Congratulations to Yichen for another fellowship. The Takeda Fellowship was established by Takeda Pharmaceuticals Ltd. in 2020 and provides graduate student support for students conducting research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and health in the MIT School of Engineering. Yichen’s project focuses on impacting pediatric drug discovery, a vastly underfunded area of research.
Angela has joined the board at The Engine Accelerator, a public benefit corporation that convenes the ‘tough tech’ community, offering access to specialized labs, equipment, tools, space, and infrastructure as well as resources and services necessary to build transformative technologies. The Engine was spun out of MIT in 2016 with the purpose of bridging the gap between discovery and commercialization for the most promising inventions, so that they don’t get stuck in a lab.
We bid farewell to Dr. Toshihiko Aiba, a visiting scientist from Ono Pharmaceuticals. Toshi spent the last two years in the group woking on a collaborative project between the Koehler Lab and the Calo Lab at MIT Biology, emphasizing chemical probe discovery for an RNA-binding protein that plays with come of our other favorite proteins. Keep your eyes out for a biorxiv in the fall! The group celebrated Toshi as an outstanding scientist and a very kind group member at Mestizo in Cambridge.
On April 22nd, our own Mo Toure successfully completed his PhD thesis, focused on the development of degraders of the CDK9 transcriptional kinase and systems biology approaches to compare degradation versus inhibition of the enzyme. This was a very special defense in that Mo has been both a Harvard undergraduate and an MIT graduate student in the lab. Mo will stick around MIT to explore both medical and commercial translation of the CDK9 degraders and recently successfully acquired a grant with the Johnson Lab in MIT Chemistry to explore degrader-antibody conjugates for CDK9.
The Koehler Lab aims to innovate in the earliest stages of drug discovery by building chemical tools or technologies to assist in the process of target validation and by expanding the repertoire of protein targets that are considered to be druggable. We focus primarily on building chemical tools and methods for studying temporal aspects of transcriptional regulation in development and disease with a focus on cancer.
The Koehler Lab is supported through the generosity of our public and private funding partners.
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