Benchmarks is your weekly dose of news and notes about the Massachusetts General Hospital research community. With over 9,500 investigators, there’s more news than we can cover each week. Here are a few highlights.

• In the News
• New Ragon Institute Building is Starting to Take Shape
• A Road Map for Processing Heart Health Data from Digital Devices
• Jackson Named to STAT’s 2023 Status List
• Tweets of the Week
• This Week in Mass General History
• A Two Year Operation to Turn a Blast-Injured Patient into a “New Man”
• False Hair is a Great Cause of Baldness Among Women, Mass General Doctor Says

In the News

New Ragon Institute Building is Starting to Take Shape

The faculty and staff of the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard recently gathered in Kendall Square, Cambridge to celebrate a significant milestone — the “topping off” of their new building.

The team watched as the highest beam was lifted into place, signifying the completion of the structural phase of the project — often thought to be the most dangerous part of construction.

“It is exhilarating to see the building taking shape,” said Ragon Institute Director Bruce Walker, MD. “This will be a palace for pandemic preparedness and allow us to expand our vision to harness the immune system to prevent and cure diseases.”

At 307,000 sq. ft., the new space will provide more than double the square footage of the Institute’s current space in Technology Square, Cambridge — allowing for more lab benches and offices, teaching facilities and one of the largest biosafety containment facilities in the Northeast.

“More space means we can add more faculty, fully integrate AI into our research and safely expand our programs to define how the immune system functions and dysfunctions,” Walker said. The new Ragon Institute building is expected to open in the spring of 2024. Read more.

A Road Map for Processing Heart Health Data from Digital Devices

Medtech innovators have flooded the market with wearable devices that have forever changed the healthcare landscape, according to Mass General cardiologist Mostafa Al-Alusi, MD, who discussed the technology at the American College of Cardiology Expo (ACC.23) in New Orleans earlier this month.

According to Al-Alusi, wearable cardiac devices from tech manufacturers that monitor the heart and can take an electrocardiogram (ECG) at the touch of a finger have shifted the healthcare paradigm.

“Physicians are no longer the gatekeepers to physiologic data,” Al-Alusi said.

For doctors, the main challenge will berocessing the amount of data pouring in from patients using and wearing these devices.

A “wearables clinic,” in Al-Alusi’s view, could potentially solve the problem posed by data from wearable devices. In such a clinic, patients would register their devices with physicians, allowing for the transmission of ECGs in real time so that computer algorithms could analyze it and identify any potential issues for doctors to review further.

“The key here is that instead of the data being self-filtered by patients, we would collect all of it,” Al-Alusi said. “And we would filter it using these algorithms whose performance in the real world we can monitor on an ongoing basis.” Learn more.

Jackson Named to STAT’s 2023 Status List

Congrats to Johnathan Jackson, PhD, executive director of the Community Access, Recruitment, and Engagement (CARE) Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, for being named to STAT’s Status List for 2023!

The Status List of 46 individuals was narrowed down from hundreds of finalists by the STAT editorial team, and includes “well-known as leaders and influencers in areas like biotechnology and public health as well as largely unheralded heroes.”

Jackson was recognized for long-standing efforts to better understand and address ethnic and racial differences in Alzheimer’s disease research and treatment. Learn more.

Tweets of the Week

This Week in Mass General History

A Two Year Operation to Turn a Blast-Injured Patient into a “New Man”

March 16, 1906—The San Francisco Call reports on “a wonderful surgical operation is in progress at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where Stephen Calabro, an Italian, is being made into a new man.

The operation will require two years to complete successfully, but Calabro is willing and is bearing the pain with remarkable stoicism.

He is being supplied with a new forehead, new eyelids, new cheeks, a new nose, lips and finally a new neck with new skin over all, the parts being grafted on after removal from other parts of his body.

The operation, if successful, will mark an epoch as a cure of one of the most severe and protracted cases of that strange disease, kaleoids.

The disease came on Calabro after he was injured in a powder explosion at Weymouth about a year ago. While the cause of kaleoids in unknown, the only cure is to cut away the entire growth and graft new skin.  

False Hair is a Great Cause of Baldness Among Women, Mass General Doctor Says

March 169, 1910—The Saturday Blade Newspaper of Illinois reports on a recent presentation by C.J. White, MD, a dermatologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“The piling of false hair, which doesn’t allow the air to get at the scalp, is the great cause for the increase of baldness among women,” said Dr. White, lecturing on the care of the skin in health and disease.

“Wear wire rats and puffs,” said Dr. White. “They look just as well, and are more economical.”

A rat was a homemade hairpiece made from the hair collected from a lady’s brush each evening. Since it was made from a lady’s own hair, it provided the best match in color and texture.

About the Mass General Research Institute
Research at Massachusetts General Hospital is interwoven through more than 30 different departments, centers and institutes. Our research includes fundamental, lab-based science; clinical trials to test new drugs, devices and diagnostic tools; and community and population-based research to improve health outcomes across populations and eliminate disparities in care.
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