On Nov. 7, a team from the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at MIT showed a Washington audience several examples of how nanotechnologies developed at the Institute can transform the detection and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

The team was one of 40 innovative groups featured at “American Possibilities: A White House Demo Day.” Technology on view spanned energy, artificial intelligence, climate, and health, highlighting advancements that contribute to building a better future for all Americans.

Participants included President Joe Biden, Biden-Harris administration leaders and White House staff, members of Congress, federal R&D funding agencies, scientists and engineers, academics, students, and science and technology industry innovators. The event holds special significance for MIT as eight years ago, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory participated in the last iteration of the White House Demo Day under President Barack Obama.

“It was truly inspirational hearing from experts from all across the government, the private sector, and academia touching on so many fields,” said President Biden of the event. “It was a reminder, at least for me, of what I’ve long believed — that America can be defined by a single word... possibilities.”

Launched in 2016, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine was established at the Koch Institute for Integrative Research at MIT to serve as a hub for miniaturized biomedical technologies, especially those that address grand challenges in cancer detection, treatment, and monitoring. The center convenes Koch Institute faculty members Sangeeta Bhatia, Paula Hammond, Robert Langer, Angela Belcher, Darrell Irvine, and Daniel Anderson to advance nanomedicine, as well as to facilitate collaboration with industry partners, including Alloy Therapeutics, Danaher Corp., Fujifilm, and Sanofi. 

Ana Jaklenec, a principal research scientist at the Koch Institute, highlighted several groundbreaking technologies in vaccines and disease diagnostics and treatment at the event. Jaklenec gave demonstrations from projects from her research group, including novel vaccine formulations capable of releasing a dozen booster doses pulsed over predetermined time points, microneedle vaccine technologies, and nutrient delivery technologies for precise control over microbiome modulation and nutrient absorption.

Jaklenec describes the event as “a wonderful opportunity to meet our government leaders and policymakers and see their passion for curing cancer. But it was especially moving to interact with people representing diverse communities across the United States and hear their excitement for how our technologies could positively impact their communities.”

Jeremy Li, a former MIT postdoc, presented a technology developed in the Belcher laboratory and commercialized by the spinout Cision Vision. The startup is developing a new approach to visualize lymph nodes in real time without any injection or radiation. The shoebox-sized device was also selected as part of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023 and is currently being used in a dozen hospitals across the United States.

“It was a proud moment for Cision Vision to be part of this event and discuss our recent progress in the field of medical imaging and cancer care,” says Li, who is a co-founder and the CEO of CisionVision. “It was a humbling experience for us to hear directly from patient advocates and cancer survivors at the event. We feel more inspired than ever to bring better solutions for cancer care to patients around the world.”

Other technologies shown at the event included new approaches such as a tortoise-shaped pill designed to enhance the efficacy of oral medicines, a miniature organ-on-a-chip liver device to predict drug toxicity and model liver disease, and a wireless bioelectronic device that provides oxygen for cell therapy applications and for the treatment of chronic disease.

“The feedback from the organizers and the audience at the event has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Tarek Fadel, who led the team’s participation at the event. “Navigating the demonstration space felt like stepping into the future. As a center, we stand poised to engineer transformative tools that will truly make a difference for the future of cancer care.”

Sangeeta Bhatia, the Director of the Marble Center and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, adds: “The showcase of our technologies at the White House Demo Day underscores the transformative impact we aim to achieve in cancer detection and treatment. The event highlights our vision to advance cutting-edge solutions for the benefit of patients and communities worldwide.”

On Nov. 7, a team from the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at MIT showed a Washington audience several examples of how nanotechnologies developed at the Institute can transform the detection and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

The team was one of 40 innovative groups featured at “American Possibilities: A White House Demo Day.” Technology on view spanned energy, artificial intelligence, climate, and health, highlighting advancements that contribute to building a better future for all Americans.

Participants included President Joe Biden, Biden-Harris administration leaders and White House staff, members of Congress, federal R&D funding agencies, scientists and engineers, academics, students, and science and technology industry innovators. The event holds special significance for MIT as eight years ago, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory participated in the last iteration of the White House Demo Day under President Barack Obama.

“It was truly inspirational hearing from experts from all across the government, the private sector, and academia touching on so many fields,” said President Biden of the event. “It was a reminder, at least for me, of what I’ve long believed — that America can be defined by a single word... possibilities.”

Launched in 2016, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine was established at the Koch Institute for Integrative Research at MIT to serve as a hub for miniaturized biomedical technologies, especially those that address grand challenges in cancer detection, treatment, and monitoring. The center convenes Koch Institute faculty members Sangeeta Bhatia, Paula Hammond, Robert Langer, Angela Belcher, Darrell Irvine, and Daniel Anderson to advance nanomedicine, as well as to facilitate collaboration with industry partners, including Alloy Therapeutics, Danaher Corp., Fujifilm, and Sanofi. 

Ana Jaklenec, a principal research scientist at the Koch Institute, highlighted several groundbreaking technologies in vaccines and disease diagnostics and treatment at the event. Jaklenec gave demonstrations from projects from her research group, including novel vaccine formulations capable of releasing a dozen booster doses pulsed over predetermined time points, microneedle vaccine technologies, and nutrient delivery technologies for precise control over microbiome modulation and nutrient absorption.

Jaklenec describes the event as “a wonderful opportunity to meet our government leaders and policymakers and see their passion for curing cancer. But it was especially moving to interact with people representing diverse communities across the United States and hear their excitement for how our technologies could positively impact their communities.”

