Tiny tools help advance medical discoveries
With the recent launch of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, MIT News examines research with the potential to reshape medicine and health care through new scientific knowledge, novel treatments and products, better management of medical data, and improvements in health-care delivery. To understand the progression of complex diseases such as cancer, scientists have had to tease out the interactions between cells at progressively finer scales — from the behavior of a single tumor cell in the body on down to the activity of that cell’s inner machinery.To foster such discoveries, mechanical engineers at MIT are designing tools to image and analyze cellular dynamics at the micro- and nanoscale. Such tools, including microfluidics, membrane technology and metamaterials, may help scientists better characterize and develop therapies for cancer and other complex diseases. New medical discoveries depend on engineering advances in real-time, multifunctional imaging and quantitative analysis, says Nicholas...