Boston Children's Hospital's science and clinical innovation blog
From the category archives:
The mobile and digital health market is evolving with great intensity and speed. The surge in wearable technology, health-related apps and the explosion of digital health communication continue to flood the marketplace.
Joseph Kvedar, MD, of Partners Healthcare’s Center for Connected Health—who took part in a think tank of panelists at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards 2014—says this surge is the beginning of the “mHealth” revolution:
The only machine to ever win a TV game show is now transforming the world of healthcare.
After winning Jeopardy in 2011, IBM’s Watson has moved on to bigger and better things. Mike Rhodin, Senior Vice President of the IBM Watson Group, told the audience at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards 2014 how the cognitive computing system is being used to synthesize medical data and assist clinicians caring for complex patients.
“We live in an age of information overload,” Rhodin explained. “The challenge is to now turn that information into knowledge.” Full story »
You are what you eat, the saying goes. For some conditions (think cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes), there are clear connections between diet, health and illness.
For breast cancer, the picture is less clear. Many epidemiologic and laboratory studies have examined the Western diet (in particular, cholesterol) and its relation to breast cancer, with conflicting results.
“There’s been a raging debate in the field,” says Christine Coticchia, PhD, who works in the laboratory of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Vascular Biology Program director, Marsha Moses, PhD. “The biology of cancer and of cholesterol are so complex, and there are many subsets of breast cancer. In order to find any connections, you have to ask very specific questions.”
Banding together with Keith Solomon, PhD, in Boston Children’s Urology Department, Coticchia and Moses asked whether dietary cholesterol might encourage progression of the most aggressive, so-called “triple-negative” breast tumors. As they report in the American Journal of Pathology, they found a big impact, at least in mice. But it’s too early to say just yet that cutting back on cholesterol will help women avoid breast cancer. Full story »
This interactive map of the Ebola outbreak, produced by HealthMap, paints a picture of the epidemic's course from its first public signs in March. Mouse around, scroll down, zoom and explore. And click play to see how events have unfolded thus far.
Sobering news keeps coming out of the West African Ebola outbreak. According to numbers released on August 6, the virus has sickened 1,711 and claimed 932 lives across four nations. The outbreak continues to grow, with a high risk of continued regional spread, according to a threat analysis released by HealthMap (an outbreak tracking system operated out of Boston Children’s Hospital) and Bio.Diaspora (a Canadian project that monitors communicable disease spread via international travel).
“What we’ve seen here—because of inadequate public health measures, because of general fear—is [an outbreak that] truly hasn’t been kept under control,” John Brownstein, PhD, co-founder of HealthMap and a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told ABC News. “The event started, calmed down and jumped up again. Now, we’re seeing movement into densely populated areas, which is highly concerning.”
If you’re interested in keeping tabs on the outbreak yourself, there are several tools that can help. Full story »
Getting drugs where they need to be, and at the right time, can be more challenging than you think. Tumors, for example, tend to have blood vessels that are tighter and twistier than normal ones, making it hard for drugs to penetrate them. Despite decades of research on antibodies, peptides and other guidance methods, drug makers struggle to target drugs to specific tissues or cell types.
And even once a drug arrives at the right place, the ability to fine-tune the dose so that the drug is released at the right time and in the right amount remains an elusive goal.
What’s needed is some kind of trigger, a stimulus that a clinician can turn on and off to guide when a drug is available and where it goes to make sure it does its job with the fewest side effects.
Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD, a critical care specialist and director of the Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery at Boston Children’s Hospital, thinks he’s hit upon a promising trigger, one that’s all around us: light. Full story »
Cameron with Galina Lipton, MD
By the time Cameron Shearing arrived at the South Shore Hospital Emergency Department (ED) during a December snowstorm, he wasn’t breathing. He didn’t have much time. The two-year-old had aspirated a chocolate-covered pretzel, which sent tiny bits of material into his lungs.
The odds of a good outcome were not high. Pretzel is one of the worst foods to aspirate for two reasons: The small pieces can block multiple small airways, and the salt, which is very irritating, causes a lot of inflammation.
