The Trio visits MIT ahead of the first day of school

Nico, Max, and Arabella had a field trip to MIT to see Mom’s office while waiting for the start of their elementary school year. They learned about o-chem from Neil Garg’s coloring books and drew lots of pictures of viral particles and antibodies on Mom’s whiteboard before heading off for a proper Kendall Square lunch. Little brother Sebastian stayed at daycare. It will be interesting to see how many of the Koehler-Vegas clan turn out to be scientists. With two science parents, we’re betting on a least one following in our footsteps.

Welcome Morgan, Bonnie, Ben and Huarui!

Wow! We have had a recent influx of new folks to the lab.

Morgan Stilgenbauer joined the lab in early 2021. She received her PhD in Biochemistry from Kent State where she worked on novel cisplatin molecules through the lenses of chemistry, biochemistry, and cancer cell biology. She will be joining a Koch-Pfizer project team focused on a suite of historically challenging targets and road-testing new industry-academic training models. She has also worked on targeting UPS machinery related to MYC post-translational stability.

Bonnie Su joined the lab in the summer of 2021 as a new graduate student from the Department of Biology. Prior to MIT, Bonnie earned her Bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley in Molecular and Cell Biology with Honors and High Distinction. She also minored in Bioengineering, making her a great fit for MIT! After graduation, she worked at ViewPoint Therapeutics, building skill sets in assay development and biophysics with a view toward impacting diseases of vision, including cataracts and presbyopia. We think she will be our lab’s new biophysics and structural biology whiz kid.

Benjamin Leu joined the lab in August 2021 as a research technical associate and SMM specialist. Ben will be the ultimate lab node, interacting with folks to make and screen SMMs across a variety of targets. Ben comes to us from UT Austin, where he recently graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry.

Huarui Cui joined the lab in September 2021 and comes to us from Will Pomerantz’s lab at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities as a recently hooded Chemistry PhD. Huarui will join Morgan in the quest to tackle oncogenic transcription factors like MYC and MYB by interfering with UPS. Her previous experience working on BET bromodomain inhibitors will certainly come in handy. As our lab has an affinity for graduates from Minnesota, she will have some big shoes to fill of one Nick Struntz, now at GSK. No pressure, ha ha.

New perspective piece in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery!

Congratulations to Maddy Henley for her new perspective piece ‘Advances in targeting ‘undruggable’ transcription factors with small molecules’ appearing in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

Congratulations to Mo Toure on his RISE Award!

Congratulations are in order for our very own Mo Toure for being honored with the MIT RISE Emerging Leader Award. This award is in recognition of a student in our community who has shown a passion and affinity for diversity and inclusion work. The Emerging Leader Award recognizes a member who has already made significant contributions to the community and has demonstrated the potential for leadership and continuing service. Mo, you make use proud and your efforts truly enrich MIT and the wider community.

Goodbye and good luck!

As we happily say goodbye to 2020, we want to say goodbye and good luck! to several lab members who moved on to new positions this year. Best of luck to these former members: Dr. Brice Curtin now at Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Nick Struntz now at GlaxoSmithKline, Dr. Yulong Su now in China, and Dr. Shelby Doyle now at MIT’s Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics.

Despite the ongoing pandemic, the Koehler lab will be looking to say hello to some new faces in 2021. The new year will bring training opportunities to advance defined, funded projects in probe discovery for tough targets. Potential postdoctoral candidates with backgrounds in cancer biology, transcription, biochemistry, synthetic chemistry, chemical biology should reach out directly to Professor Koehler at koehler@mit.edu.

Until then, again, we’ll say goodbye 2020! And we hope you enjoy a healthy and hopeful holiday season.

New paper out in Cell Chemical Biology!

We are thrilled to share a story emerging from our androgen receptor program is now available for download at Cell Chemical Biology!

This work, co-led by Dr. Andre Richters and Dr. Shelby Doyle, has been a long-running effort from our team focused on prostate cancer, who discovered KI-ARv-03, a selective CDK9 inhibitor with potent activity in castration resistant prostate cancer models. The initial discovery was supported through a partnership with Janssen Pharmaceuticals and validated in collaboration with the lab of Dr. Steven Balk through the Koch Institute and Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC) Bridge Project. More recently this project grew to collaborative effort between our lab, colleagues at the Therapeutic Innovation Center at Baylor College of Medicine, and Kronos Bio, Inc., who optimized KI-ARv-03 to produce KB-0742.

We are grateful to the entire team of authors and extend congratulations to all!

REFERENCE: *André Richters, *Shelby K. Doyle, David B. Freeman, Christina Lee, Becky S. Leifer, Sajjeev Jagannathan, Florian Kabinger, Jošt Vrabič Koren, Nicholas B. Struntz, Julie Urgiles, Ryan A. Stagg, Brice H. Curtin, Deep Chatterjee, Sebastian Mathea, Peter J. Mikochik, Tamara D. Hopkins, Hua Gao, Jonathan Branch, Hong Xin, Lori Westover, Gilles C. Bignan, Brent A. Rupnow, Kristen L. Karlin, Calla M. Olson, Thomas F. Westbrook, Joseph Vacca, Chris M. Wilfong, B. Wesley Trotter, Douglas C. Saffran, Norbert Bischofberger, Stefan Knapp, Joshua W. Russo, Ian Hickson, James R. Bischoff, Marco M. Gottardis, Steven P. Balk, Charles Y. Lin, Marius S. Pop, Angela N. Koehler. “Modulating Androgen Receptor-Driven Transcription in Prostate Cancer with Selective CDK9 Inhibitors.” Cell Chemical Biology. Open Access Published: October 20, 2020 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chembiol.2020.10.001

Congratulations, Mo and Jasmin!

We are proud to announce that Mohammed Toure and Dr. Jasmin Krüll have both received fellowships to support their academic training and scientific projects.

Mohammed, a Biological Engineering graduate student, has received the Ludwig Center at MIT's Koch Institute Graduate Fellowship to support his exploration of KI-ARV-03 derivatives in metastatic cancer models.

image from ki.mit.edu

Jasmin, a Postdoctoral Fellow with a background in chemistry, has been selected for the Walter Benjamin Programme, a two year postdoctoral fellowship program funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). In addition to this honor, she has also been selected for the Convergence Scholars Program at the Koch Institute, where she will receive additional professional development and leadership training.

Congratulations, both—well done!

New paper out in ACS Chemical Biology!

We are excited to share that our collaborative effort to discover chemical probes for the cytokine IL-4 is now available for download at ACS Chemical Biology!

This work led by our collaborators in the laboratory of Dr. Arturo Vegas at Boston University was championed in our lab throughout the project’s lifetime by Becky Leifer. The newly published story describes the discovery and validation of the first known small molecule inhibitor of IL-4.

We extend congratulations to all involved!

Sean P. Quinnell, Becky S. Leifer, Stephen T. Nestor, Kelly Tan, Daniel F. Sheehy, Luke Ceo, Shelby K. Doyle, Angela N. Koehler, and Arturo J. Vegas. “A Small-Molecule Inhibitor to the Cytokine Interleukin-4.” ACS Chemical Biology 2020 15 (10), 2649-2654