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Print Edition StoriesWednesday, October 28, 2009
MIT grant applies physics to cancer research
By Mass High Tech staff
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The National Cancer Institute has awarded MIT with a five-year grant, valued at $3.5 million per year, to create a new Physical Science-Oncology Center. The grant will enable MIT physical scientists to engage in four cancer research projects.
MIT is one of 12 institutions to form physics-oncology centers, with the goal of bringing non-traditional approaches to cancer research. The institute applies physical laws — such as computational modeling and statistical analysis — to the research.
Alexander van Oudenaarden, MIT physics professor, will direct the Physical Science-Oncology Center, which will also include input from researchers at the Whitehead Institute, the Broad Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Stanford University, University of California at San Francisco and Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands. Van Oudenaarden and Tyler Jacks, director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, are studying the evolution of cancerous colon stem cells.
A second funded project — headed by MIT associate professor of biological engineering Scott Manalis, Harvard Medical School professor Marc Kirschner and Koch Institute professor Angelik Amon — will study single cell progression and evolution.
The third project, focused on cancer-affected signal networks in T cell lymphomas, will be researched by MIT’s Arup Chakraborty, professor of chemical engineering, chemistry and biological engineering, and the University of San Francisco Medical School’s biologists Jeroen Roose, Kevin Shannon and Benjamin Braun.
Leonid Mirny, associate professor of Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Shamil Sunyaev will research the micro-evolutionary process of cancer as the fourth grant-awarded project.
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