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Portraits of 2024 Amon Award winners

Meet the 2024 Amon Award Winners

MIT Koch Institute

The Koch Institute at MIT is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Angelika Amon Young Scientist Award, Anna Uzonyi and Lukas Teoman Henneberg. The prize was established in 2021 to recognize graduate students in the life sciences or biomedical research from institutions outside the United States who embody Dr. Amon’s infectious enthusiasm for discovery science. 



 

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In Fond Remembrance

MIT News

The KI community mourns the loss of Herman Eisen, a professor emeritus of biology and founding faculty member of the MIT Center for Cancer Research (CCR), who died Nov. 2 at age 96. Over a 70-year career, Eisen forged a path as a pioneering immunologist whose research has significantly shaped the field. He joined the MIT faculty in 1973, having been recruited by CCR founder Salvador Luria. Eisen retired from MIT in 1989, albeit only in the official sense: As a professor emeritus, he maintained an active laboratory and continued to advise students and postdocs, research, and publish until his very last day. “Herman was a true treasure: an inspiring colleague, a caring mentor, and a wonderful human being,” says Tyler Jacks, director of the Koch Institute and David H. Koch Professor of Biology. “We all aspire to be Herman Eisen.”

Life Lessons from 34 Years of Fighting Cancer

TEDx Cambridge

Just like in life, there are no turn-by-turn directions when it comes to cancer research.  At TEDxCambridge, Koch Institute Director Tyler Jacks shared insights from his 34 years in the "maze" of cancer research.

The Inside Story: Implantable Technology Improves Treatment

MIT Koch Institute

Working on implantable devices for drug delivery, KI member Michael Cima, David H. Koch Professor of Engineering, hopes to make cancer treatments safer, more effective, and more convenient. As these implantable devices advance toward the clinic, so does the promise for improving patient outcomes and experiences. 

RNA Combination Therapy for Lung Cancer Offers Promise for Personalized Medicine

MIT News

Researchers in the Jacks, Anderson, and Langer Labs report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have successfully delivered nanoparticles carrying small RNA therapies in a clinically relevant mouse model of lung cancer to shrink tumors and slow their growth. They found that their nanoparticle treatment extended life just as well as a standard-care chemotherapy drug, and furthermore, that the combination therapy of the nanoparticles and the drug together prolonged life by about an additional 25 percent. “Small-RNA therapy holds great promise for cancer,” Jacks says. “It is widely appreciated that the major hurdle in this field is efficient delivery to solid tumors outside of the liver, and this work goes a long way in showing that this is achievable.”

Cancer Immunotherapy Gets Flashy

MIT Koch Institute

Pom-poms, foam fingers, umbrellas, T-shirts, whistles…all the ingredients the KI community needs to hack the immune system to fight cancer. On April 25, approximately 180 friends, colleagues, and strangers gathered to turn cutting-edge biotechnology into a larger-than-life battle behind the KI building as part of the annual Cambridge Science Festival. Documented with words and video, the third annual biology flash mob was a smashing success, educating students and adults alike about the promise of adoptive T cell transfer and cancer immunotherapy. Well, maybe not such a success for the redshirts, who, as cancer cells, suffered a rather humiliating defeat at the hands T cells' aforementioned pom-poms and foam fingers…but at least they had fun.

Langer Wins Kyoto Prize, Biotechnology Heritage Award

The Boston Globe

On June 20, the Inamori Foundation in Japan announced that Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, won the Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology in the Biotechnology and Medical Technology field. The Kyoto Prize is presented annually to those who have made significant contributions to the “scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind.” Langer was specifically recognized as an interdisciplinary pioneer in the fields of medicine and engineering. He will receive his prize in Kyoto on Nov. 10. Later in the month, Langer also received the 2014 Biotechnology Heritage Award from the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the Biotechnology Industry Organization. This annual award honors an individual who has made significant contributions to the growth of biotechnology. "Bob is truly one of the great biotechnology pioneers," said Carsten Reinhardt, CHF's president and CEO, citing Langer’s contributions to tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and controlled drug-delivery systems.

