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Two tumor cells, one with forcefield. two blue spheres with green and purple spheres on them

Kinase Closed: Shutting Down Cancer's Escape Routes

MIT News

March 26, 2026

Forest White and Cameron Flower PhD ’24 have uncovered why drugs that inhibit tyrosine kinase signaling pathways, such as imatinib (Gleevec), fail in some patients.  By analyzing tumor phosphoproteomics, the White Lab team found that many resistant cells are intrinsically wired to resist tyrosine kinase inhibitors: backup signaling networks are already running to support vital functions such as cell growth and division, even when tyrosine kinase inhibitors work as intended. 

As reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers overcame this resistance in cell models by pairing a tyrosine kinase inhibitor with a drug that targets the backup pathway—an approach currently in clinical trials for lung cancer. 

“We are really excited to watch these clinical trials and to see how well patients do on these combinations. And I really think there’s a future for using tyrosine phosphoproteomics to guide this clinical decision-making,” White says. The research was funded in part by the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine.
 

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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

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.