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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 656 stories

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

New exhibits showcase trailblazing MIT women

MIT News

March 6, 2024

Featuring several KI faculty members, the exhibition, “Under the Lens: Women Biologists and Chemists at MIT 1865-2024,” will be on view in Hayden Library through June 21. Pictured from the accompanying digital exhibit: Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau (ScD ’37), the first woman to receive an ScD in Chemical Engineering, and the KI's own Paula Hammond ('83, PhD '93), fellow Course 10 alumna and first woman to head the Chemical Engineering Department.

Framework for vaccine success

MIT News

March 6, 2024

The Jaklenec Group designed a nanoparticle made from a metal organic framework (MOF) that both delivers vaccines and acts as an adjuvant to generate a strong immune response at a lower dose. In a study of mice appearing in Science Advances, the researchers showed that this MOF could successfully encapsulate and deliver part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, while also acting as an adjuvant once the MOF is broken down inside cells.   

KI alum Viktor Adalsteinsson develops liquid biopsies to detect cancer

Slice of MIT

March 6, 2024

Cancer patients who undergo surgery are often left with a frightening question: Did the surgeons get all the cancerous cells? No one wants a recurrence of disease, but additional treatments such as radiation or chemotherapy have significant side effects. That’s why Viktor Adalsteinsson PhD ’15 has been developing tools to support better-informed treatment decisions: so-called “liquid biopsies” that can detect the presence of cancer from a simple blood test.

KI faculty take on Cancer Grand Challenges 

MIT News

March 1, 2024

Michael Birnbaum will lead Cancer Grand Challenges Team MATCHMAKERS, backed by $25 million over five years. Along with Regina Barzilay and Brandon DeKosky, the team will take advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence to develop tools for personalized immunotherapies for cancer patients. In addition, Ömer Yilmaz will join team PROSPECT to help address early-onset colorectal cancers.