Double Trouble for Aggressive Cancers

MIT News

KI researchers led by Paula Hammond, David H. Koch Professor of Engineering, and Michael Yaffe, the David H. Koch Professor of Science, have engineered new, “smart” nanoparticles that directly target tumor cells to deliver multiple drugs in a staggered, precisely-timed regimen.

In 2012, the Yaffe Lab showed that the timing of drug administration can make a great difference in the success of combination treatments. Yaffe’s team discovered that pre-treating tumor cells with erlotinib, a therapeutic that shuts down uncontrolled tumor growth, before administering a DNA-damaging agent called doxorubicin, is more effective than giving the two drugs simultaneously.

As part of efforts to adapt the findings for patient care, Yaffe enlisted the help of KI colleague Paula Hammond. Hammond and her team designed dozens of nanoparticles to carry Yaffe’s treatment and found that liposomes, small droplets covered in a fatty shell, were most effective. With the first drug, erlotnib, injected in the outer layer, and the second, doxorubicin, contained in the inner core, the liposomes dispatched treatment to the cells at ideal intervals as the particles broke down in the body. In the study, published in Science Signaling, this treatment was shown to effectively knock out triple-negative breast tumors and non-small-cell lung tumors in mouse models. The researchers hope to expand time-staggered treatment to other types of chemotherapy.

This work was supported in part by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program through the Kathy and Curt Marble Fund for Cancer Research.

Three Companies: Sasisekharan Startups Please Crowd

MIT News

“It’s about the impact we can have on patient care,” says Ram Sasisekharan, KI faculty member and the Alfred H. Caspary Professor of Biological Engineering and Health Sciences and Technology, about his biotech startups. The three companies, profiled in MIT News, combine cutting-edge bioengineering with entrepreneurial spirit and, like so many other enterprises coming out of KI laboratories, find new ways to apply academic research to real world problems. Sasisekharan’s 2006 startup, Cerulean, is one of a handful of companies using nanotechnology to treat cancer, while his latest venture, Visterra, has an eye toward global health. His first company, Momenta (originally Mimeon), transforms the sequencing of complex molecules into the development of powerful, efficient, low-cost therapeutics. All three reside within minutes of the KI and owe their success to what Sasisekharan calls a “melting pot of people, ideas, opportunities” and “the convergence of biology, analytics, computation, and engineering” within the MIT ecosystem.

Cima Develops a Sensor for Measuring Tumors’ Oxygen Levels

MIT News

A new sensor for measuring oxygen levels around tumors has been developed by researchers from the laboratory of KI faculty member and David H. Koch Professor in Engineering Michael Cima. The sensor, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is an injectable device made of silicone, which is picked up in MRI scans. The sensor is the first MRI contrast agent that can be left in the body for long periods of time, allowing for the collection of oxygen tension over several weeks. Given that cancer cells thrive without oxygen and tumors in low-oxygen environments are generally more aggressive and resistant to treatment, long-term monitoring of oxygen tension will provide new insights into tumor growth and could aid therapeutic choices and tracking of treatment response.

Triple Threat: A New Breed of Nanoparticles

MIT News

MIT chemists from the laboratory of Jeremiah Johnson and researchers from the group of KI faculty member and David H. Koch Professor in Engineering Paula Hammond have come together to develop a new method for building nanoparticles that carry the drugs cisplatin, doxorubicin, and camptothecin—three drugs that are often used in a combination treatment for ovarian cancer. In a study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Johnson and colleagues demonstrated that the triple-threat nanoparticles could kill ovarian cancer cells more effectively than particles carrying only one or two drugs.

Instead of building a particle and then binding a drug, the new approach uses drug-loaded building blocks that can be attached to others in a very specific structure. The team is now working on four-drug particles with the goal of developing new treatment regimens that could better target cancer cells while avoiding the toxic side effects of traditional chemotherapy. “This is a new way to build the particles from the beginning,” Johnson said. “In principle, there’s no limitation on how many drugs you can add.”