Welcome Back!
As the new semester begins, I’m excited and hopeful about the months ahead. It’s wonderful to come together again for in-person classes, events, and meetings, and the normal human interactions we have missed. Even as the Delta variant and other pandemic challenges persist, we continue to prioritize the safety of faculty, students and staff while carrying on our work in the lab and the classroom. I can think of no community better suited to navigate the bumps in the road ahead and adjust to shifting situations, policies and plans. We look forward to a healthy, safe, productive, and engaging semester of learning, research, and public and scientific programs. Check our website often for updated event info, and join us in person or online as often as you can! |
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 | Staking Out Cancer
Bhatia Lab engineers, in collaboration with biologists in the Gertler Lab, have created diagnostic nanoparticles that detect cancer cells and pinpoint their location anywhere in the body. A study published in Nature Materials tracked the progression and spread of metastatic colon cancer in mouse models before and after chemotherapy, suggesting that the platform could be used to diagnose and monitor cancer, as well as evaluate treatment response. The team is optimistic about the new platform’s eventual use as a routine screening tool in annual health exams.
This project was supported in part by the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine and a KI Quinquennial Cancer Research Fellowship, with earlier work supported by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program. |
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Lees Named Associate Dean
KI associate director and Virginia & D.K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research Jacqueline Lees has been appointed associate dean in the MIT School of Science. Lees, along with John W. Jarve (1978) Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences Rebecca Saxe, will contribute to the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion activities, as well as develop and implement mentoring and other career-development programs to support the community. This work is well aligned with Lees’ longstanding leadership at both the Koch Institute and MIT’s Department of Biology, and her ongoing commitment to making discovery science research accessible to all. |
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Three Strikes Against Pancreatic Cancer
Jacks Lab investigations published in Cancer Cell have identified a promising three-drug combination to improve pancreatic tumors’ response to immunotherapy. The team now seeks to analyze which tumors will respond best to this approach and is working with the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research and two pharmaceutical companies to test the combination therapy in clinical trials. |
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Upcoming Event: Oxygenating the Pipeline
The Koch Institute tenth anniversary celebrations continue with a with/in/sight webinar on Wednesday, October 6. Join us at 6:30 p.m. ET to learn about the Cima Lab’s bench-to-bedside progress in targeting tumor oxygen levels as a vulnerability in cancer. |
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Copy That
Griffith Lab researchers have developed a new way to grow tiny replicas of the pancreas. These “organoids,” described in Nature Materials, can be grown from healthy or cancerous cells and could help researchers develop and test potential drugs for pancreatic cancer—one of the most difficult types of cancer to treat. |
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Improving Health with Nanomedicine
Congratulations to Paula Hammond, the inaugural recipient of the Black in Cancer Distinguished Investigator Award. With this support, Hammond will engineer a nanoscale delivery system—variations on which were recently featured in National Geographic and The Wall Street Journal—to direct a combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy to ovarian cancer cells and their surroundings. Although the incidence rate of high grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) is higher in white than black women, the mortality rate is higher for black women, making Hammond’s approach a powerful tool for combating serious health disparities. |
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Moles Meet Machine Learning
KI member Regina Barzilay continues her work to improve early cancer detection through machine learning algorithms. In an article published in Science Translational Medicine, Barzilay and colleagues describe the training and use of a deep convolutional neural network to compare markings on patients’ skin to identify signs of pre-cancerous lesions. |
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MIRA MIRA on the Cell
Congratulations to chemical engineer Katie Galloway on receipt of the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences. This prestigious award will support Galloway’s molecular systems biology work to develop multi-scale tools and approaches for understanding and engineering cell-fate transitions in development, reprogramming, and cancer. |
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mRNA Vaccines Beyond Covid
Covid-19 has brought substantial attention to the use of messenger RNA, or mRNA, as a tool for training the body to fight disease. KI member Daniel Anderson speaks with National Geographic about the application of this technology in cancer therapy—a longstanding research interest in his lab. His message? Therapeutic mRNA vaccines delivered via nanoparticles could offer great flexibility in helping the immune system identify and attack tumor cells across a wide range of cancer types. |
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