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Portraits of 2024 Amon Award winners

Meet the 2024 Amon Award Winners

MIT Koch Institute

September 3, 2024

The Koch Institute at MIT is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Angelika Amon Young Scientist Award, Anna Uzonyi and Lukas Teoman Henneberg. The prize was established in 2021 to recognize graduate students in the life sciences or biomedical research from institutions outside the United States who embody Dr. Amon’s infectious enthusiasm for discovery science. 



 

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Takeda Care of Business

MIT News

February 13, 2017

Takeda Pharmaceuticals has given a generous gift to support groundbreaking research in immuno-oncology at the KI. The gift, aimed to encourage several novel research approaches over the next two years, will allow investigators to advance their understanding of the relationship between the immune system and cancer, and accelerate the development of new immunotherapeutic approaches. Immuno-oncology, prioritized by Takeda as “arguably one of the most impactful recent breakthroughs in cancer research” has been one of the KI’s five core focus areas since its founding.

Can't Wait for the Seq-Well

MIT News

February 13, 2017

Fans of the Love Lab’s signature nanowell technology will be captivated by a new paper in Nature Methods, and by the associated opportunities to rapidly isolate and sequence RNA from complex patient samples. Working with researchers in MIT’s Department of Chemistry, KI engineers have developed an accessible, portable platform for sequencing RNA from many cells simultaneously, which allows the researchers to identify and analyze different cell types found in individual blood or tissue samples, and look for patterns in their gene expression. With expected applications for multiple diseases, including cancer, the Seq-Well approach is sure to be a blockbuster, coming soon to laboratories near you. In fact, the line is already out the door for the new Nanowell Cytometry platform in the KI’s Flow Cytometry Core Facility, and the research team has already joined forces with clinical investigators at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center to apply this technology toward discovery of new combination immunotherapies as part of the collaborative Bridge Project.

Hammond Elected to the National Academy of Engineering

MIT News

February 10, 2017

Congratulations to the Koch Institute's Paula Hammond on her election to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest professional distinctions that can be accorded to an engineer. Hammond, a David H. Koch Professor of Engineering and the Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering, is one of eight faculty members from MIT named to the 2017 NAE Election Class. A polymer chemist, she was selected for her contributions to self-assembly of polyelectrolytes, colloids, and block copolymers at surfaces and interfaces for energy and health care applications. 

Remembering Scientific Pioneer Susan Lindquist

Whitehead Institute

October 28, 2016

The Koch Institute shares its sorrow with the MIT and scientific communities over the news that Susan Lindquist, Ph.D., Member and former Director of the Whitehead Institute, and extramural KI faculty member has passed away at age 67 from cancer. Susan was well-known as a trailblazer in the study of protein folding; her research has had profound influences in fields as wide-ranging as human disease, evolution, and nanotechnology.

Our admiration for Susan goes beyond her visionary groundbreaking research. Susan was a tireless advocate for women in STEM fields, and her inspirational career is one that will be lauded for years to come. Her tenacious, vibrant, and innovative spirit was contagious, and we are incredibly fortunate to have had her as a foundational part of the KI community.

Susan was a towering figure in biomedical science, a bold and creative scientist, a wonderful mentor, a role model for women in science, and a friend,” said KI Director Tyler Jacks. "Sue will be missed greatly in our community and well beyond. Our hearts and thoughts go out to her family and to the members of her laboratory, present and past.”

Read more about Susan's life and legacy via the Whitehead Institute, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and Cell Press.

Doubling Down on Immunotherapy

MIT News

October 24, 2016

They say the best offense is a strong defense and cancer immunotherapy is just that—leveraging the body’s natural defense mechanisms to overcome cancer’s immunosuppressive nature. KI researchers have designed a new immunotherapy that combines strategies developed by the Irvine and Wittrup laboratories to activate both innate and adaptive immunity. Their approach, described in Nature Medicine and featured in Nature's Research Highlights, shows unprecedented results eliminating large, aggressive tumors in mice, and offers great potential for matching the current effectiveness of adoptive T cell transfer at a much lower cost, thus leveling the playing field for future patients across the board. It could also be customized to target multiple cancer types, while simultaneously training the immune system to tackle future challenges if new tumor cells return for an instant replay.

