News

Introducing the 2025 Karches Prize winners

November 25, 2025

Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Peter Karches Mentorship Prize: Fangtao Chi, Emma Dawson, Amy Lee, and Richard Van. 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.

Alice Hall Named Rhodes Scholar

MIT News

November 17, 2025

Congratulations to Alice Hall on being named a 2026 Rhodes Scholar! A senior majoring in chemical engineering, Hall (pictured, second from left) worked in the Langer Lab to improve lung viability for transplantation by investigating alveolar-capillary barrier function. At Oxford, she will pursue graduate work advancing sustainable heating and cooling technologies

Ankyra doses first patient

Business Wire

November 17, 2025

Ankyra has begun trials of its lead candidate, ANK-101, an anchored IL-12 drug conjugate initially engineered in the Wittrup and former Irvine Labs with support from KI trainee fellowships and the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine. Given in combination with checkpoint blockade immunotherapy, ANK-101 will be evaluated for treatment of patients with lung cancer. 

Predicting Better Lipids

Nature Biotechnology

November 13, 2025

Lipid nanoparticles are the leading delivery vehicle for mRNAs across biomedical applications, each requiring its own nanoparticle design and optimization. In a cover-winning Nature Biotechnology paper, the Anderson and Langer Labs used machine learning approaches to evaluate 1.6 million lipids in silico, to expedite successful designs for mRNA delivery to the lungs in animal models.

Inspired engineering  

MIT News

November 13, 2025

At MIT’s 2025 Nano Summit, KI faculty showcased drug delivery technologies that took design cues from unexpected places to address what MIT HEALS faculty director Angela Koehler calls "some of the most transformative problems in human health." Ana Jaklenec explained how she borrowed techniques from the microelectronics and semiconductor industries to fabricate single-injection, multi-dose vaccine microparticles. Giovanni Traverso highlighted ingestible drug delivery systems inspired by squid and remora.

Near-Perfect Response for Elicio’s Vaccine

Investing.com

November 7, 2025

Elicio Therapeutics’ cancer vaccine—designed to train the immune system to attack KRAS-mutated tumors—continues to show strong promise. In a Phase 2 trial, it induced immune responses in 99% of evaluable pancreatic cancer patients, with 88% responding to their own tumor-specific mutation.

Mini Brains, Major Insights  

MIT News

November 5, 2025

A study led by Robert Langer and Li-Huei Tsai of the Picower Institute, presents “miBrains,” a 3D human brain tissue platform designed for disease modeling and drug testing. Described in PNAS, the customizable, scalable models are cultured from donors’ induced pluripotent stem cells, and integrate all major brain cell types.  

Mapped to purrfection

MIT News

November 4, 2025

Burge Lab researchers have created KATMAP, a framework for predicting gene splicing. While DNA is the same across most cells in an organism, gene splicing allows RNA to be remixed to support cells specialized for different tissues. Described in Nature Biotechnology, KATMAP can be used to investigate how splicing mutations give rise to diseases such as cancer and how nucleic acid therapies influence splicing. 

Can we demystify endometriosis?

WNYC Studios

November 3, 2025

On NPR’s Science Fridays, Linda Griffith highlights challenges in endometriosis—from ‘squeamishness’ around basic conversations to difficulties in clinical diagnosis—and promising research innovations in modeling and treatment. Her own patient-derived models are advancing this work, including collaborative efforts via the MIT Stem Cell Initiative to understand biological structures that may help maintain healthy endometrium and its stem-like properties.

Pumped to Beat Drug Resistance

Nature Communications

October 20, 2025

Anthracyclines are powerful chemotherapy drugs, but cancer cells can resist them by building efflux pumps—proteins that act like molecular “bouncers,” kicking drugs out of the cell. The Hemann, Yilmaz and Lippard labs have designed a “dual warhead” that retains anthracyclines’ cancer-killing power while circumventing efflux by adding features of platinum-based chemotherapies. A Nature Communications study demonstrates that the drug conjugate extended survival in mouse models of metastatic colon cancer and suggests new opportunities to combat chemoresistance and augment existing chemotherapeutics. This work was partly funded by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program via the Casey and Family Foundation Cancer Research Fund and the Michael (1957) and Inara Erdei Fund.