to demonstrate that lifelong accumulation of oxidative DNA damage leads to mitochondrial dysfunction and subsequent cell death in the tissue of the corneal endothelium. These changes are the result of free radical-induced molecular changes that are characteristic of FECD.

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In a finding with enormous implications for cancer diagnostics and therapeutics, Whitehead Institute scientists have discovered that breaches in looping chromosomal structures known as “insulated neighborhoods” can activate oncogenes capable of fueling aggressive tumor growth.

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Over the past decade, studies have found that obesity and eating a high-fat, high-calorie diet are significant risk factors for many types of cancer. Now, a new study from Whitehead Institute and MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research reveals how a high-fat diet makes the cells of the intestinal lining more likely to become cancerous.

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Whitehead Institute researchers have created a hydrogel scaffold that replicates the environment found within the human breast. The scaffold supports the growth of human mammary tissue from patient-derived cells and can be used to study normal breast development as well as breast cancer initiation and progression.

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Debi Kleiman has been named Executive Director of the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College. Debi comes to Babson following more than 20 years as an award-winning marketing executive and entrepreneurial leader known for inspiring top performing teams and delivering strong business results.

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If you’re a lung or colorectal cancer patient, what’s in your wallet could determine your level of suffering and quality of life during treatment, according to a new study by Dana Farber Cancer Institute researchers.

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An overwhelming majority of people with incurable cancer want to hear findings from DNA sequencing of their own tumors and normal cells, and to learn how those results may affect their health and treatment options, Dana Farber Cancer Institute scientists report.

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Research led by investigators in veterinary and human medicine has identified genetic pathways that exacerbate severity of canine compulsive disorder in Doberman pinschers, a discovery that could lead to better therapies for obsessive compulsive disorder in people. The discovery appears online in advance of print on February 29 in the International Journal of Applied Research in Veterinary Medicine.

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Through a partnership with John Hancock Financial Services, Massachusetts Eye and Ear is preparing a team of runners for the 2016 Boston Marathon.® “Team Eye and Ear” comprises 57 members fundraising in support of Mass. Eye and Ear’s research programs to fight disorders of the eyes, ears, nose, throat, head and neck.

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National health care leaders, John Santa, MD, MPH, Homer Chin, MD, MS, and Amy Fellows, MPH, have joined the OpenNotes team. The three bring decades of expertise in information technology and population health to the expanding OpenNotes movement.

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Rohit N. Kulkarni, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Investigator in the Section on Islet Cell and Regenerative Biology at Joslin Diabetes Center, has been named Professor of Medicine by Harvard Medical School.

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Laurie H. Glimcher, MD, an internationally recognized immunologist, has been named the next president and CEO of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Board of Trustees announced today.

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A path-breaking new study on how we seek similarity in relationships, co-authored by researchers at Wellesley College and the University of Kansas, upends the idea that “opposites attract,” instead suggesting we’re drawn to people who are like-minded. The results sound a warning for the idea that couples can change each other over time.

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BOSTON – Robert E. Gerszten, MD, an accomplished clinician and researcher focused on the relationship between cardiac and metabolic diseases, has been named Chief of Cardiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC).

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A free, open online course on rare forms of dementia aims to spread knowledge while harnessing social learning.

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The germinal centers that form in the body’s lymph nodes work as a fitness boot camp in which B cells evolve to produce antibodies of increasingly higher affinity to an invading pathogen. This new finding from Whitehead Institute scientists overturns a previously held notion that only a narrow range of B cells can survive this training and go on to secrete high-affinity antibodies. This revised understanding may aid development of effective vaccines against HIV, influenza, and other viruses that mutate rapidly.

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In addition to featuring hailed authors and editors, Amherst College LitFest 2016 will celebrate the National Book Award on Campus program—a partnership between the National Book Foundation, Amherst and The Common literary magazine—and a new collaboration between the College and MacDowell Colony.

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Co-senior author Hari Arthanari describes how he and his colleagues re-sensitized multidrug-resistant pathogenic yeast to antifungal treatment by finding a compound that prevents two proteins from interacting with each other. Video: Stephanie Dutchen An international team led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital has devised a new way to approach the problem of multidrug-resistant fungal infections that can be life-threatening to people with weakened immune systems.

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New research has identified key factors in the structure of Calcium silicate hydrate (CSH), the main product of the hydration of Portland cement, that could help researchers work out better formulations for producing more durable concrete.

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Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the EDI Institute are partnering to provide a new mobile imaging technique for cancer patients, family members, and staff to express their feelings around the illness. Expressive Digital Imagery (EDI) is used on a smartphone or tablet to provide a creative outlet for people to express complex feelings and emotions that words alone cannot.

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Lori Laffel, M.D., M.P.H., has been appointed to the newly formed Research Advisory Committee (RAC) of the JDRF, the leading global organization funding type 1 diabetes (T1D) research.

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How well a flu shot protects you from the virus can depend on your ethnic background and other inherited factors, report Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists.