News

Viktor Adalsteinsson

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.

Filter by

Filter by Title/Description

Filter by Topic

Filter by Year

Showing 391–400 of 537 stories

Amon Wins 2020 HFSP Nakasone Award

Human Frontier Science Program

February 24, 2020

Congratulations to Angelika Amon, the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor of Cancer Research, on receiving the 2020 HFSP Nakasone Award! The award, given by the Human Frontier Science Program, honors scientists who have made important breakthroughs in the life sciences. This year's award is given in recognition of Amon's “discovery of aneuploidy-induced cellular changes and their contribution to tumorigenesis, which paved the way for exploiting aneuploidy as a therapeutic target in cancer treatment.” 

Niche Interest

Cancer Research

February 5, 2020

The Hynes Lab sheds light on how metastatic tumor cells adapt to survive in different locations. Analysis of the extracellular matrix (ECM) surrounding breast cancer metastases, published in Cancer Research, revealed that tumor and local cells each contribute different proteins to create ECM niches that vary from organ to organ.

Personalized Medicine and Medleys

MIT News

February 2, 2020

Meet Swarna Jeewajee, MIT senior, soprano, and aspiring physician-scientist. She balances her work in the Hemann Lab researching therapeutic vulnerabilities in near-haploid leukemia with her a capella group Singing for Service, which performs in nursing homes and rehabilitation centers throughout the Boston area. Her passion for patient-centered medicine is informed both by her experiences as an MIT student and by her own medical history, growing up in Mauritius with a poorly understood hearing loss and a transformative surgery to correct it in 2018.

Battling Bias in Boston Biotech

Washington Post

January 29, 2020

A survey of seven MIT science and engineering departments quantifies how many biotech startups have been lost to gender bias: 40. The study, which compared the relative proportion of female faculty members (22%) to woman-founded companies (10%), got its start at the 2018 Xconomy Prize gala. Nancy Hopkins—no stranger to measuring gender bias—told the story of a woman in venture capital who carried a list of 100 VC-funded Boston biotechs, 99 of which were founded by men. Hopkins’s KI colleagues Sangeeta Bhatia, entrepreneur and founder of Glympse Bio, and MIT President Emerita Susan Hockfield heard the speech and joined with Hopkins to brainstorm strategies for addressing this imbalance. Their conversation grew into the Boston Biotech Working Group, which carried out the survey and is spearheading several programs to boost the number of women biotech founders. 

Syros Begins CDK7 Inhibitor Trial

Syros

January 28, 2020

Syros Pharmaceuticals, co-founded by Bridge Project collaborators Richard Young and Nathanael Gray, has launched a Phase 1 trial of SY-5609. Potent and highly selective, the drug has broad applicability across a range of cancers, including resistant and hard-to treat tumors. It targets the CDK7 gene to combat increased oncogene expression and uncontrolled cell cycle progression.

Trip the Light Fan-gastric

MIT News

January 17, 2020

The Langer and Traverso Labs developed a light-sensitive hydrogel for gastrointestinal devices. Devices made with the gel break down when triggered by an ingestible LED, eliminating the need for surgical removal. The work, published in Science Advances, has numerous applications for long-term drug delivery, monitoring, and sensing.

Hojun Li Joins the KI

MIT Koch Institute

January 10, 2020

Welcome to Hojun Li, MD, PhD, the KI’s new Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Clinical Investigator. A pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Hospital, he recently received a 2020 Scholar Award from the American Society of Hematology.

Dr. Li studies normal and pathologic hematopoietic stem cell development, conditions that predispose children and adults to leukemia, and novel treatments to prevent blood cancers in these patients.   

A Perfect 10 for 2020

MIT Koch Institute

January 10, 2020

The Koch Institute is ringing in the New Year with a 10/10—again! For more than a year, the Koch Institute community has been working on the renewal process for our Cancer Center Support Grant from the National Cancer Institute. Since MIT’s then-nascent Center for Cancer Research was distinguished as an NCI-designated Cancer Center in 1974, the grant has been recompeted every five years, requiring an extensive written application (more than 1,000 pages!) and an intense site visit. Given the vulnerability of federal research funding, there are no guarantees of success. Yet not only has the Koch Institute’s grant been formally approved for renewal, but it was given a perfect score of 10. We received the same score at our last recompete, in 2014. Join us in raising a glass to our faculty members, trainees, technicians, and staff who worked so hard to put the grant together and to defend it during the site visit!

Mind Your PNAS QnAs

MIT Koch Institute

January 6, 2020

PNAS queries Sangeeta Bhatia, director of the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, on her work building protease-based diagnostic tools, including probes—potentially delivered by a nebulizer—that distinguish between benign and malignant lung nodules. Other highlights include diagnostic tools for pneumonia and a rare genetic disease called α-1 antitrypsin deficiency.

Better Foundations for Breast Cancer Diagnostics

MIT Koch Institute

December 13, 2019

Foundation Medicine, co-founded by KI member Eric Lander, reports two advances in breast cancer diagnostics. The FDA approved the FoundationOne CDx test to select patients for treatment of HR+/HER2- breast cancer with PIK3CA mutations. In a clinical study, the company’s FoundationOne liquid biopsy test accurately predicted the risk of recurrence for early-stage triple-negative breast cancer.