Welcome Yulong, Julie, and Florian!

The start of the new year brought three new faces to our team. The lab is pleased to welcome Dr. Yulong Su, Julie Urgiles, and Florian Kabinger!

Yulong received his PhD in in cancer biology from Oregon Health & Science University in 2017. His thesis work was conducted under Dr. Rosalie Sears and detailed previously uncharacterized mechanisms of c-Myc regulation through post-translational modifications that affect localization to the nuclear pore basket. He will be joining the MYC-focused team, where his knowledge of c-Myc biology will be a welcome addition.

Welcome, also, to Julie, a medical student in the Harvard-MIT Health Science & Technology (HST) program.  Julie received a B.S. in Chemistry from Cornell in 2017 and will join our group for the research portion of her training. She will be joining the existing team focused on oncogenic transcription factors in prostate cancer, where she will leverage her skills in synthetic organic chemistry to enable target engagement studies for small molecule probes in development against some of our favorite targets.

And, lastly, welcome, Florian! Florian is a visiting masters students from the University of Applied Sciences in Austria, supported by Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellowship. He brings expertise in molecular biology and biochemistry techniques, which both the adenoid cystic carcinoma team and the prostate cancer team are delighted to fold into ongoing mechanism of action studies for chemical probes currently in development.

Welcome, all!

Congratulations Shelby!

Congratulations to Shelby Doyle for winning the first annual Peter Karches Mentorship Prize.

This prize, newly established in memory of the late Peter Karches, is awarded to up to four postdocs or graduate students in recognition of the important role trainees play in the mentorship of high school and undergraduate students working in KI laboratories.

Congratulations, Shelby!

Karches Prize winners (left to right): Peter Westcott, Kim Nguyen, Shelby Doyle, Amanda Whipple. Photo taken from the Koch Institute news page.

Congratulations to Brice!

Dr. Brice Curtin has been named as a Convergence Scholar through the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine and the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine Convergence Scholars Program.

“The Convergence Scholars Program (CSP) provides postdoctoral trainees opportunities to further their experiences and skills beyond the research laboratory. Scholars will learn more about science project development by approaching it from various angles, including policy and regulations, technology transfer, education and outreach, business and finances, industry, and the clinic.”

Congrats, Brice!

2019 CSP Class (left to right): Brice Curtin (Koehler Lab), Leslie Chan (Bhatia Lab), Sean Smith (Hammond Lab), Padmini Pillai (Langer Lab), Neelkanth Bardhan (Belcher Lab), Sharanya Sivanand (Vander Heiden Lab, front row), Pau Creixell (Yaffe Lab, back row), Piotr Kowalski (Anderson Lab), and Hannah Watkins (Irvine Lab). Photo taken from CPCM webpage.

Koehler Lab featured in MIT's Spectrum

In the latest issue of MIT’s Spectrum magazine, which focuses on the Kendall Square ecosystem, Dr. Koehler is interviewed for a piece on the biotech start-up’s fueling the area. Read more here!

Cover art from this quarter’s edition. Illustration by Marcus Martinez SM ’12.

Kronos Bio opens shop at Lab Central!

In order to translate the work our group has been pursuing over the past decade into the clinic, the Koehler Lab is excited to share that late last year Dr. Koehler co-founded the company Kronos Bio. 

Kronos, through a partnership with Two River, has assembled a top-notch launch team and secured an excellent space in LabCentral, the shared laboratory for biotech innovation space down the street from our group at the Koch Institute. Under the recently announced leadership of Dr. Norbert Bischofberger, the Kronos team will be leveraging the small molecule microarray (SMM) platform and extensive know-how in biological assay development to pursue novel therapies against some of the most important and intractable targets in cancer research.

Koehler Lab at AACR Annual Meeting 2018

The Koehler Lab--old and new members--was in attendance at this year's AACR Annual Meeting in Chicago. 

Dr. Koehler chaired an educational session for the Chemistry in Cancer Research (CICR) working group "From Chemistry to the Clinic: Part 1 - Chemical Probes for Identifying and Validating Drug Targets." Members of the group focused on targets in prostate cancer were able to attend to gain exposure to advances and discoveries across multiple disciplines represented at the meeting. They were also able to catch up with old pals--an important part of the chemistry that goes into good science.

Graduate student Shelby Doyle with former Koehler Lab research scientist Marius Pop and postdoc's André Richters and Helen Evans taking a Cab into town between sessions.

Congratulations to Nick, Rob and Shelby!

Congratulations are overdue, but well deserved for Dr. Nick Struntz, who was one of four post doctoral researchers to be awarded the MIT-GSK Gertrude B. Elion Research Fellowship. This new fellowship program in honor of the trailblazing Nobel laureate, Gertrude B. Elion, is awarded to select post doctoral associates focused on drug discovery and development who are pursuing fund research that has the potential to transform and modernize drug discovery. Congrats, Nick! 

Photo of the awardees (Nick is second from the left) included with the MIT News press release

Additional congratulations to Rob Wilson, who received the Fall 2017 Wishnok Prize for the Bioengineering and Toxicology Seminar (BATS), and to Shelby Doyle, who received Honorable Mention for Spring 2018 prize. Fantastic to see such great representation of the group by all of our graduate students in this important seminar series.

New Look--And New Faces!

Welcome to the new look for the Koehler Lab website!

In order to better share our science with our fellow scientists and curious members of our wider community, we have streamlined our page and updated our content. We hope you'll take the time to click around to see what's new, but we wanted to be sure to start with some new faces in the lab!

Early this year we welcomed post doctoral associate Dr. Brice Curtin. Brice received his PhD in chemistry from UCLA in 2017. His thesis work, which focused on synthetic peptidomimetics to target anti-apoptotic protein-protein interactions, was conducted under Dr. Partick Harran. He will be joining the MYC-focused team, where we are eager to see him leverage his knowledge of organic chemistry and protein-protein interactions. Welcome, Brice!

Welcome, to Catherine Henry, a graduate student in Biological Engineering at MIT!  Catherine received a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2016 and joins us from a year spent working at the Nation Cancer Institute (NCI) on in vitro models for colorectal cancer. She will be joining the existing team focused on oncogenic transcription factors in prostate cancer, and is very interested in developing the next generation of chemical technologies for tackling tough targets.

And last, but certainly not least, welcome to our littlest yet of young members, Sebastián Arturo Jensen Vegas, born on July 26th and waving hello in his work onesie. As you can see, the rest of the Koehler-Vegas subgroup is pleased to meet him and enjoying his company.

It should also be said that all of these 'hellos' have also meant we've recently said 'good luck!' to several members moving on from the lab to new positions. Good luck to those who have recently moved on: Dr. Helen Evans to ImmunoGen, Dr. Dave Freeman to Kronos Bio, Kimia Ziadkhanpour to Mount Sinai. As well as good luck to our recently departed visiting students now finishing up their theses at their home institutions: Jasmin Krüll, MS at Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen (Germany) and Rui Traquete at Instituto de Medicina Molecular (Portugal).

Stay tuned for more updates on news from the Koehler Lab!