There are currently few good treatment options for glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer with a high fatality rate. One reason that the disease is so difficult to treat is that most chemotherapy drugs can’t penetrate the blood vessels that
MIT researchers developed drug-carrying nanoparticles that appear to get into the brain more efficiently than drugs given on their own. Using a human tissue model that replicates the blood-brain barrier, they showed the particles could get into tumors and kill glioblastoma cells.
Credits: Photo courtesy of Fondation L’Oréal Previous image Next image Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, a co-leader of the cryptography and information security group, and a member of the complexity theory group within the Theory of Computation Group and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has been named the laureate for North America in this year’s 2021 L Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Awards. The award celebrates Goldwasser’s groundbreaking work in cryptography, which has enabled secure communication and verification over the internet and collaborative computation on private data. Goldwasser is also known of her pioneering work on interactive and probabilistic proof verification. In announcing the award, the organizers said that Goldwasser s research has a significant impact on our understanding of large classes of problems for which computers cannot efficiently find approximate solutions.”