To help people with hormone deficiencies, scientists have developed a potential new therapy based on an unlikely model: immune molecules from cows. Their research, published recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that human hormones and antibodies can be fused together--mimicking long, stalk-like cow antibodies.

The new study, whose senior authors were Peter Schultz, the Scripps Family Chair Professor at at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), and Feng Wang, a principal investigator at the California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr), could also provide the foundation for treatments for a range of other diseases.

Because Americans spend more per capita on health care than residents of any country, debate has rumbled on for years about whether all that investment yields sufficient results. Now a newly published study with a distinctive design, led by an MIT health care scholar, shows that increased spending on emergency care does, in fact, produce better outcomes for patients.

"If the question is, 'Do high-spending hospitals get better outcomes for emergency care?' -- we think that they do," says MIT economist Joseph Doyle. "We do find that if you go from a low-spending hospital to a high-spending hospital, you get significantly lower mortality rates."