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Skoltech joins a panel discussion, “Translating science into breakthrough medical projects”

Participants of the panel discussion held within the 4th Forum of Social Innovations in Russian Regions and focusing on innovations in healthcare discussed social challenges and technological capabilities as the basis for cooperation in medicine between Skoltech and the Moscow Government.

Vyacheslav Shulenin, head of the Moscow Center for Innovative Technologies in Healthcare and moderator of the discussion, emphasized that the growing demand for innovation in medicine has prompted the Moscow authorities to ramp up cooperation with academic partners. “This year, Skoltech has become a strategic partner of the Moscow Government. The projects discussed during Mayor Sergey Sobyanin’s visit to Skoltech last spring are actively in progress, with many pilot projects already completed,” Shulenin said.

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“Currently, achievements in multidisciplinary research are noticeable in medicine like nowhere else,” Alexander Kuleshov, Skoltech President and Member of RAS, said.

To prove the point, the participants, Skoltech professors, research team leads and heads of laboratories presented their projects.

Professor Lebedev spoke about novel approaches to preventing brain diseases and ensuring fast and effective rehabilitation after nervous system injuries. “At the forum, we presented a neuro-simulator with a brain-computer interface (BCI) at its core, which captures and uses brain signals for a variety of purposes, including neuro rehabilitation that should occur within a “plasticity window” during the first two weeks after a stroke. We pick brain signals to decode the motion intention, and the robot moves its hand after it has figured out what the patient wants. This helps the patient acquire the voluntary motion ability and recover faster by exercising every day. We strongly hope that this application will find use in Moscow clinics,” Lebedev said.

Professor Philipp Khaitovich presented a breakthrough area of science, molecular psychiatry. He is one of the few scientists who study lipid composition of the brain – a least researched area of modern science. “We decided to build a map of changes in brain lipid levels in patients suffering from schizophrenia. The results suggest that traces of what is going on in the brain can be found in blood plasma. We studied blood plasma samples of several test groups jointly with our partners from Austria, Germany, and China and found that the blood plasma contains compounds that provide information about brain health. In addition, the blood plasma test that we performed jointly with a team from Alekseev Psychiatric Clinical Hospital No. 1 of the Moscow Health Department helped identify healthy individuals and patients with schizophrenia with an accuracy of 90%. These findings open vast opportunities for diagnosis and prevention of diseases and, we hope, will soon become a common medical practice, so that people could attend to their health before a problem arises,” Khaitovich commented.

Christoph Borchers, a Canadian scientist and a visiting professor at Skoltech, presented another breakthrough diagnostic technology. A renowned Canadian scholar and one of the world leaders in clinical proteomics that studies proteins, professor Borchers was among the pioneers of proteomic research in personal medicine. His laboratory team develops techniques for absolute quantitative measurement of protein biomarkers in blood plasma and other biological fluids, which constitutes one of the key objectives of modern clinical proteomics. “Multi-omics technology opens broad opportunities for medical diagnostics. I am happy to have my research at Skoltech supported by a Russian mega-grant,” Borchers said.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) took pride of place at the discussion: according to Mikhail Belyaev, an assistant professor at Skoltech and director of the IRA Labs startup, “AI is more application oriented and capable of reaching out to real-life medicine much quicker than any other technology.” “Medical imagery plays center stage here. A technological breakthrough in computer vision has triggered the migration of frontier technology into applied fields, such as medicine. A great boon to doctors, AI-based analysis of medical imagery helps perform complex measurements in automatic mode, while allowing doctors to identify concomitant pathologies,” Belyaev said.

At the Forum, Skoltech and the Moscow Center for Innovative Technologies in Healthcare signed a cooperation agreement marking a new milestone in the relations between the Moscow Government and Skoltech.

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