On January 19, 2023, faculty and staff of the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard gathered in Kendall Square, Cambridge to celebrate a significant milestone — the “topping off” of their new building. The team watched as the highest beam was lifted into place, signifying the completion of the structural phase of the project — often thought to be the…
Fundamental to Whitehead Institute’s mission of forging new frontiers in science is helping to train and develop the scientists whose curiosity, skill, and perseverance will lead them to make paradigm-shifting discoveries and to create path breaking new research tools. Whitehead prides itself on attracting bright young researchers and providing an environment in which they can do their best work.
Today in the United States, about two out of every 1,000 people live with kidney failure. For every one white person who develops the disease, three Black people do. Kidney failure, also known as end-stage renal failure or end-stage kidney disease, is the irreversible loss of kidney function. Regular dialysis or kidney transplant are the only therapies currently available. Now,…
Dan G. Duda, DMD, PhD, a researcher and the Director of Translational Research in GI Radiation Oncology at the Edwin L. Steele Laboratories at Massachusetts General Hospital, is the senior author of an article in the journal NPJ Precision Oncology, “Systemic immune modulation by stereotactic radiotherapy in early-stage lung cancer.
Flare Therapeutics closed an oversubscribed Series B funding round Wednesday counting $123 million in earnings, which it will use to advance FX-909, its lead precision oncology asset in urothelial cancer. Pfizer Ventures and GordonMD Global Investments LP led the financing. Other existing investors participated, including Boxer Capital, Eventide Asset Management and Third Rock Ventures. Flare also gained new supporters, including Novartis and Eli Lilly,…
Identifying how small molecules act to kill malaria parasites can lead to new “chemically validated” targets. By pressuring Plasmodium falciparum asexual blood stage parasites with three novel structurally-unrelated antimalarial compounds (MMV665924, MMV019719 and MMV897615), and performing whole-genome sequence analysis on resistant parasite lines, we identify multiple mutations in the P. falciparum acyl-CoA synthetase (ACS) genes PfACS10 (PF3D7_0525100, M300I, A268D/V, F427L) and PfACS11 (PF3D7_1238800, F387V, D648Y, and…
To date, the search for effective treatments for dementia has yielded only disappointments. Many recent drug candidates target the tau protein, which aggregates and forms tangles in patients’ brain tissue and is involved in 75 percent of all dementias. While tau-targeting drugs have looked promising in mouse models, they’ve failed in clinical trials. A recent study led by Kathrin Wenger, a PhD…
Millions of people, including athletes who play contact sports, members of the military and victims of domestic violence, are exposed to repetitive head impacts (RHI), which is the primary risk factor for developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Symptoms of CTE often manifest years to decades after exposure to RHI and very little is known about what happens in the brain…
After watching Jurassic Park in fifth grade, Greg Newby wrote an essay for school about his aspiration to become a genetic engineer and bring back the dinosaurs. But instead of creating prehistoric creatures, he became a different kind of genetic engineer — one who develops genome editing technologies to treat genetic diseases. As an undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon University,…
Using an RNA sensor, MIT engineers have designed a new way to trigger cells to turn on a synthetic gene. Their approach could make it possible to create targeted therapies for cancer and other diseases, by ensuring that synthetic genes are activated only in specific cells. The researchers demonstrated that their sensor could accurately identify cells expressing a mutated…
