News

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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Did you eat your Wheaties?

MIT 24 Hour Challenge

March 12, 2020

Greetings, cancer fighters! TODAY the Koch Institute is throwing down in MIT’s 24-Hour Challenge. At stake is critical, unrestricted support for research, trainees, and cutting-edge equipment to keep the KI on the frontline of progress against cancer. In this year’s challenge all gifts benefit the Koch Institute Director’s Fund, where gifts from 120 donors will unlock an anonymous challenge gift of an extra $10K.

But wait, there’s more! Gifts from an additional 30 donors will unlock another $15K from Steve Corman '58, SM ’61, who for years has led by example on challenging oneself to do more to fight cancer. That’s an extra $25,000 up for grabs to advance research and training. Today’s challenge is all about the KI community coming together to support innovative solutions for cancer. Learn more about how you can help clinch this challenge!

Speaking Frankly

MIT Koch Institute

March 8, 2020

Cancer patients rarely get to meet the researchers behind their treatments, and cancer researchers rarely get to put a name or face to the people who benefit from their work. Yet, that’s precisely what happened when retiree Frank Lovell and postdoc Jesse Patterson chatted after the Koch Institute’s recent SOLUTIONS with/in/sight.

Frank was a participant in a clinical trial showcased that evening, for a prostate cancer combination therapy pairing the widely-used targeted therapy abiraterone with the Plk1 inhibitor onvansertib. The trial also represents a powerful synergy, starting with the Yaffe Lab and their Bridge Project clinical collaborators, and catalyzed by a chance connection with west coast biotech Trovagene. For patients like Frank, this combination is turning out to be far greater than the sum of its parts.

Convening on COVID

Boston Globe

March 5, 2020

Sangeeta Bhatia is co-chairing the Proposal Selection Task Force for the newly formed Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness. Bringing together clinicians and scientists from the Boston and Cambridge communities, the consortium aims to accelerate the development of diagnostic tools, treatments, and vaccines for the COVID-19 pandemic.

New Model for Neuroblastoma

Whitehead Institute

March 4, 2020

The laboratories of Rudolf Jaenisch and Stefani Spranger, the Howard S. (1953) and Linda B. Stern Career Development Professor, have developed a mouse to study tumor development and immune response in neuroblastoma, a rare form of childhood cancer that has proven difficult to study in animal models. The mice, described in a study appearing in Cell Stem Cell, were modified to include human cells in parts of the nervous system.

Deep Learning at IAP

MIT News

February 24, 2020

Bhatia Lab grad student Ava Soleimany is helping to spread machine-learning tools into research labs across MIT with IAP course 6.S191 Introduction to Deep Learning. Co-designed and taught with Alexander Amini, her class begins with machine learning basics and culminates with students making real-world applications of their own. The pair were inspired to create the course through their own experiences using machine learning in research—Soleimany develops nanosensors for the early detection of lung cancer (supported by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program via Upstage Lung Cancer).

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.