Bridge Project

The Bridge Project is a collaboration between the Koch Institute and the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer  Center (DF/HCC), designed to bring bioengineering and clinical oncology together to solve today’s most challenging problems in cancer research and care.  Through seed funding for collaborative research teams comprised of both MIT and DF/HCC investigators, the Bridge project will foster interdisciplinary studies that wed new tools and methods from the bioengineering world with the translational expertise of clinical oncologists.  Our plan is to raise and deploy a minimum of $15M of innovative investment into transformative target areas over 5 years.

The Bridge Project is designed to reach beyond existing individual networks to establish new ties between unmet clinical needs and technological solutions that have not traditionally been connected. While the potential for fundamentally new insights into cancer research is exciting, a substantial challenge lies in “bridging” a significant divide – in scientific language, experimental approaches, and tranditional expertise. Through this program, catalytic financial support will jumpstart pilot cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional, multi-investigator research.

Bridge Project funding will focus on bringing into the lives of patients new technical advances related to cancer detection and monitoring, targeted drug delivery, rapid mapping of drug resistance, and sustaining cancer-specific immune responses. Brain cancer, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, and ovarian cancer will be the initial clinical foci of this research effort. Likely to be included in the early Bridge Project funded efforts are new tools to deliver drugs to recalcitrant cancer tissues, newly engineering methods to rapidly define patient-specific molecular vulnerabilities, and new embedded sensors that can rapidly assess if drugs being used are working.

Current Bridge Projects include:

• “Combined therapy to convert tumors into in situ cancer vaccines,” a collaboration between Darrell Irvine, Ph.D.  and Shannon J. Turley, Ph.D.
• “Targeted siRNA therapy delivery for T cell leukemia”, a collaboration between Dane Wittrup, Ph.D.  and Harald von Boehmer, M.D., Ph.D. 

The Bridge Project is jointly led by:

• Susan Hockfield, Ph.D., President, MIT
• Edward J. Benz, Jr., M.D., President and CEO, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
• David M. Livingston, M.D., Deputy Director of the DF/HCC
• Tyler Jacks, Ph.D., Director, Koch Institute
• David Nathan, President Emeritus, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute