Thursday, November 8th, 2012

Time	Event
8:00p	Fighting bacteria with mucus Slimy layers of bacterial growth, known as biofilms, pose a significant hazard in industrial and medical settings. Once established, biofilms are very difficult to remove, and a great deal of research has gone into figuring out how to prevent and eradicate them. Results from a recent MIT study suggest a possible new source of protection against biofilm formation: polymers found in mucus. The MIT biological engineers found that these polymers, known as mucins, can trap bacteria and prevent them from clumping together on a surface, rendering them harmless. “Mucus is a material that has developed over millions of years of evolution to manage our interactions with the microbial world. I’m sure we can find inspiration from it for new strategies to help prevent infections and bacterial colonization,” says Katharina Ribbeck, the Eugene Bell Career Development Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering and senior author of the paper, which appears in the Nov. 8 online edition of the journal Current Biology. Mucin coatings may help prevent biofilm formation on medical devices and could also find applications in personal hygiene: Incorporating them into products such as toothpaste or mouthwash may supplement the body’s own defenses, especially in people whose natural mucus has been depleted, Ribbeck says. Lead authors of the Current Biology paper are former MIT postdoc Marina Caldara and Ronn Friedlander, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Other authors are Nicole Kavanaugh, an MIT graduate student in biology; Joanna Aizenberg, a professor of materials science at Harvard University; and Kevin Foster, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Oxford. How to stop bacteria from teaming up Mucus normally lines most of the wet surfaces of the body, including the respiratory and digestive tracts. “The textbook view of mucus is that it forms a barrier to infection, but it’s not at all clear how it does so,” Ribbeck says. To investigate that question, Ribbeck and her colleagues observed the behavior of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria in a growth medium that contained soluble purified mucins — long proteins with many sugar molecules attached. For bacteria to effectively penetrate the mucus layer and infect the tissues below, they need to form clusters that can adhere to the tissue surface. Clumps of bacteria are much more difficult for the immune system to clear, because immune cells are specialized to attack individual bacterial cells. “In general, you want to have bacteria around, you just don’t want them to team up,” Ribbeck says. “You want to them to be mixed with many other bacteria that are good for you. You don’t want a single species to take over, because then they may overgrow the system.” In the new study, the researchers found that mucins block bacterial cluster formation by preventing them from adhering, which is necessary for them to clump together. When bacteria stay motile, they end up suspended in a gooey mix and can do less harm. “The mucins have the ability to suppress virulence by keeping the cells separate. It’s like keeping your kids in separate rooms, so they will stay out of trouble,” Ribbeck says. However, bacteria are sometimes able to break through this defense system and cause infections. This can be accelerated by reductions in mucus due to aging, dehydration or chemotherapy, Ribbeck says. Or it may be that the mucus does not get replaced often enough, as happens in the mucus-clogged lungs of cystic fibrosis patients. The finding contradicts a long-held belief that mucus is merely a sticky substance that traps more or less everything, says Gunnar C. Hansson, a professor of medical biochemistry at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. It also “opens a new window for studies of mucins and their properties, which will help us to develop new medical therapies and biotechnological applications,” says Hansson, who was not part of the research team. ‘Managing microbial behavior’ One advantage of using mucins as antimicrobial coatings is that the substance disarms pathogenic bacteria without killing them. This makes it less likely that bacteria could evolve resistance to mucins, as they do to antibiotic drugs. It would also spare the beneficial bacteria that live on mucus membranes. “This is a nice mechanism where you just suppress the virulence traits without killing the bacteria,” Ribbeck says. “It’s nature’s way of managing microbial behavioral in a way that could be useful to take advantage of.” Her lab is now investigating exactly how mucins prevent bacteria from losing their motility, and also how they block infection by nonmotile bacteria. Mucins seem to have wide-ranging antimicrobial properties: Ribbeck has previously shown that they can trap viruses and keep them from infecting cells, and she is now studying mucin interactions with other pathogenic organisms, such as yeasts. The research was funded by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the European Research Council and the National Science Foundation. (Comment on this)
10:00p	Bringing the world to innovation A decade ago, in the early days of the innovative MIT classes and field trips known collectively as D-Lab, the project aimed to develop creative solutions to problems facing people in the world’s least-affluent countries — and then hoped those residents would embrace the solutions. But over the years, with the accumulation of on-the-ground experience, D-Lab’s philosophy has shifted toward fostering a spirit of innovation in the developing world, encouraging residents to devise solutions that fit their needs, circumstances and resources. Now, thanks to a major new U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) grant to D-Lab and MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, D-Lab’s instructors and researchers will implement this strategy even more broadly — providing greater continuity to projects around the world, says D-Lab founder Amy Smith, a senior lecturer in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. D-Lab began small, but has undergone explosive growth thanks to broad interest among MIT undergraduates. In its first year, D-Lab consisted of a single class, a single instructor and about 10 students. D-Lab’s first courses were held in a shared classroom at MIT’s Edgerton Center; its initial headquarters was a converted shipping and receiving room. The program now employs about 20 people and encompasses 16 courses that reach about 400 students each year. Even though D-Lab does little to publicize its activities, staffers are increasingly hearing that this program was a major reason why participating students chose to attend MIT. The growth has been “exciting and mind-boggling and challenging,” Smith says. Straddling several departments, labs and centers, D-Lab “is probably not like the structure of anything else at MIT. We’ve built ourselves up from a grassroots level.” D-Lab’s early growth was helped by others who shared its vision, Smith says, including Kim Vandiver, head of the Edgerton Center, and Sally Susnowitz, head of MIT’s Public Service Center. “The level of collaboration has been very significant,” she says. All of D-Lab’s classes assess the needs of people in less-privileged communities around the world, examining innovations in technology, education or communications that might address those needs. The classes then seek ways to spread word of these solutions — and in some cases, to spur the creation of organizations to help disseminate them. Specific projects have focused on improved