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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 481–490 of 595 stories

Unmasking Mutant Cancer Cells

Clinical Cancer Research

July 17, 2019

Researchers in the Jacks and White Laboratories have identified a new dosing routine for a well-studied class of anti-cancer drugs that makes tumor cells more easily recognizable to the immune system. The team found that trading traditional bolus dosing for sustained, low-level dosing of heat shock protein (HSP) inhibitors increased the number of mutated protein fragments presented on the surfaces of tumor cells. Their approach, described in Clinical Cancer Research, could improve immunotherapy's effectiveness across more cancer types with fewer side effects and reinvigorate clinical investigations of promising HSP inhibitors. The research was inspired by and builds on work, partly supported by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program, of late MIT biologist and KI member Susan Lindquist.

Taris Touts Trial Success

MIT Koch Institute

July 2, 2019

Taris Biomedical, founded by David H. Koch Professor of Engineering Michael Cima and David H. Koch Institue Professor Robert Langer, has made exciting headway in translating its approach to treating muscle-invasive bladder cancer. TAR-200 is an implantable device developed by the Cima and Langer Labs that continuously administers gemcitabine, a chemotherapy drug, for multiple weeks. First, Taris shared positive results from an ongoing study of the device alone, which suggest therapeutic benefit to both patients who undergo radical cystectomy and those unfit for surgical intervention. Two weeks later, the company announced the dosing of the first patient in a new clinical trial, in collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb, that combines the device with nivolumab, an approved cancer immunotherapy.

Killing Tumors with Cytokine-ness

MIT News

June 27, 2019

Immune cell signaling proteins, known as cytokines, are highly toxic—not just to tumors but, unfortunately, to healthy tissue as well. Wittrup Lab researchers are delivering cytokines directly into solid tumors and using the collagen-binding protein lumican to confine these cell-killing proteins within the tumoral space. Their strategy, described in Science Translational Medicine, leverages the protective layer of collagen produced by the cancer cells to prevent leakage of these toxic agents into the bloodstream and opens up previously-closed avenues for combination immunotherapy. 

Compound Interest

MIT News

June 20, 2019

Researchers in the laboratories of KI faculty members Michael Hemann and Graham Walker discovered a compound that may make cancer cells more susceptible to cisplatin and similar cancer therapies on the first and, importantly, subsequent doses. Cisplatin and drugs like it work by severely damaging the DNA of cancer cells, which have often lost one of the more reliable means of DNA repair. The newly-identified compound, known as JH-RE-06, interferes with a key component of translesion synthesis, a less accurate DNA repair pathway that not only helps cells survive chemotherapy, but introduces mutations that might confer resistance to future treatment. The study, appearing in Cell and funded in part by the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, found that the combination killed many more cells than cisplatin alone and that surviving cells were far less able to generate new mutations.

Better Breast Cancer Risk Prediction

MIT Koch Institute

May 15, 2019

A deep-learning model developed by KI member and Delta Electronics Professor Regina Barzilay can predict from a mammogram if a patient is likely to develop breast cancer within five years. Trained on mammograms and outcomes from more than 60,000 patients at Massachusetts General Hospital, the model learned to spot patterns in mammograms that are precursors to malignant tumors. Published in Radiology, the model performed significantly better than existing approaches, and could be used in the future to build personalized breast cancer screening plans. Read more.

At last month's SOLUTIONS with/in/sight, Barzilay was joined by her co-author, Harvard Medical School Professor and Director of Breast Imaging at Massachussetts General Hospital Constance Lehman, to talk about the new model and earlier work using deep-learning models to screen for dense breast tissue. Managing Director of The Boston Globe and STAT Linda Pizzuti Henry moderated the discussion, with an introduction from MIT president emerita and KI faculty member Susan Hockfield. Watch video. 

Guiding Light

MIT News

May 15, 2019

A new system developed by the laboratory of KI member and James Mason Crafts Professor Angela Belcher could pinpoint ovarian tumors during debulking surgery and improve survival rates for patients. Most ovarian cancers are diagnosed in advanced stages of the disease, after tumors—often quite small—have spread so abundantly throughout the abdomen that it is difficult for a surgeon to remove them all. In a mouse study led by Mazumdar-Shaw International Oncology Fellow Neelkanth Bardhan and published in ACS Nano, researchers identified tumors as small as 0.2 millimeters with a combination of near-infrared light and single-walled carbon nanotubule probes. Researchers are seeking approval for a FDA phase 1 clinical trial for the system and plan to adapt it for monitoring patients for recurrence of tumors and for early-stage diagnosis of ovarian cancer. The system was developed with support from the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program and later tested with support from the Bridge Project.

 Aneuploidy in Prostate Cancer

MIT News

May 15, 2019

Prostate cancers with higher levels of aneuploidy—an abnormal number of chromosomes—also come with higher lethality risk for patients, according to a new study from a Bridge Project team co-led by Angelika Amon, KI member and Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health faculty member Lorelei Mucci. Using a collection of prostate cancer tumor samples, researchers extrapolated the degree of aneuploidy from each sample's genetic sequencing information and compared it to information about patient outcomes. Patients with a higher degree of aneuploidy were five times more likely to die from the disease. The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that aneuploidy could be used to more accurately predict patients' prognosis and to identify patients who might need more aggressive treatment. 

Alpaca Punch

MIT News

May 15, 2019

In two studies appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the laboratory of Richard Hynes, KI member and Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research, showed how tumors and metastases could be imaged and treated with lightweight antibodies (or, "nanobodies") derived from alpacas. The nanobodies target the extracellular matrix (ECM), which plays important roles in cancer cell survival, invasion, and development, and is more genetically stable, less heterogenous, and easier to access than cancer cells.

The researchers, led by Mazumdar-Shaw International Oncology Fellow Noor Jailkhani, built a nanobody library for ECM proteins that were abundant in the tumor microenvironment, but absent from healthy tissues. In one study, researchers treated mouse cancer models with radioisotope-labled nanobodies. PET/CT imaging revealed clearly visible tumors and metastases. In the companion study, they used the same nanobodies to develop nanobody-based chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells to target solid tumors.

"And the Academy and awards go to..."

MIT Koch Institute

May 15, 2019

...Paula Hammond, Ed Boyden, and Aviv Regev, for their election to the National Academy of Sciences. Hammond, David H. Koch Professor in Engineering and head of MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering, is being honored for her work in nanomedicine, using biomaterials to enable targeted drug delivery and self-assembled materials systems for electrochemical energy devices. Boyden, Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, develops new tools for probing, analyzing, and engineering brain circuits. Regev, Professor of Biology, studies the molecular circuitry that governs the function of mammalian cells in health and disease. ...Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, for the 2019 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences, awarded by The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation "for discoveries and inventions of materials for drug delivery systems and tissue engineering that have had a transformative impact on human health through chemistry." This prestigious prize in chemistry and related fields was focused this year on advances that have benefited human health. Notably, Langer is the first chemical engineer to receive it.

What's On Your Plate?

eLife

April 23, 2019

Cancer cell metabolism—as well as tumor growth and drug sensitivity—is profoundly influenced by the nutrient profile of the surrounding microenvironment. However, according to new research from the laboratory of KI member Matthew Vander Heiden, the nutrient composition of tumor interstitial fluid is significantly different from the plasma that feeds normal cells. Research in mice also shows variation based on diet and tumor location and site of origin. The findings, published in eLife with former KI postdoc Alex Muir as co-senior author, suggest that model cancer cells grown in media that more closely replicate physiological nutrient levels might better predict which genes are essential to tumor metabolism. The research was funded in part by the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine and the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology.