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Residents and New Cars BY STEVE BARRETT CORY FAWCET T, MD, a retired general surgeon and author of The Doctors Guide to Eliminating Debt, learned that lesson as a second-year resident when his 14-year-old Oldsmobile started giving him more trouble than it was worth. Blogging at personal finance website Physician on FIRE, Dr. Fawcett recalls the temptation to buy a new Mercedes: the luxurious test drive, the sense of confidence — even the pleasant sound of closing the door. Then reality sank in: He and his wife had agreed to live on one of their salaries and save the other one. The new car would make that impossible. The monthly payments, over the life of the loan, would add massive interest to the cost of the vehicle. The couple thought better of it and wound up buying a year-old Taurus at one-third the price. With medical school graduates carrying an average of about $200,000 in educational debt today, Dr. Fawcett urges extreme caution with auto purchases. "If you need to borrow the money to buy the car, you can't afford that car," he writes. "Buy the car of your income, not the car of your dreams." n IT'S NOT THAT A FANCY NE W CAR ISN'T, YOU KNOW, FANCY AND NE W. IT'S WHAT IT CAN DO TO THE BUDGE T OF A RESIDENT WITH A LOW SAL ARY WHO LIKELY CARRIES A LOT OF MEDICAL SCHOOL DEBT. PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT BY STEVE BARRETT Personalizing Chemotherapy S C IE N T I S T S AT RU T G E R S U NI V E R SI T Y have developed a portable device that incorporates biosensors and artificial intelligence to help predict whether individual cancer patients are likely to benefit from particular chemotherapy drugs. Using the device, researchers passed cancer cells treated with varying concentrations of drugs through a fluidic hole. Changes in the cells' electrical properties quickly revealed whether the cells were still alive, according to a news release from Rutgers. The device "can predict whether patients will respond positively to targeted cancer therapy," says senior author Mehdi Javanmard, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the School of Engineering at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. The scientists say the device could enhance personalization of treatment and management of the disease. Their findings were published in Microsystems & Nanoengineering. n A Pill to Profile Gut Bacteria A 3 D - P R I N T E D P I L L developed by Tufts University scientists can sample the microbiome while traveling through the GI tract. The ingestible pill is the first noninvasive diagnostic means of profil- ing gut bacteria through the whole GI tract, according to the engineers, whose findings appear in Advanced Intelligent Systems. "Current methods of sampling the microbiome involve primarily the analysis of fecal DNA and metabolites, but that approach provides little information on the environment upstream of the distal colon, where bacterial species can vary significantly," Tufts notes in a news release. Thus far, the device has been tested only in primates and pigs. However, eventually it could advance treatment for multiple diseases, according to the researchers. "The pill will improve our understanding of the role of spatial distribu- tion in the microbiome profile," says Sameer Sonkusale, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tufts' School of Engineering and corresponding author of the study. n 2 0