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Black and white photo of a bearded man in very 70s apparel standing in front of a banner with "David Baltimore" and the mirror image text'

Remembering David Baltimore

MIT Koch Institute

September 8, 2025

With sadness, the Koch Institute marks the passing of Professor David Baltimore. A founding faculty member and formative influence behind the MIT Center for Cancer Research, he was not only a ground-breaking researcher but also a compelling and thoughtful voice for science. 

His discovery of reverse transcriptase changed the prevailing scientific dogma, earned him a 1975 Nobel Prize, and directly enables work in life sciences and biomedical laboratories everywhere. His decades-long advocacy work impacted national policy debates on topics such as recombinant DNA research, the AIDS epidemic, and genome editing.

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Showing 121–130 of 660 stories

RNAi: An MIT case study

MIT News

May 13, 2024

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of cancer research at MIT, a feature story tracing Alnylam’s success in developing RNAi therapies perfectly encapsulates the transformational impact and disciplinary diversity that characterize our community.  Incorporating contributions from the Sharp and Langer Labs, with their alumni and colleagues, Alnylam has several medicines approved by the FDA and a rapidly expanding clinical pipeline.

Engineering flexibility

MIT News

May 10, 2024

Combining microbiology, bioengineering, artificial intelligence, big data, and materials science, Belcher Lab graduate student Ashutosh Kumar’s research is a microcosm of the Koch Institute’s interdisciplinary model. Classically trained as an engineer working on steel design, Kumar is studying how the microbiome of ovarian cancer affects metastasis and treatment response.  His ultimate goal is to engineer bacteriophage viruses to reprogram bacteria to work therapeutically. Bacteriophage are a mainstay of the Belcher Lab’s signature research platforms, and being developed in a number of other ways for early detection and treatment as part of a larger ovarian cancer initiative led by Belcher, along with Sangeeta Bhatia and Paula Hammond.

Documenting innovation

MIT News

May 7, 2024

A new documentary, “Pathways to Invention,” follows a diverse group of modern inventors—all of whom are Lemelson-MIT Student Prize recipients, including KI alum Geoff von Maltzahn '03, PhD '10—as they develop life-changing innovations. The program airs this summer on PBS stations nationwide, including WGBH 44 Boston on July 19.  

Al Masri wins Soros Fellowship for New Americans

MIT News

April 25, 2024

Congratulations to Riyam Al Msari, a graduate student in the Irvine and Wittrup labs, on receiving a 2024 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Al Msari arrived in the US following a childhood in Iraq shaped by war, and a transformative experience serving as primary caretaker during her mother’s battle with head and neck cancer, which inspired her work to pioneer translational cancer therapies.

It’s a hard day’s night for the liver

MIT News

April 24, 2024

Just like in our bodies, circadian rhythms in our cells and genes regulate critical processes such as immune activity and metabolism.

In a Science Advances study, the Bhatia lab developed tiny, engineered human livers, and found that many genes involved in drug metabolism are under circadian control. Because these rhythms affect how much of a drug is available to the body and how effectively it breaks it down, they could be analyzed to improve dosing schedules for drugs, including chemotherapies.

It’s the same old thing, since 1916

MIT News

April 24, 2024

Based on one equation developed in 1916 using data from nine patients, chemotherapy dosing calculations do not account for several variables that can lead to toxicity or insufficient benefit in patients.

Described in Med and funded in part by the Bridge Project, the Traverso and Langer Labs developed CLAUDIA, a closed-loop drug delivery system designed to tailor doses of chemotherapy to individual patients for maximum safety and effectiveness.

Microfluidic device reveals leukemia cell behaviors in the blood

MIT Koch Institute

April 20, 2024

Scott Manalis and Michael Hemann published a new study in Communications Biology that improves our basic understanding of circulating leukemia cell dynamics over the course of disease progression and therapeutic response.

Understanding these circulation kinetics and clearance rates can inform our biological understandings of metastasis, as well as the design of tools that target these circulating cells for cancer diagnosis, treatment and monitoring.

Killian cancer at the nanoscale

MIT News

April 10, 2024

In her 2023-24 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award lecture, Paula Hammond showcased the layers that make up her mettle, from her childhood in Michigan, to her time as a student at MIT, and then her pioneering development of layer-by-layer nanomaterials for applications in cancer, medicine and energy.

Speeding up cancer gene screening

MIT News

March 12, 2024

The Sanchez-Rivera Lab devised a method to screen for the effects of cancer-associated genetic mutations much more easily and quickly than any existing approach. In a Nature Biotechnology study of lung cancer, researchers used a variant of CRISPR genome-editing called prime editing to screen cells with more than 1,000 different mutations of the tumor suppressor gene p53 observed in cancer patients. They found that some p53 mutations are more harmful than previously thought. The technique could one day be used to determine how an individual patient’s tumor will respond to a particular treatment.

This research was funded in part by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program via the Casey and Family Foundation Cancer Research Fund, the Ludwig Center at MIT, and Upstage Lung Cancer.

Special delivery: Nanoparticles for RNA therapies

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

March 12, 2024

Sangeeta Bhatia and Georgia Institute of Technology professor James Dahlman co-edited a special PNAS issue exploring nano-sized solutions for improving delivery of RNA therapeutics.

In addition to their introduction, other KI faculty highlights include:

Targeting and monitoring ovarian cancer invasion with an RNAi and peptide delivery system | Sangeeta Bhatia with Paula Hammond

Electrostatic adsorption of polyanions onto lipid nanoparticles controls uptake, trafficking, and transfection of RNA and DNA therapies | Paula Hammond

Recent advances in nanoparticulate RNA delivery systems | Robert Langer and Daniel Anderson