Congratulations to Yichen for another fellowship. The Takeda Fellowship was established by Takeda Pharmaceuticals Ltd. in 2020 and provides graduate student support for students conducting research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and health in the MIT School of Engineering. Yichen’s project focuses on impacting pediatric drug discovery, a vastly underfunded area of research.
Angela has joined the board at The Engine Accelerator, a public benefit corporation that convenes the ‘tough tech’ community, offering access to specialized labs, equipment, tools, space, and infrastructure as well as resources and services necessary to build transformative technologies. The Engine was spun out of MIT in 2016 with the purpose of bridging the gap between discovery and commercialization for the most promising inventions, so that they don’t get stuck in a lab.
We bid farewell to Dr. Toshihiko Aiba, a visiting scientist from Ono Pharmaceuticals. Toshi spent the last two years in the group woking on a collaborative project between the Koehler Lab and the Calo Lab at MIT Biology, emphasizing chemical probe discovery for an RNA-binding protein that plays with come of our other favorite proteins. Keep your eyes out for a biorxiv in the fall! The group celebrated Toshi as an outstanding scientist and a very kind group member at Mestizo in Cambridge.
On April 22nd, our own Mo Toure successfully completed his PhD thesis, focused on the development of degraders of the CDK9 transcriptional kinase and systems biology approaches to compare degradation versus inhibition of the enzyme. This was a very special defense in that Mo has been both a Harvard undergraduate and an MIT graduate student in the lab. Mo will stick around MIT to explore both medical and commercial translation of the CDK9 degraders and recently successfully acquired a grant with the Johnson Lab in MIT Chemistry to explore degrader-antibody conjugates for CDK9.
Congratulations to Bocheng Wu for being named a 2023-2024 Convergence Scholar. See the story here.
Congratulations to Yichen Xiang, a second-year BE graduate student, for her recent fellowship award from the Ludwig Center at MIT’s Koch Institute! Yichen is applying her biological engineering skills to tackle ‘the most undruggable of the undruggable’ proteins, transcription factor fusion proteins implicated in pediatric cancers. Specifically, she is working to target the PAX3-FOXO1 fusion protein, which is pathogomonic in pediatric alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma (aRMS). Yichen is running small molecule screens to target protein complexes that contain PAX3-FOXO1 and collaboratively advancing PROTAC candidate to degrade the fusion in RMS cells. She hopes to expand the approaches that she is using for RMS to other fusion-positive pediatric cancers. Go Yichen!
At the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, scientists and engineers work come together to solve some of the most difficult problems in cancer. We ask big questions in strategic areas, where the answers have big impacts on how we understand and treat cancer. Through extensive collaboration with academic, clinical, and industry partners, we make sure that discoveries and innovations made in our laboratories are translated as rapidly as possible into tools and treatments that improve patient survival and quality of life.
Check out Koehler Lab scientists Andrea Casiraghi, Becky Leifer, and Mo Toure in the video. They are making and screening small molecule microarrays and evaluating CDK9 degraders in the film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-my7fRyeDwY
In what will hopefully become an annual lab event, the lab headed to TD Garden to watch the Celtics beat the Heat. It was a fun night with pub food, good B-ball, and the Prince and Princess of Wales (visiting Boston for the EarthShot Prize ceremony). Good times.
The Koehler Lab aims to innovate in the earliest stages of drug discovery by building chemical tools or technologies to assist in the process of target validation and by expanding the repertoire of protein targets that are considered to be druggable. We focus primarily on building chemical tools and methods for studying temporal aspects of transcriptional regulation in development and disease with a focus on cancer.
The Koehler Lab is supported through the generosity of our public and private funding partners.
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