March Bulletin

Issue 102

Community Notices

Next Marble Center seminar on March 24th

Next Marble Center seminar is on Monday March 24th (4-5pm) at the KI Luria Auditorium with a research talk by Dr. Tahoura Samad of the Bhatia lab. Following the talk, we will have a hot topic presentation by Dr. Zhiyang Jin of the Bhatia Lab on next-generation imaging technologies in oncology.

Save the date: Annual Marble Center poster symposium on Tuesday May 20th (Luria Auditorium)

The poster symposium will convene members of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and broader MIT community working on nano- and precision based approaches for the early detection and treatment of cancer. The event will be held at the Koch Institute Luria Auditorium on May 20, 3:30-5:30pm. This will be an in-person only event, and will be an excellent opportunity to highlight collaborative projects in this area and get feedback from faculty and industry members.

Multimedia

Marble Center hot topic: The promises and pitfalls of multi-cancer early detection

News

Are you ready for STAT Madness? WE NEED YOUR VOTES!

It’s March, which means it’s time to support the Koch Institute in the annual STAT Madness competition. This year, we have four projects competing for Koch Institute and MIT glory:

In Group 1, Matchup 8: the Traverso Lab’s “SQUID-INSPIRED DRUG DELIVERY” (as seen in Nature and MIT News)
In Group 2, Matchup 6: the Jaklenec, Langer, and Belcher Labs’ DYNAMIC DUO (as seen in ACS Nano and MIT News)
In Group 3, Matchup 3: the Bhatia Lab’s “PATROL” (as seen in Science Advances and MIT News)
In Group 4, Matchup 7: the Traverso Lab’s “CLAUDIA” (as seen in Med and MIT News)

In the style of NCAA Basketball’s March Madness, STAT Madness is a bracket-style tournament to find the best innovations in science and medicine. Vote to help these projects advance to the next round and promote the work happening in our labs: https://www.statnews.com/feature/stat-madness/bracket/. Please help spread the word to your friends and colleagues, and post on your own social media accounts with the link above and the hashtag #STATMadness.

Designing better ways to deliver drugs

(Michaela Jarvis) When Louis DeRidder was 12 years old, he had a medical emergency that nearly cost him his life. The terrifying experience gave him a close-up look at medical care and made him eager to learn more. “You can’t always pinpoint exactly what gets you interested in something, but that was a transformative moment,” says DeRidder.

In high school, he grabbed the chance to participate in a medicine-focused program, spending about half of his days during his senior year in high school learning about medical science and shadowing doctors. DeRidder was hooked. He became fascinated by the technologies that make treatments possible and was particularly interested in how drugs are delivered to the brain, a curiosity that sparked a lifelong passion. “Here I was, a 17-year-old in high school, and a decade later, that problem still fascinates me,” he says. “That’s what eventually got me into the drug delivery field.”

DeRidder’s interests led him to transfer half-way through his undergraduate studies to Johns Hopkins University, where he performed research he had proposed in a Goldwater Scholarship proposal. The research focused on the development of a nanoparticle-drug conjugate to deliver a drug to brain cells in order to transform them from a pro-inflammatory to an anti-inflammatory phenotype. Such a technology could be valuable in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Read more…

Achievements and challenges in mRNA, drug delivery, and other health technologies—A leading biomedical researcher’s perspective

(Ricardo Treviño) Chemical engineer, scientist, and Moderna co-founder Robert Langer shared his vision on the latest breakthroughs and challenges in various biomedical technologies, including messenger RNA (mRNA) used in vaccines and treatments, drug delivery systems, and tissue engineering. Langer was one of the keynote speakers at the 2025 Board of Directors Meeting of Tecnológico de Monterrey, held from February 16 to 18 at the Monterrey campus. The event was titled Towards 2030: Education That Transforms Realities.

