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Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang holding the medal she won in the 2024 Collegiate Inventors Competition

Rhoda Zhang Wins 2024 Collegiate Inventors Competition

MIT News

November 5, 2024

Graduate student Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang has won the 2024 Collegiate Inventors Competition in both the Graduate and People's Choice categories. With advisors Robert Langer and Ana Jaklenec, Zhang and KI postdoc Xin Yang are developing metal-organic frameworks and other safe, sustainable nutrient stabilizing materials to address global micronutrient deficiencies. They are also launching MOFe™ Coffee, the first iron-fortified coffee.

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Trip the Light Fan-gastric

MIT News

January 17, 2020

The Langer and Traverso Labs developed a light-sensitive hydrogel for gastrointestinal devices. Devices made with the gel break down when triggered by an ingestible LED, eliminating the need for surgical removal. The work, published in Science Advances, has numerous applications for long-term drug delivery, monitoring, and sensing.

Hojun Li Joins the KI

MIT Koch Institute

January 10, 2020

Welcome to Hojun Li, MD, PhD, the KI’s new Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Clinical Investigator. A pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Hospital, he recently received a 2020 Scholar Award from the American Society of Hematology.

Dr. Li studies normal and pathologic hematopoietic stem cell development, conditions that predispose children and adults to leukemia, and novel treatments to prevent blood cancers in these patients.   

A Perfect 10 for 2020

MIT Koch Institute

January 10, 2020

The Koch Institute is ringing in the New Year with a 10/10—again! For more than a year, the Koch Institute community has been working on the renewal process for our Cancer Center Support Grant from the National Cancer Institute. Since MIT’s then-nascent Center for Cancer Research was distinguished as an NCI-designated Cancer Center in 1974, the grant has been recompeted every five years, requiring an extensive written application (more than 1,000 pages!) and an intense site visit. Given the vulnerability of federal research funding, there are no guarantees of success. Yet not only has the Koch Institute’s grant been formally approved for renewal, but it was given a perfect score of 10. We received the same score at our last recompete, in 2014. Join us in raising a glass to our faculty members, trainees, technicians, and staff who worked so hard to put the grant together and to defend it during the site visit!

Mind Your PNAS QnAs

MIT Koch Institute

January 6, 2020

PNAS queries Sangeeta Bhatia, director of the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, on her work building protease-based diagnostic tools, including probes—potentially delivered by a nebulizer—that distinguish between benign and malignant lung nodules. Other highlights include diagnostic tools for pneumonia and a rare genetic disease called α-1 antitrypsin deficiency.

Better Foundations for Breast Cancer Diagnostics

MIT Koch Institute

December 13, 2019

Foundation Medicine, co-founded by KI member Eric Lander, reports two advances in breast cancer diagnostics. The FDA approved the FoundationOne CDx test to select patients for treatment of HR+/HER2- breast cancer with PIK3CA mutations. In a clinical study, the company’s FoundationOne liquid biopsy test accurately predicted the risk of recurrence for early-stage triple-negative breast cancer. 

Homing in on Hypoxia

MIT Spectrum

December 13, 2019

Inspired by a desire to work on pressing, unaddressed medical needs, Cima Lab postdoc Greg Ekchian is developing a way to measure oxygen levels in tumors in order to improve cancer treatment. Until now, clinicians have been unable to quickly assess tumor tissue for areas of hypoxia (oxygen deprivation). Hypoxic areas can drive chemoresistance, but respond to high-dose radiation. Working with clinical collaborators through the Bridge Project, Ekchian is testing the strategy in a pilot trial of cervical cancer patients. In another project supported by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program, he is developing a more advanced version of the original device.

KI Gets Two Therapeutic Thumbs Up

MIT Koch Institute

November 21, 2019

New startup Immunitas Therapeutics combines immunology and genetic targeting to stop tumors with a platform incorporating Bridge Project research by Aviv Regev, Mario Suvà, Dane Wittrup, and Kai Wucherpfennig. 

Sunflower Therapeutics will develop the Love lab’s nimble technology to dramatically reduce the time and cost to develop and manufacture biologics for patients around the world, from orphan diseases to areas without healthcare infrastructure. 

A Farewell to ARMS?

MIT News

November 20, 2019

Fusion-positive alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma (ARMS) is a rare, deadly, and poorly understood skeletal muscle cancer. Thanks, however, to a high-risk, high-reward grant from the Cancer Moonshot Initiative, this pediatric cancer faces a new adversary in KI member Angela Koehler. As part of a multi-institutional team, Koehler will use her signature microarray technology to screen for potential compounds that target the so-called “undruggable” fusion oncoproteins responsible for ARMS. The work is expected to open up new therapeutic opportunities for patients and inform drug development strategies for other challenging “orphan diseases.”

Here Be Dragonfly

MIT Koch Institute

November 20, 2019

Dragonfly, co-founded by KI director Tyler Jacks, launched its first clinical trial, a study of multiple solid tumor types, with a drug candidate called DF1001; the drug is the first from its TriNKET™ platform of NK cell-based immunotherapies to move into humans. The company also entered a partnership with AbbVie to help commercialize other candidates in its pipeline.

A Means to an End

MIT News

November 19, 2019

The Love and Shalek labs devised a high throughput single-cell RNA sequencing method for identifying T cells that share a particular target. Conventional RNA sequencing reads only one end of an RNA molecule. Yet, the variable sequences encoding for T cell receptors (TCR), which bind to receptors on target cells, reside on the other end. The new method, published in Nature Immunology and partly supported by the Bridge Project, complements the conventional approach by amplifying TCR-encoding RNA molecules labeled for their T cells of origin, then pulls and sequences them. The study identified T cells that produce inflammation in peanut allergies, but the technique can be applied to a variety of T cell responses, including patient responses to cancer immunotherapies.