massachusetts institute of technology

(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) After spending years developing a computational model to help illuminate cell signaling pathways, a team of MIT researchers decided to see what would happen if they "broke" the model.The results, reported in the Oct. 17 issue of the journal Cell, reveal new ways in which cells process chemical information and could indicate how to maximize the effectiveness of disease treatments such as chemotherapy.

(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) MIT researchers have shown that cells from different people don't all react the same way when exposed to the same DNA-damaging agent -- a finding that could help clinicians predict how patients will respond to chemotherapy.

We recently posted about a controversial study of using CT scans to screen for lung cancer that turned out to have been partially sponsored by a tobacco company.

Even though we have written quite a bit about conflicts of interest, this surprised even me, since the conflicts of interest presented by financial relationships with tobacco companies seem so blatantly risky that I would have thought few physicians or medical researchers would dare contemplate them.