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Four headshots of winnners of the 2024 Karches Prize - Shandon Amos, Christina Cabana, Ivan Pires, and Jason Yu.

Introducing the 2024 Karches Prize winners

January 24, 2025

Congratulations to the winners of the 2024 Peter Karches Mentorship Prize — Shandon Amos, Christina Cabana, Ivan Pires, and Jason Yu.

The Peter Karches Mentorship Prize is awarded annually to up to four Koch Institute postdocs, graduate students or research technicians who demonstrate exemplary mentorship of undergraduate researchers or high school students in their labs. The prize allows the Koch Institute community to celebrate and recognize the critical role that mentors play, both personally and professionally, in the early stages of a scientist’s career.

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Showing 41–50 of 595 stories

Progress for PanTher

PR NewsWire

August 13, 2024

Following positive initial results, PanTher has received IND clearance to advance their absorbable drug-delivery film for treating pancreatic cancer to the next phase of clinical trials. PanTher’s approaches—based on their signature platform, developed in the Edelman lab with support from the Bridge Project—provide continuous, high-dose treatment of potent therapeutics exclusively at the tumor site.

Keeping it local with immunotherapy

Nature Immunology

August 7, 2024

A new study from the Irvine and Wittrup labs, published in Nature Immunology, describes a novel immunotherapy approach that delivers and retains cytokines directly in tumors and nearby lymph nodes via a combination of locally administered IL-12 and IL-15, both engineered to target the CD45 receptor.

Unlike other efforts, this approach localizes the effects of cytokines, ensuring that the drugs stay inside the tumor and neighboring lymph nodes to prevent leakage and the severe systemic side effects that accompany it.

Alex Shalek to direct IMES

MIT News

August 6, 2024

Alex Shalek has been appointed Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES). IMES integrates engineering, science, and medicine to advance and accelerate innovation in human health. Shalek, who is also the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in the Department of Chemistry, as well as a member of the Koch Institute and the MIT Stem Cell Initiative, began his appointment on August 1.

Recognizing Excellence

MIT News

July 11, 2024

Highlighting the exceptional expertise and essential research role played by our Robert A. Swanson (1969) Biotechnology Center, members of the Peterson (1957) Nanotechnology Materials Core Facility staff were recognized with the 2024 MIT Excellence Award in the Innovative Solutions category. Congratulations to Margaret (Peggy) Bisher, Giovanni de Nola, David Mankus, and Dong Soo Yun!

Primed for success

Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology

July 11, 2024

Carmen Martin Alonso, 2024 HST graduate, has been awarded a provisional patent for her liquid biopsy priming agents developed in the labs of Sangeeta Bhatia, Chris Love, and the Broad Institute's Viktor Adalsteinsson. Alonso’s priming agents make it easier to detect circulating tumor DNA in blood samples, which could enable earlier cancer diagnosis and help guide treatment.   

A SMART way to produce (CAR)T-cells

MIT News

July 9, 2024

Michael Birnbaum and researchers at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research & Technology Centre (SMART) have discovered a way to produce CAR T-cells for the treatment of cancer. The technology, which uses a microfluidic chip roughly the size of a pack of cards, could lower manufacturing costs for cell therapies and enable point-of-care CAR T-cell production in hospitals. 

Stark wins V Scholar Award

V Foundation

July 8, 2024

Congratulations to Jessica Stark, one of a class of 15 recipients selected as part of the V Foundation’s A Grant of Her Own: The Women Scientists Innovation Award for Cancer Research, aimed at addressing longstanding gender disparities in research. Stark studies the interplay between the immune system and glycans—cell surface sugars—and how to leverage it to improve cancer immunotherapy.

Deciphering T cell diversity

MIT News

June 28, 2024

MIT News profiled Michael Birnbaum’s efforts to develop large scale screening tools to decipher how diverse T cells recognize their targets. Birnbaum co-founded Kelonia, which is adapting the approach to reprogram T cells to target specific antigens directly inside the body to treat a broad range of diseases including cancer, autoimmune disorders, and viral infections.  

Cutting out CRISPR bias

Broad Institute

June 14, 2024

A Nature Communications study from the Boehm Group and Broad Institute collaborators highlights an ancestry bias that can cause CRISPR screens to miss cancer dependencies. To help address this bias, which stems from the guide RNAs used, the team built a website of data tools to help researchers determine the effect of ancestry on specific guides. Ongoing work by Boehm, Francisco Sánchez-Rivera, and collaborators is supported by the Bridge Project.  

DINO-mite DNA polymers

MIT News

June 13, 2024

Inspired partly by the movie “Jurassic Park,” the Johnson Lab has developed an amber-like DNA-encapsulating polymer dubbed T-REX (Thermoset-REinforced Xeropreservation), for freezer-free long-term DNA storage. DNA itself has vast storage capacity that can accommodate genetic and digital data—everything from an entire human genome to the Jurassic Park theme song.