wheelchairs and prosthetics; water and sanitation systems; and recycling waste to produce useful products, including charcoal fuel made from agricultural waste. New classes are often added “just by trying to respond to student demand,” says Victor Grau Serrat, D-Lab’s co-director, an electrical engineer who started out as a volunteer. Awareness of D-Lab has grown in recent years, thanks in part to some prominent mentions: a popular TED talk Smith gave in 2006 and Time magazine’s selection of her in 2010 as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. In addition to its classes and field trips, the D-Lab staff and a large group of volunteers have, for the past six years, planned and coordinated a series of month-long workshops — the International Development Design Summit (IDDS) — hosted either at MIT or by partner universities in Colorado, Ghana and Brazil. While these events have produced ingenious ideas and inspired innovators, D-Lab has never had the resources to provide ongoing support. Now, with the new USAID support, “we can harness the alumni of IDDS as a kind of an extremely diverse and dispersed design consultancy,” Smith says: After each summit, the D-Lab team would help participants establish ongoing “innovation hubs” to continue developing solutions to local needs. She also hopes to expand from a single IDDS each July to several annually. The USAID grant will also make it possible to maintain projects that D-Lab students begin during their field trips to remote locations. While some students have already managed to turn class projects into ongoing organizations — building better water filters in Africa, bicycle-powered washing machines in Latin America, and wheelchairs in India, for instance — the new funding should enable more such activities, Smith says, by “incubating ventures and training entrepreneurs.” “Creative capacity-building” — fostering local innovation by providing training, resources, information, tools and inspiration — has become a mantra of D-Lab. The new funding will also build a database of projects from D-Lab, the IDDS, the International Development Innovation Network and other groups worldwide. “The emphasis has shifted,” Grau Serrat says, “more from designing for poor people to designing with poor people, or even design by poor people.” The key aim now, he says, is “to develop the local capacity, so that villagers themselves can develop their own technology. Instead of viewing them as needy and vulnerable, we view them as resourceful and creative.” (Comment on this)
10:00p	MIT a linchpin of major new USAID program MIT will receive up to $25 million in funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of a new five-year project intended to fight poverty by developing and evaluating useful technologies for communities around the globe. “People here really care about doing something for the world’s poor,” says Bish Sanyal, the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), who is one of the leaders of the Institute’s participation in the project. MIT’s role in the new program will involve two related but distinct enterprises: The Institute’s D-Lab will help lead a consortium of higher-education institutions in creating the International Development Innovation Network (IDIN), which aims to foster and provide structure for technological innovation in developing countries. The Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE) — which DUSP and six other groups within MIT will help develop — will assess technologies intended to alleviate poverty and determine which will have the most impact. “We were very excited when we heard about this grant,” says D-Lab founder Amy Smith, a senior lecturer in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. The USAID backing, she adds, represents “an effort to promote local innovation and to increase the problem-solving and creative capacities of communities around the world, so that people are solving problems [themselves] rather than relying on external sources.” MIT is one of six academic institutions involved in the project, along with six nongovernmental organizations. The other academic partners in the IDIN are Colorado State University, Franklin Olin College of Engineering, the University of California at Davis, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana and the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. As part of the CITE program, MIT will work with the International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, Oxfam America, Partners in Health, UNICEF and the World Food Program. Building innovation networks The IDIN portion of the program will involve, among other things, 12 international design summits to look at technologies helping local development, along with the building of eight Innovation Hubs globally to act as centers for technological development. IDIN will work on innovations in a wide variety of areas, including agriculture, clean drinking water, improvement of power sources in rural areas and health-care projects. A crucial part of the IDIN’s work is the linkage of technologists from around the world, sometimes through intensive, monthlong workshops that Smith has developed. “A lot of time people don’t have the resources or training to engage in these activities,” Smith says. “One of the things that’s exciting about the IDIN grant is that it helps give us the capacity to build a network of innovators, and tap into that network to solve challenges.” The CITE project, on the other hand, will involve the development of rigorous evaluation methods for new technologies — aiming to address the problem of promising innovations that do not necessarily take hold as intended in developing countries. “Our problem is not simply the supply of technological solutions,” Sanyal says. “The problem is that the solutions are not assessed.” As a result, he notes, funding for global development has not always been guided toward the most effective solutions. The CITE program will evaluate technologies along three dimensions, Sanyal adds: suitability, to see if innovations match the needs of the poor and perform according to technical specifications; scalability, to see if innovations can be disseminated broadly; and sustainability, to see if technologies can be provided over the long term, considering resource and institutional constraints in developing countries. Sanyal says that by developing “a three-pronged methodological assessment that is really useful,” the CITE project could provide a system of technological evaluation “that leads to better innovations.” An interdisciplinary effort The USAID program also helps provide long-term structure for some of MIT’s expansive efforts to encourage innovation and growth in developing countries. Institute centers, departments and schools participating in the USAID program are DUSP, the D-Lab, the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Center for Transportation and Logistics, the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Public Service Center “With this team, we have a chance to look at this problem in a multidisciplinary way, and that’s the real power of what we’re trying to do here,” says Derek Brine, a DUSP graduate and mechanical engineer who will be managing MIT’s participation in the USAID program. The project will formally launch with multiple events organized by USAID in Washington this week, including one featuring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. USAID, a federal agency, was founded in 1961 to promote global development. “A lot will be expected of us,” Sanyal says. (Comment on this)

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