News

Density detector

MIT News

May 30, 2025

Scott Manalis, collaborating with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's Keith Ligon, has developed a technique to measure single-cell density for predicting whether immunotherapies will work in a patient or how a tumor will respond to drug treatment. This method, detailed in Nature Biomedical Engineering, originated as a project funded in part by the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine.   

Bravo: smarter breast cancer scans

NBC Boston

May 30, 2025

Recently featured on NBC Boston, Cima Lab alum Canan Dagdeviren is developing wearable ultrasound technology for early breast cancer detection. The device, embedded in a bra, delivers results for less than $3 and sends data to the cloud and the patient’s doctor, offering a valuable tool for diagnosing early stage tumors in high-risk patients.  

MIT Advocacy in Action at the AACR’s 2025 Hill Day

Koch Institute

May 29, 2025

MIT Koch Institute postdoc Meaghan McGeary traveled to Washington, DC to advocate for increased federal funding for cancer research as part of the annual American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Hill Day. Joining other early-career scientists in a mission to make more than 50 congressional visits in a single day, she shared her experiences with policymakers, emphasizing the importance of stable research funding.  

AI ready to ADAPT

MIT Jameel Clinic

May 23, 2025

Regina Barzilay, with collaborators at MIT’s Jameel Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital, have received ARPA-H ADAPT funding for AURORA, an AI-driven platform to personalize cancer treatment. By integrating imaging, molecular, and clinical data, the team aims to predict resistance and tailor therapies—advancing adaptive precision medicine for lung, colon, and breast cancer

Investigating sex differences in glioblastoma

May 19, 2025

Glioblastoma is the most aggressive form of brain cancer. The tumor affects males more frequently and severely than females, and while treatment resistance and survival statistics are uniformly poor, females show significantly higher rates of both one-year and mean survival.  With support from the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program and the Samuel (1966) and Benjamin (2000) Krinsky Research Fund, the Page lab is investigating the biological mechanisms behind these differences in hopes of uncovering new and targeted ways to intervene therapeutically.

Self-Starters: Built-In Boosters

MIT News

May 15, 2025

The Jaklenec and Langer labs have developed microparticles that deliver multiple doses of vaccines in a single injection. Described in Advanced Materials, these particles release payloads at precise intervals—potentially eliminating the need for booster shots and benefiting children in areas where follow-up care is hard to access. 

Cryptic Clues to Pancreatic Cancer

MIT News

May 8, 2025

Researchers from the labs of Tyler Jacks and KI alum William Freed-Pastor uncovered cryptic peptides presented on the surface of pancreas cancer cells for the first time. Cryptic peptides, found in healthy cells and other tumor types, derive from genome sequences not known to code for any protein. The discovery may lead to more effective immunotherapies for pancreatic cancer, which has one of the lowest survival rates and few effective treatments. A study appearing in Science and funded in part by the Lustgarten Foundation identified 500 pancreatic cancer-specific cryptic peptides. After testing 30, the team found 12 peptides could stimulated immune responses in cell culture, and the resulting data was used to engineer T cells capable of stopping or significantly slowing tumor progression in different cancer models. Freed-Pastor and his team at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have begun developing a therapeutic pancreatic cancer vaccine that targets cryptic antigens.  

Where Universities Matter Most

MIT Sloan School

May 7, 2025

Universities are crucial to innovation—not just through research, but also training people who turn discoveries into patents, products, and startups. A new study from MIT Sloan School of Management and Copenhagen Business School shows that in US regions with low innovation activity, these university contributions can account for more than 10% of local patents and 14% of new inventors, an even stronger influence than in more economically productive areas. 

Tailor-made genes

MIT News

April 30, 2025

Katie Galloway and her team developed synthetic gene circuits that enable more precise control of gene therapy. Their research, published in Cell Systems, could lead to new treatments for fragile X syndrome and other diseases caused by mutations in a single gene, ensuring more safe and effective therapeutic outcomes.

Resistance mapping yields novel drug combination

Cell Systems

April 30, 2025

A new Cell Systems paper from the White lab identified mechanisms that enable resistance to cancer therapies, offering new opportunities to intervene for better patient outcomes. Mapping cell-wide signaling networks remodeled by therapy in unprecedented depth, the study reveals new insights into cancer cell plasticity and demonstrates a new drug combination repurposing a leukemia drug against melanoma. This work was supported in part by the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine and a graduate fellowship from the Ludwig Center at MIT.