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!