Yichen Xiang awarded a Ludwig Center fellowship!

/

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!

This is cancer research at MIT

/

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