Predicting Tumor Response for Personalized Cancer Care

MIT News

October 10, 2016

The KI’s Manalis lab, in partnership with clinicians and other researchers working under the auspices of the KI-DF/HCC Bridge Project, has mobilized their suspended microchannel resonators to quickly and accurately analyze how mass accumulation of cells in individual patients’ tumors changes after exposure to different drugs.

Thinking Outside the Dish

Cell Metabolism

October 10, 2016

Cell metabolism has been called the "Achilles Heel" of cancer, an opportunity to attack tumors as they consume essential nutrients to feed their hyperproliferative nature. However, many of the experiments exploring how cancer cells metabolize these nutrients are conducted in plastic dishes, several steps removed from an in vivo environment.

To more faithfully model these processes, researchers in the KI's Vander Heiden lab infused tumor-bearing mice with isotope-labeled glucose and glutamine (two important molecules for fueling cancer cell replication and proliferation) and compared their fates in both tumor and normal tissue. In both situations, glucose was converted to lactate at an expectedly elevated rate (cancerous cells are commonly observed to increase lactate production) but the cells' utilization of glutamine did not increase, a starkly different result than that observed in analogous experiments performed in tissue culture.

The conclusion that in vitro results cannot be applied uniformly to in vivo environments is not unexpected, but it is indicative of the importance of understanding the context in which metabolic processes occur. Using in vivo metabolic tracking presents an exciting opportunity for probing the metabolic properties of multiple tumor types in vivo, and can lead to novel insights into the biology of human cancers. Mouse models that faithfully recapitulate human cancers will be critical for identifying tumors' vulnerabilities within a given tissue and give researchers a "heel" up on designing therapies that target cancer metabolism

A New Release on Life

MIT News

September 14, 2016

Nanoparticles are becoming an attractive option for targeted cancer therapy, but do these new delivery methods interfere with their cargo's functions? The Hemann Lab teamed up with the MIT Department of Chemistry’s Johnson Lab to measure cell response to their previously developed high capacity nanoparticles. 

On the Origin of Mutations

Science

September 9, 2016

You can take the tumor out of the tissue, but you can’t take the tissue out of the tumor. In a paper published in Science, the KI’s Vander Heiden Lab presents strong evidence that activation and suppression of cancer-causing genes can have wildly different results in cell metabolism depending on the tumor’s tissue of origin.

To prove that tissue of origin influences tumor behavior, researchers utilized models of both pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) and non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) with identical genetic mutations. They found that despite having the same initiating events, the resulting cancer cells used branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) differently as they proliferated. Their results showed that the NSCLC tumors used free-flowing BCAAs to supply the tumor with essential growth nutrients, while the PDAC tumors decreased their use of these free BCAAs. Indeed, blocking metabolism of these BCAAs inhibited the formation of NSCLC but not PDAC tumors. As such, they concluded that therapies designed to impair tumor growth by suppressing enzymes needed for BCAA use would be most effective in NSCLC and that a different treatment plan would be required to slow the growth of PDAC tumors.

The Vander Heiden Lab’s findings suggest a shifting paradigm for personalized medicine, in which context plays as critical a role as the genetic drivers. In other words, those who seek to exploit the pathways that cancer cells employ to survive ought to consider not just how the journey begins, but also where.

A Hard Day’s Night for Tumorigenesis

MIT News

July 28, 2016

The KI's Jacks Lab wants to Let It Be known that two of the genes that control cells’ light/dark regulation are also tumor suppressors. Their experiments, conducted with Help! from a genetically engineered mouse model of non-small cell lung cancer, explore the effects of both night shift work and jet lag on tumor development and offer Something New in the search for exploitable drug targets as researchers work around the clock to fight cancer.