Prof. Tyler Jacks, president of the nonprofit Break Through Cancer, speaks to The New York Times’ Gina Kolata about his research on resistance to the drug daraxonrasib in pancreatic cancer patients. “We all believe that daraxonrasib and other KRAS inhibitors are important initial steps [for treating pancreatic cancer],” says Jacks. In the future, the research will lead to, “one day, cures.”
For Fortune, reporter Barry Werth highlights the groundbreaking research of the late Prof. David Baltimore, founding director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT, who “independently discovered an enzyme essential for the reproduction of retroviruses such as HIV, which spread by inserting their genes into the DNA of host cells and hijacking the cells’ chemical machinery to make copies of themselves.” “Few investigators were more qualified or better positioned to understand how to stop HIV from spreading,” writes Werth.
Prof. Jonathan Weissman speaks with The New York Times’ Emily Baumgaertner Nunn about epigenome editing, including a single injection that would silence a gene in the liver that destroys receptors responsible for clearing LDL cholesterol. “This is sort of the ultimate one-and-done treatment,” says Weissman. “I don’t think we know enough to be able to do it at the moment, but it is not so far off from what’s imaginable.”
MIT researchers have discovered that peptides “not only survive in highly concentrated sulfuric acid but take on stable 3D conformations too,” writes Chemical & Engineering News’ Fionna Samuels. “The project started with a new collaboration between [Prof. Sara] Seager and the MIT chemist [Prof.] Mei Hong,” notes Samuels. “In the years since finding phosphine signals in Venusian clouds, Seager had been working her way through the building blocks of life—nucleic acids, amino acids, and lipids—to see if any survived concentrated acid exposure.”
Writing for Forbes, Arvid Ernst Gollwitzer, a research scholar at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, spotlights FINGERS-7B, an AI foundation model for Alzheimer’s prevention his research team developed at MIT. “By analyzing signals spanning everything from genetic risk factors to long-term environmental exposures, the model detects patterns that no single-domain approach could find,” writes Gollwitzer. “These patterns, which we call multi-omic precision signatures, represent a new kind of biomarker for gauging early disease risk.”
Sonia Vallabh, Director of Prion Therapeutic Science at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, speaks to Nature’s Josie Glausiusz about her journey co-leading an initiative to develop preventive drugs for prion disease, a rare, lethal neurodegenerative disease that is caused by misfolded proteins that kill neurons. “In pre-symptomatic people at risk, if we can lower the amount of normal protein, I’m hoping we can delay or even prevent the formation of the first misfolded prion,” says Vallabh.
Prof. Sebastian Lourido speaks to Boston Globe reporter Lindsay Crudele about the safety of local produce amidst the current cyclospora outbreak. “There are many features of local agriculture that are less susceptible to the spread of these kinds of diseases,” says Lourido.
The life and work of the late Nobel laureate Prof. Susumu Tonegawa, founding director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, is spotlighted by The New York Times’ Dylan Loeb McClain. “Few scientists have reshaped our understanding of biology as profoundly,” says Prof. Myriam Heiman, director of the Picower Institute. “His intellectual fearlessness, extraordinary creativity and relentless pursuit of fundamental questions opened entirely new frontiers in both immunology and neuroscience.”
A new study by MIT researchers finds high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diets may increase the risk of certain intestinal cancers, writes Newsweek’s Daniella Gray. “The researchers say future studies will be needed to better understand how specific dietary fats influence cancer risk and whether modifying the composition of ketogenic diets could reduce potential harms while preserving any health benefits,” writes Gray.
Prof. Brett McGuire joins Peter O'Dowd, host of WBUR’s “Here & Now,” to discuss astronomers’ discovery of Erythrulose, the sugar found in raspberries, in clouds of gas about 25,000 light-years away from Earth. “By a chemist's formal definition this is a sugar—given its structure, the way its atoms are bonded together,” says McGuire. "It’s not the sort of sugar that we think of as involved in making things sweet for us. But it is still a sugar in that it is a compound that stores energy and is involved in biological processes that access that energy and allow it to be used by living organisms."
MIT researchers found that the keto diet, which emphasizes low carbs and sugar, could increase the risk of tumors in the small intestine, explains New York Post reporter Allie Yang. The researchers found that “cells burning fat (from ketosis) start a chain reaction which leads to stem cells multiplying rapidly, increasing the chance they go out of control and become cancer,” Yang explains.
The Guardian’s David Kohn points to a study by Prof. Siniša Hrvatin that proposes targeting the preoptic area of the brain to induce torpor (a hibernation-like state) as a solution for astronauts to survive long term space travel. “Key aspects of the circuit appear to be conserved across different animals,” says Hrvatin. “I think we can use it to modify metabolism.”
MIT researchers have developed a non-invasive, wearable pacemaker that stimulates the heart using ultrasound, writes Physics World reporter Tami Freeman. “For cardiac pacing, we envisage that the final goal of NUP [Non-Invasive Ultrasound Pacemaker] technology is to be a permanent alternative to a long-term implanted pacemaker,” says Prof. Xuanhe Zhao. “More broadly, we are interested in expanding ultrasound-enabled bioelectronic medicine beyond cardiac pacing toward other organs and therapeutic applications where non-invasive, spatially precise modulation could have clinical impact.”
MIT researchers have found that colon cancer cells can “change their identity, allowing them to travel through the body and form new tumors,” reports Daniella Gray for Newsweek. The findings could point to future treatments that can prevent metastasis—the leading cause of death for colorectal cancer patients, Gray explains.
New York Times reporters Gina Kolata and Rebecca Robbins highlight how university researchers at MIT and Harvard laid the groundwork for the development of a new treatment for pancreatic cancer that “could wind up being the most significant advance in cancer treatment in 15 years, since the arrival of immunotherapy.” They write: “In 1982, Robert Weinberg, a scientist at MIT, made one of the seminal discoveries about how RAS genes fuel some cancers.”