The FDA has cleared the world’s first portable MRI system, designed to be wheeled to a hospital bedside for scanning a patient’s head and brain.

Developed by Hyperfine Research for people age two and older, the point-of-care imaging system weighs about one-tenth that of a conventional, fixed MRI system. About three feet wide and five feet tall, the device fits in an elevator and runs off an everyday power outlet to create both clinical contrast images and 3D renders.

“More than 40 years after its first use, MRI remains a marvel. Unfortunately, it also remains inaccessible,” Hyperfine Chief Medical Officer Khan Siddiqui said in a statement. “It’s time that MRI made the jump to point of need just like X-ray and ultrasound have before it.”

Glioblastomas are relentless, hard-to-treat, and often lethal brain tumors. Yale scientists have enlisted a most unlikely ally in efforts to treat this form of cancer — elements of the Ebola virus.

“The irony is that one of the world’s deadliest viruses may be useful in treating one of the deadliest of brain cancers,” said Yale’s Anthony van den Pol, professor of neurosurgery, who describes the Yale efforts Feb. 12 in the Journal of Virology.

The approach takes advantage of a weakness in most cancer tumors and also of an Ebola defense against the immune system response to pathogens.

“” This cancer seems simple. Basically, it has been known for many years it is just one type of cells that proliferate out of control,” Zong said. “However, we noticed an interesting paradox. While tumor cells grow really fast in the body, they grow poorly and only for a limited time when we take them out and put them in a [lab] dish. So we suspected some other cells may be in play.”

His investigation of that suspicion turned science’s understanding of medulloblastoma on its head. Using an innovative model of the disease, Zong and his team marked tumor cells so that they would appear green. That led to the first surprise: While all other cell types outside the tumor are colorless, a cell type called astrocyte appeared green, which never happens in normal brain regions.

“Astrocyte actually has been linked to poor prognosis of medulloblastoma, but nobody has ever suspected its origin, since the cell of origin for medulloblastoma normally never gives rise to astrocytes. The fact that tumor-associated astrocytes share the same color with tumor cells suggests that they actually come from tumor cells,” he said. “So some tumor cells basically completely change their identity to make a separate cell type.”

That was a shocker on its own. But it proved to be just the beginning of a complex process that nurtures the growth of this “simple” cancer.”

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A surprising discovery about a rare form of childhood brain cancer suggests a new treatment approach for that cancer—and potentially many others.

Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the supposedly simple cancer, called medulloblastoma, forms an unexpectedly intricate network to drive its growth. Some tumor cells actually turn into another type of cell altogether. The discovery raises the exciting possibility that doctors may be able to intervene to stop the disease—and possibly other cancers as well.

Lead researcher Hui Zong of UVA’s Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology and the UVA Cancer Center suspects this network formation is common in cancer.