MIT and MGH partnership tackles clinical medicine challenges

A new partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Massachusetts General Hospital supports projects to accelerate the development of diagnostic tools and therapies.

Specifically, the two institutions are heading up $3 million in grants for projects that examine ways to improve the diagnosis of disease, develop new ways to prevent and treat infectious and autoimmune diseases and develop more accurate methods of diagnosing and treating major neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases, according to MIT.

Grant projects must include a principal investigator from each institution, and have the potential to generate results that could lead to funding from external sources within a couple of years. The institutions announced the first series of grants last month, with two major grants taking place over a two-year period and four smaller, one-year grants.

“I believe that developing the cost-effective diagnostic tools, therapies and vaccines needed to overcome some of the daunting challenges facing human health today can be achieved by bringing approaches from engineering and basic science together with clinical medicine and that a strategic partnership between our institutions could achieve much more toward advancing human health,” said Arup Chakraborty, the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry and Biological Engineering at MIT, and director of the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, in a statement.