In an interview, the MIT professor—who leads the renowned Langer Lab—discussed some of the cutting-edge research in biotechnology and materials science he has worked on, such as using mRNA technology to treat cancer and other diseases. As part of this research, Langer developed nanoparticles that help transport mRNA through the human body without breaking down, using materials like polymers and lipids. Read more…

Research spotlight: An electroadhesive hydrogel interface for mucosal theranostics

(Molly Ogle) Adhesive hydrogels have great potential for sealing tissue wounds, delivering drugs, and biosensing applications. However, in a rapidly renewing mucosal tissue such as the stomach or intestines, adhesive materials have a limited residence time, which restrains the duration of the associated therapy or diagnostic application. Here, Ying et al. address this challenge by using electrophoretic-stimulated adhesion of tough hydrogels containing interpenetrated cationic polymers to extend adhesion to deeper tissue layers. This system, called e-GLUE, is designed for minimally invasive endoscope-based deployment. In a porcine model, they demonstrate that the e-GLUE hydrogel can remain in the stomach for at least 30 days. In proof-of-principle studies, they demonstrate several applications of e-GLUE, including hemostasis, drug delivery, and anchoring of biosensors. These studies support further investigation of this technology for translational applications. Read more…

(***LEFT***) Schematic illustration of e-GLUE deployment with electrodes on the mucosal surface and after removal of the electrode and the electroadhesive mechanism responsible for the strong bonding between e-GLUE and mucosal tissues including a combination of active polymeric diffusion and polycationic-polyanionic cross-linking. # indicates repelled mucus. (***RIGHT***) X-ray images showing e-GLUE on the porcine gastric mucosa on day 1 and day 30 after attachment. Yellow arrows show the gastric retention location of e-GLUE labeled with x-ray opaque beads. L indicates the left view of x-ray imaging. Scale bars, 20 mm.

Job opportunities

Director, Research Development, Boston University. TThe Office of Research, which provides resources to ensure a supportive and competitive environment for research and scholarship at Boston University, seeks a Director of Research Development. The Director leads a team of research professionals to provide comprehensive proposal development services, and to respond to relevant funding opportunities. This position will provide strategic direction to a staff facilitating full-service proposal development, at the central University level, for complex, multi-million dollar interdisciplinary and/or training grant proposals submitted by faculty teams across schools/colleges and research centers and institutes. Research development services include disseminating competitive intelligence on funding programs, facilitating PI team building and ideation, writing and editing proposal sections, identifying, and securing external resources and leading external or red team review of proposals. The Director will lead and guide PIs through their submissions to a variety of federal agencies including; NSF, DoD, DoE, DARPA, NIH, ARPA-H. The Director is also responsible for responding to relevant funding opportunities, supporting the federal and foundation relations teams overseeing the limited submission processes and community funding opportunities. The Director will organize strategic workshops and events that enable faculty and researchers to submit high-quality, competitive proposals in alignment with best practices.

Postdoctoral Associate, Immunological Evaluation and Formulation of Lipid Nanoparticles. GSK is building new laboratories that will be focused on the development of state-of-the-art methods that will be supporting deep product understanding, process and product development, as well as testing of pre-clinical and clinical samples for new mRNA-based vaccines. mRNA-LNPs have achieved tremendous success in demonstrating vaccine efficacy against respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 and its emerging variants in several target populations as well as RSV in older adults. However, much work remains to be done to understand their mechanism of action. LNPs have shown to have adjuvant properties; however little is known about the mechanisms for this adjuvant effect, particularly in terms of interaction with immune cells and correlation with downstream events such as cell uptake, endosomal escape of the RNA into cytoplasm and protein expression, which ultimately contribute to mRNA vaccines’ reactogenicity/efficacy balance.

Key Responsibilities include: (1) Elucidate the adjuvant mechanism of action (MoA) of LNPs to understand its existing contribution to immunogenicity of mRNA-LNP vaccines. To do so, we will leverage the experience built in-house as well as from extensive literature search in understanding the MoA of multi-component lipid-based adjuvant systems; (2) On top of assessing the innate immune response to LNP, the candidate will correlate it with critical processes in mRNA biology, such as uptake mechanism, endosomal escape, and protein expression in established in vitro assays and in vivo models when necessary; and (3) specifically, the candidate would produce the necessary LNP(s), develop the key immunological assays as well as utilize existing techniques at GSK to answer the key questions on the role LNPs play as an adjuvant in contributing to the immunogenicity of mRNA LNP vaccines.