Bringing a new perspective to infectious disease
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. Studying infectious diseases has long been primarily the domain of biologists. However, as part of the Ragon Institute, MIT engineers and physical scientists are joining immunologists and physicians in the battle against HIV, which currently infects 34 million people worldwide. The mission of the Ragon Institute — launched jointly in 2009 by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), MIT and Harvard University — is to develop new HIV vaccines through better understanding of how the immune system responds to infection. Bruce Walker, the MGH physician who directs the institute, says it was important to enlist engineers and physical scientists, who have usually been excluded from traditional HIV...