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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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Blazing Trails in Biopharma

Endpoints News

December 23, 2020

Dragonfly Therapeutics Head of Biology Ann Cheung is featured among Endpoints News’ top trailblazers in biopharmaceutical research & development. The profile chronicles her career transitions from her early years as the lone immuno-oncology researcher in the Jacks Lab to her current role moving NK cell therapies from bench to bedside. Longtime Koch Institute member Aviv Regev is also recognized for her groundbreaking work in single cell sequencing, computational biology, and genetics.

Division of Liver

Nature Communications

December 16, 2020

The Shalek Lab codiscovered a mechanism that helps damaged livers function while they regenerate. A study appearing in Nature Communications showed that liver cells increase transcription of important genes ahead of proliferation, and may even divide labor between cells that proliferate and those that maintain core functions. This contributes to a larger effort to identify stem cells in normal and cancerous liver tissue, and is funded in part by the MIT Stem Cell Initiative.

Bringing Computers Into the Protein Fold

MIT School of Science

December 14, 2020

The Keating Lab mixes lab work, modeling and, most recently, machine learning to understand how protein sequences determine their interactions. While the COVID-19 crisis disrupts lab research, Keating’s team is focusing on computational projects, including exploring interactions between “short linear motifs” and a family of proteins implicated in metastasis. 

The Long History of Rapid Vaccine Development

MIT Koch Institute

December 11, 2020

In the 1970s, Phillip Sharp and his colleagues on the fifth floor of the MIT Center for Cancer Research set out to unravel the mysteries of tumor virology, cancer genetics, and cell biology. Looking at parts of the adenovirus genome responsible for tumor development, Sharp had long wondered why RNA in the nucleus was longer than RNA found outside the nucleus in the cytoplasm. While this curiosity led to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of split genes and spliced RNA, neither Sharp nor his colleagues were thinking about the possibility of mRNA vaccines at the time. Nevertheless, that discovery, together with many years of mRNA research and key technology advances like nanoparticle delivery of RNA, set the stage for companies such as Pfizer and Moderna to develop mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines with record speed.

The discoveries that enabled RNA vaccines | RNA vaccines explained

Live and Let Liver

MIT News

December 8, 2020

The Cima Lab has developed a non-invasive diagnostic tool to assess liver damage. The technology, described in Nature Biomedical Engineering, uses nuclear magnetic resonance to measure fat content and detect scarring that can be indicative of fatty liver disease and a precursor to fibrosis, both known risk factors for cancer.

Barzilay Argues for Equity in AI-Influenced Health Care

Stat News

December 3, 2020

Machine learning pioneer Regina Barzilay is holding AI developers to a higher standard, flagging commonly-used machine learning models as likely perpetrators of health care inequities. Barzilay cites her experience image-based breast cancer risk prediction, where existing AI models assessed white women’s risks more accurately than for women of African and Asian descent. (subscription required)

Conducting Research in a New Way

MIT News

November 24, 2020

A new imaging technique from the Boyden Lab, published in Cell, identifies up to five different molecule types from random, distinct locations throughout a cell, uncovering a full “symphony” of cellular activity. The technology will be instrumental in understanding how cell signaling differs between cells from healthy and diseased tissue. 

Small Molecule, Big Potential

MIT News

November 20, 2020

A multidisciplinary team from the Koehler Lab identified a compound that could target key proteins in advanced prostate cancer, as well as a variety of other cancer types. The compound, KI-ARv-03, works by selectively binding to an androgen receptor cofactor known as CDK9, thereby destabilizing androgen receptor proteins in a key pathway contributing to the development of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) and curbing the expression of associated oncogenes. The study appears in Cell Chemical Biology and was supported in part by the Koch Institute-Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Bridge Project, the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, and Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., via the Transcend partnership.

Kronos Bio, co-founded by Koehler, has developed a more powerful version of the CDK9 inhibitor, KB-0742 and recently received IND clearance to begin a Phase 1/2 clinical trial in 2021. Preclinical tests in cell lines and mouse models revealed significantly reduced tumor growth in CRPC models and other oncogene-addicted cancers.

Age of Senescence

MIT Biology

November 16, 2020

The Hemann and Walker labs previously discovered that the compound JH-RE-06 enhanced the tumor-shrinking effects of DNA-damaging chemotherapies. While they expected JH-RE-06 to amplify programmed cell death induced by DNA damage, two studies appearing in PNAS showed that JH-RE-06, or genetically ablating the pathway targeted by JH-RE-06, instead puts tumor cells in a permanently dormant state known as senescence. Because senescent cells are often cleared by immune cells, these findings suggest a complementary approach to traditional chemotherapies. 

Growing Evidence

bioRxiv

November 13, 2020

In a biorxiv paper posted two days before Amon’s passing, researchers in her group, with collaborators in the Lees and Yilmaz labs, illuminate the relationship between stem cell size and function, and tissue aging. Despite great variability in cell size and shape between tissues, stem cells are invariably small. The Amon lab’s studies present evidence that small size is critical for hematopoietic stem cell function. Analyses of these cells also showed that they get progressively bigger with organismal aging, and that the larger stem cells are less functional. These findings suggest that large size causes stem cell function to decline during aging. This work was partly supported by the MIT Stem Cell Initiative.