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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.

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Welcome to Langermania

Harvard Business Review

February 28, 2017

KI member Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, has been doing laps around the press circuit, but don't plan on him slowing down anytime soon. Most recently, Langer was featured as "The Edison of Medicine" in Harvard Business Review via an in-depth profile detailing his illustrious accomplishments as an academic and entrepreneur. The article includes business advice from Langer himself — as well as success stories about research by Langer Lab postdocs Oliver "Ollie" Jonas and Mark Tibbitt. The projects described, respectively supported in part by the Koch Institute's Frontier Research Program and S. Leslie Misrock Frontier Research Fund for Cancer Nanotechnology, highlight the culture of the lab itself and the important role that mentorship plays in transforming ideas into impact.

Langer also headlined an article in WIRED showcasing his contributions to smarter drug delivery, namely his work with polymers to create long-lasting pills and drugs. Finally, Langer got personal with the science-based human interest blog Humans of Science as he talked about his career, inspirations, and motivations. (Phew!)

What's Your Damage?

Nature Medicine

February 27, 2017

Are all chemotherapies created equal? Researchers in the laboratories of KI members Michael Hemann and Stephen Lippard analyzed the mechanisms of action of three common platinum-based chemotherapeutics and discovered that drugs that were thought to act similarly actually kill cells in very different ways. Their results, published in Nature Medicine, suggest that our current arsenal of anti-cancer agents are not generic killers, but rather can be targeted towards specific cancer alterations to achieve optimal results.

This work was supported in part by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program through the Michael (1957) and Inara Erdei Fund and Kathy and Curt Marble Cancer Research Fund, and a Misrock Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Takeda Care of Business

MIT News

February 13, 2017

Takeda Pharmaceuticals has given a generous gift to support groundbreaking research in immuno-oncology at the KI. The gift, aimed to encourage several novel research approaches over the next two years, will allow investigators to advance their understanding of the relationship between the immune system and cancer, and accelerate the development of new immunotherapeutic approaches. Immuno-oncology, prioritized by Takeda as “arguably one of the most impactful recent breakthroughs in cancer research” has been one of the KI’s five core focus areas since its founding.

Can't Wait for the Seq-Well

MIT News

February 13, 2017

Fans of the Love Lab’s signature nanowell technology will be captivated by a new paper in Nature Methods, and by the associated opportunities to rapidly isolate and sequence RNA from complex patient samples. Working with researchers in MIT’s Department of Chemistry, KI engineers have developed an accessible, portable platform for sequencing RNA from many cells simultaneously, which allows the researchers to identify and analyze different cell types found in individual blood or tissue samples, and look for patterns in their gene expression. With expected applications for multiple diseases, including cancer, the Seq-Well approach is sure to be a blockbuster, coming soon to laboratories near you. In fact, the line is already out the door for the new Nanowell Cytometry platform in the KI’s Flow Cytometry Core Facility, and the research team has already joined forces with clinical investigators at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center to apply this technology toward discovery of new combination immunotherapies as part of the collaborative Bridge Project.

Hammond Elected to the National Academy of Engineering

MIT News

February 10, 2017

Congratulations to the Koch Institute's Paula Hammond on her election to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest professional distinctions that can be accorded to an engineer. Hammond, a David H. Koch Professor of Engineering and the Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering, is one of eight faculty members from MIT named to the 2017 NAE Election Class. A polymer chemist, she was selected for her contributions to self-assembly of polyelectrolytes, colloids, and block copolymers at surfaces and interfaces for energy and health care applications. 

Remembering Scientific Pioneer Susan Lindquist

Whitehead Institute

October 28, 2016

The Koch Institute shares its sorrow with the MIT and scientific communities over the news that Susan Lindquist, Ph.D., Member and former Director of the Whitehead Institute, and extramural KI faculty member has passed away at age 67 from cancer. Susan was well-known as a trailblazer in the study of protein folding; her research has had profound influences in fields as wide-ranging as human disease, evolution, and nanotechnology.

Our admiration for Susan goes beyond her visionary groundbreaking research. Susan was a tireless advocate for women in STEM fields, and her inspirational career is one that will be lauded for years to come. Her tenacious, vibrant, and innovative spirit was contagious, and we are incredibly fortunate to have had her as a foundational part of the KI community.

Susan was a towering figure in biomedical science, a bold and creative scientist, a wonderful mentor, a role model for women in science, and a friend,” said KI Director Tyler Jacks. "Sue will be missed greatly in our community and well beyond. Our hearts and thoughts go out to her family and to the members of her laboratory, present and past.”

Read more about Susan's life and legacy via the Whitehead Institute, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and Cell Press.

Doubling Down on Immunotherapy

MIT News

October 24, 2016

They say the best offense is a strong defense and cancer immunotherapy is just that—leveraging the body’s natural defense mechanisms to overcome cancer’s immunosuppressive nature. KI researchers have designed a new immunotherapy that combines strategies developed by the Irvine and Wittrup laboratories to activate both innate and adaptive immunity. Their approach, described in Nature Medicine and featured in Nature's Research Highlights, shows unprecedented results eliminating large, aggressive tumors in mice, and offers great potential for matching the current effectiveness of adoptive T cell transfer at a much lower cost, thus leveling the playing field for future patients across the board. It could also be customized to target multiple cancer types, while simultaneously training the immune system to tackle future challenges if new tumor cells return for an instant replay.

Predicting Tumor Response for Personalized Cancer Care

MIT News

October 10, 2016

The KI’s Manalis lab, in partnership with clinicians and other researchers working under the auspices of the KI-DF/HCC Bridge Project, has mobilized their suspended microchannel resonators to quickly and accurately analyze how mass accumulation of cells in individual patients’ tumors changes after exposure to different drugs.

Thinking Outside the Dish

Cell Metabolism

October 10, 2016

Cell metabolism has been called the "Achilles Heel" of cancer, an opportunity to attack tumors as they consume essential nutrients to feed their hyperproliferative nature. However, many of the experiments exploring how cancer cells metabolize these nutrients are conducted in plastic dishes, several steps removed from an in vivo environment.

To more faithfully model these processes, researchers in the KI's Vander Heiden lab infused tumor-bearing mice with isotope-labeled glucose and glutamine (two important molecules for fueling cancer cell replication and proliferation) and compared their fates in both tumor and normal tissue. In both situations, glucose was converted to lactate at an expectedly elevated rate (cancerous cells are commonly observed to increase lactate production) but the cells' utilization of glutamine did not increase, a starkly different result than that observed in analogous experiments performed in tissue culture.

The conclusion that in vitro results cannot be applied uniformly to in vivo environments is not unexpected, but it is indicative of the importance of understanding the context in which metabolic processes occur. Using in vivo metabolic tracking presents an exciting opportunity for probing the metabolic properties of multiple tumor types in vivo, and can lead to novel insights into the biology of human cancers. Mouse models that faithfully recapitulate human cancers will be critical for identifying tumors' vulnerabilities within a given tissue and give researchers a "heel" up on designing therapies that target cancer metabolism

A New Release on Life

MIT News

September 14, 2016

Nanoparticles are becoming an attractive option for targeted cancer therapy, but do these new delivery methods interfere with their cargo's functions? The Hemann Lab teamed up with the MIT Department of Chemistry’s Johnson Lab to measure cell response to their previously developed high capacity nanoparticles.