News

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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Biomedicine for the Convergent Soul

MIT Koch Institute

June 27, 2016

A new MIT report sounds the battle cry for increased collaboration and funding of integrative research bringing together physical and life sciences. Co-chaired by KI members Tyler Jacks, KI director and the David H. Koch Professor of Biology; Susan Hockfield, president emerita of MIT; and Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor, the report builds on a 2011 white paper and cites numerous examples of ground-breaking cross-disciplinary research. The report was formally presented at last month’s Convergence Forum at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (watch presentations).

Do Viruses Make You Feel Funny?

You're the Expert

June 24, 2016

What exactly does KI faculty member Angela Belcher do all day? This was the challenge presented to three comedians on a recent “You’re the Expert” podcast, which brings together academic experts and sharp-witted humorists for a deep, humorous dive into the inner workings of top research laboratories. Listen, laugh, and learn about Belcher’s work engineering viruses and bacteria to create new technologies.

Keeping Up with the Koehlers

The Secret Life of Scientists

June 21, 2016

As a chemist with an appointment in MIT's Department of Biological Engineering, KI faculty member Angela Koehler is no stranger to the challenges of navigating multiple worlds at once. On The Secret Life of Scientists, Koehler dives into cancer drug discovery, mentorship, and how she and her husband, fellow academic and former KI postdoc Arturo Vegas, balance life in the lab with parenting three under three.

Pearls Before STEM

Cell Press

June 8, 2016

“If you’re wearing pearls today,” KI faculty member Angela Belcher told the crowd assembled at the KI for “The Science of Gender and the Gender of Science", “you’re wearing a biocomposite nanomaterial.” Belcher and fellow KI faculty member Angela Koehler presented their work and professional experiences as part of Cell Press’s LabLinks event on May 19. The day’s lecture and discussion sessions, which began with a welcome and call to action by KI Executive Director Anne Deconinck, ranged from protein engineering, endocrinology, and reproduction to lab culture, and the pay gap, and did not shy away from difficult questions affecting women and men alike. The event was co-hosted by the Association for Women in Science. Learn more about the motivation behind this meeting and explore contributions by KI members and meeting participants to Cell Metabolism's Rosie Project (subscription required).

Tumors Behaving Badly

MIT Spectrum

June 6, 2016

It takes a village to raise a child, but what about shape-shifting tumors? Can they be corralled into submission? KI faculty members Douglas Lauffenburger and Michael Hemann are teaming up to create detailed profiles of tumor behavior, including their variable responsiveness to treatment, with an eye toward overcoming drug resistance and transforming tumor development models. Their approach may just be the discipline the field is calling for!

TED Live and Learn

MIT Koch Institute

June 1, 2016

KI engineers Paula Hammond, a David H. Koch Professor of Engineering, and Sangeeta Bhatia, the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology & Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, made their Broadway debuts at TED Talks Live, in partnership with PBS. Hammond unveiled “a new superweapon in the fight against cancer” (watch now) while Bhatia explored how a “tiny particle could roam your body to find tumors” (watch now). Both presentations were offered as part of the two-day Science & Wonder series within the weeklong event and preceded Bhatia’s appearance at TEDMED, during which she spoke further about her vision for miniaturization of biomedical inventions (watch now).

That's So Ninja

STAT News

May 9, 2016

“Fascinating and daunting” is how KI director Tyler Jacks describes tumors in Episode 10 of STAT’s SIGNAL podcast. Jacks joined former advisor and Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus and others to talk with STAT’s Luke Timmerman and Meg Tirrell about cancer’s dirty, sneaky ability to evolve, evading both the immune system and treatment, in “Cancer is a low-down, gangster ninja.” Listen online; Jacks makes his first of several appearances around the five-minute mark.

Personalized Drug Device Enters Clinical Trials

American Association for Cancer Research

April 20, 2016

Figuring out which drugs will work best for an individual patient can be challenging and time-consuming, if not impossible. Last spring, however, KI postdoc Oliver Jonas published his development of a microdevice that can be implanted into tumors, using a biopsy needle, to test the efficacy of multiple cancer therapeutics or combinations. At this year's AACR annual meeting, Jonas presented preclinical results on the device, which has also been used to uncover new methods of drug resistance. He described updates to the device, which can now hold up to 100 different drugs or combinations as well as relay results in real-time, and he announced the launch of the first clinical trials of the device.

Jonas is a member of the laboratories of Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, and Michael Cima, a David H. Koch Professor of Engineering. This work was supported in part by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program.

Timing is of the Essence

Washington Post

March 14, 2016

Cancer patients often endure a battery of different drug treatments to find a therapy that works. Scientists have known for some time that genetics help explain why certain drugs may work on one person and not on another, but new findings by KI members Michael Hemann and Doug Lauffenburger suggest that the timing of these treatments may also be a critical factor. Tumors evolve through various stages, and the team’s study shows that sensitivity to a particular drug can depend on the stage at which it is administered. Their findings indicate that there may be windows of opportunity for drugs that had previously been written off as failures for individual patients. Hemann and Lauffenburger hope that modeling methods will predict tumor evolution and improve targeted therapies to help combat drug resistance. This research was supported in part by the Go Mitch Go Foundation.

Fueling Cancer Growth

MIT News

March 7, 2016

Glucose is the main source of fuel that cancer cells use to divide and reproduce uncontrollably. For some time, this had led scientists to believe that most of the cell mass in new cancer cells comes from glucose. Now new findings from a group including KI members Eisen and Chang Career Development Professor Matt Vander Heiden and Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor Scott Manalis, suggest that the largest source for new cell material is amino acids, which growing cells consume in considerably smaller quantities than glucose. The paper, published in Developmental Cell, offers a new way to look at cancer metabolism, a process that Vander Heiden mentioned in a recent NPR interview plays an important role in cancer development.