“Cameron was one of the sickest patients I ever cared for as an emergency physician. I did everything I could within my scope of practice, but he needed the tools and expertise of pediatric subspecialists,” recalls Galina Lipton, MD, from Boston Children’s Department of Emergency Medicine, who was staffing the South Shore Hospital emergency room that evening. Full story »
A clinician's-eye view of a patient with spinal muscular atrophy during a telemedicine visit.
TeleCAPE, a small pilot project at Boston Children’s Hospital, inches the dial toward “yes” for some patients—in particular, home-ventilated patients.
Home-ventilated patients require an inordinate amount of health care resources for even minor conditions. Costs for a simple urinary tract or viral respiratory infection that might be managed without hospitalization can reach up to $83,000 because the child’s complex medical needs require ICU admission. Full story »
To manufacture platelets in the laboratory, we need to find the switch that starts their production.
The problem is that Italiano really couldn’t; he needs every platelet his lab can put its hands on. A platelet biologist in Boston Children’s Hospital’s Vascular Biology Program, Italiano is trying to find ways to manufacture platelets at a clinically useful scale.
To do that, he needs to develop a deep understanding of the science of how the body produces platelets, something that no one has at the moment.
The path by which blood stem cells develop into megakaryocytes—the bone marrow cells that produce and release platelets into the bloodstream—is already known, Italiano says. We also know that platelets are essentially fragments of megakaryocytes that break off in response to some signal.
But that’s where our knowledge of platelet production largely ends. “Megakaryocytes themselves are something of a black box,” Italiano explains. “If you microinject the cytoplasm of an active megakaryocyte into a resting megakaryocyte, it will start to produce platelets as well. But we don’t know what factor or factors cause them to start platelet production.”
As Italiano and his laboratory peer into that black box, they know the stakes are big. Because in the end, they want to greatly reduce doctors’ and patients’ dependence on donated platelets. Full story »
Chronic, unresolved inflammation can be quite harmful, right down to the cellular level. At the macro level, it has links to cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other degenerative conditions.
This is why the body keeps a tight rein on the inflammatory response and maintains a host of factors that resolve inflammation once the need for it (for instance, to clear an infection or heal an injury) has passed.
We know pretty well which factors work between cells to turn on and turn off inflammation. That knowledge has led to the development of drugs like ibuprofen, acetaminophen and naproxen, all of which temper pro-inflammatory factors.
However, when you look at the signals and signaling pathways within cells, things get more complex, especially when it comes to factors that turn off inflammation. We haven’t completely grasped the full complement of proteins that transmit these internal anti-inflammatory signals. If we did, we could potentially add new drugs to our pharmacopeia to regulate or resolve inflammation or maintain cells in a non-inflamed state, and perhaps help prevent rejection of transplanted organs and tissues.
David Briscoe, MD, and his team at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Transplant Research Program, has taken the field one step closer to grasping those internal pathways by studying a cellular protein called DEPTOR. Full story »
With the latest technologies and techniques, MRI (bottom) is in many cases just as good as, if not better than, CT (top) when taking images of a child's chest. (Courtesy Edward Y. Lee, MD, MPH)
Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, can produce stunningly detailed images of the body’s tissues and structures. Historically, however, the chest—and in particular, the lungs and airway—has proven challenging for radiologists to clearly visualize through MR images.
Why is that? Unlike most other solid organs, the lung and trachea aren’t really solid. The air spaces within them do not absorb the magnetic fields or produce the radio signals needed to generate high-quality diagnostic images. Also, they are in constant motion—we have to breathe, after all.
For these reasons, radiologists have long relied on x-rays and computed tomography (CT) scans to take pictures of the lungs. Both can produce very good, highly detailed diagnostic images, but both also come with risks related to their reliance on ionizing radiation.
The lung MRI’s time may now have come. In a review paper in Radiologic Clinics of North America (RCNA), an international team of radiologists led by Simon Warfield, PhD, and Edward Y. Lee, MD, MPH, of Boston Children’s Department of Radiology outlines several recent advances that have made MRI a more viable—radiation-free—alternative for diagnostic imaging of children’s lungs and airway. Full story »
