A partnership between Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) www.massgeneral.org and MIT http://web.mit.edu is addressing three major challenges in clinical medicine. The partnership will explore ways to improve the diagnosis of disease, secondly, develop new approaches to prevent and treat infectious and autoimmune diseases, and lastly, develop more accurate ways to diagnose and treat major neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases.
This formalized strategic partnership will help to accelerate the development of diagnostic tools and therapies. Under the new partnership, MGH and MIT are going to provide up to $3 million over a two year period to fund research for the three major challenges. Teams applying for grants must have the potential to generate results that could lead to further funding from external sources within a year or two.
Projects addressing the first challenge will need to improve the accuracy and cost effectiveness of diagnosis through either the use of real-time monitoring devices or by analyzing large data sets.
Six grant awards were announced in September that included a large grant to develop a portable noninvasive device capable of accurately measuring blood volume using nuclear magnetic resonance. So far, researchers from the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering http://dmse.mit.edu and the Division of Nephrology at the MGH Department of Medicine www.massgeneral.org/nephrology are working together on this project.
Several of the smaller grants announced are going to set up a clinical trial for a device using wireless signals to monitor breathing without touching a patient’s body to improve the diagnosis of sleep apnea. The research will take place at the Sleep division within MGH Department Neurology and the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing http://wireless.csail.mit.edu.
Another grant will build an archive of data collected from bedside monitoring and the EMR to develop algorithms to predict the transition from sepsis to septic shock. Research will take place at the MGH Department of Emergency Medicine www.massgeneral.org/emergencymedicine and the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science http://imes.mit.edu.