Jeremy Li, a former MIT postdoc, presented a technology developed in the Belcher laboratory and commercialized by the spinout Cision Vision. The startup is developing a new approach to visualize lymph nodes in real time without any injection or radiation. The shoebox-sized device was also selected as part of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023 and is currently being used in a dozen hospitals across the United States.

“It was a proud moment for Cision Vision to be part of this event and discuss our recent progress in the field of medical imaging and cancer care,” says Li, who is a co-founder and the CEO of CisionVision. “It was a humbling experience for us to hear directly from patient advocates and cancer survivors at the event. We feel more inspired than ever to bring better solutions for cancer care to patients around the world.”

Other technologies shown at the event included new approaches such as a tortoise-shaped pill designed to enhance the efficacy of oral medicines, a miniature organ-on-a-chip liver device to predict drug toxicity and model liver disease, and a wireless bioelectronic device that provides oxygen for cell therapy applications and for the treatment of chronic disease.

“The feedback from the organizers and the audience at the event has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Tarek Fadel, who led the team’s participation at the event. “Navigating the demonstration space felt like stepping into the future. As a center, we stand poised to engineer transformative tools that will truly make a difference for the future of cancer care.”

Sangeeta Bhatia, the Director of the Marble Center and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, adds: “The showcase of our technologies at the White House Demo Day underscores the transformative impact we aim to achieve in cancer detection and treatment. The event highlights our vision to advance cutting-edge solutions for the benefit of patients and communities worldwide.”

On Nov. 7, a team from the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at MIT showed a Washington audience several examples of how nanotechnologies developed at the Institute can transform the detection and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

The team was one of 40 innovative groups featured at “American Possibilities: A White House Demo Day.” Technology on view spanned energy, artificial intelligence, climate, and health, highlighting advancements that contribute to building a better future for all Americans.

Participants included President Joe Biden, Biden-Harris administration leaders and White House staff, members of Congress, federal R&D funding agencies, scientists and engineers, academics, students, and science and technology industry innovators. The event holds special significance for MIT as eight years ago, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory participated in the last iteration of the White House Demo Day under President Barack Obama.

“It was truly inspirational hearing from experts from all across the government, the private sector, and academia touching on so many fields,” said President Biden of the event. “It was a reminder, at least for me, of what I’ve long believed — that America can be defined by a single word... possibilities.”

Launched in 2016, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine was established at the Koch Institute for Integrative Research at MIT to serve as a hub for miniaturized biomedical technologies, especially those that address grand challenges in cancer detection, treatment, and monitoring. The center convenes Koch Institute faculty members Sangeeta Bhatia, Paula Hammond, Robert Langer, Angela Belcher, Darrell Irvine, and Daniel Anderson to advance nanomedicine, as well as to facilitate collaboration with industry partners, including Alloy Therapeutics, Danaher Corp., Fujifilm, and Sanofi. 

Ana Jaklenec, a principal research scientist at the Koch Institute, highlighted several groundbreaking technologies in vaccines and disease diagnostics and treatment at the event. Jaklenec gave demonstrations from projects from her research group, including novel vaccine formulations capable of releasing a dozen booster doses pulsed over predetermined time points, microneedle vaccine technologies, and nutrient delivery technologies for precise control over microbiome modulation and nutrient absorption.

Jaklenec describes the event as “a wonderful opportunity to meet our government leaders and policymakers and see their passion for curing cancer. But it was especially moving to interact with people representing diverse communities across the United States and hear their excitement for how our technologies could positively impact their communities.”

Jeremy Li, a former MIT postdoc, presented a technology developed in the Belcher laboratory and commercialized by the spinout Cision Vision. The startup is developing a new approach to visualize lymph nodes in real time without any injection or radiation. The shoebox-sized device was also selected as part of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023 and is currently being used in a dozen hospitals across the United States.

“It was a proud moment for Cision Vision to be part of this event and discuss our recent progress in the field of medical imaging and cancer care,” says Li, who is a co-founder and the CEO of CisionVision. “It was a humbling experience for us to hear directly from patient advocates and cancer survivors at the event. We feel more inspired than ever to bring better solutions for cancer care to patients around the world.”

Other technologies shown at the event included new approaches such as a tortoise-shaped pill designed to enhance the efficacy of oral medicines, a miniature organ-on-a-chip liver device to predict drug toxicity and model liver disease, and a wireless bioelectronic device that provides oxygen for cell therapy applications and for the treatment of chronic disease.

“The feedback from the organizers and the audience at the event has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Tarek Fadel, who led the team’s participation at the event. “Navigating the demonstration space felt like stepping into the future. As a center, we stand poised to engineer transformative tools that will truly make a difference for the future of cancer care.”

Sangeeta Bhatia, the Director of the Marble Center and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, adds: “The showcase of our technologies at the White House Demo Day underscores the transformative impact we aim to achieve in cancer detection and treatment. The event highlights our vision to advance cutting-edge solutions for the benefit of patients and communities worldwide.”

On Nov. 7, a team from the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at MIT showed a Washington audience several examples of how nanotechnologies developed at the Institute can transform the detection and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

The team was one of 40 innovative groups featured at “American Possibilities: A White House Demo Day.” Technology on view spanned energy, artificial intelligence, climate, and health, highlighting advancements that contribute to building a better future for all Americans.

Participants included President Joe Biden, Biden-Harris administration leaders and White House staff, members of Congress, federal R&D funding agencies, scientists and engineers, academics, students, and science and technology industry innovators. The event holds special significance for MIT as eight years ago, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory participated in the last iteration of the White House Demo Day under President Barack Obama.

“It was truly inspirational hearing from experts from all across the government, the private sector, and academia touching on so many fields,” said President Biden of the event. “It was a reminder, at least for me, of what I’ve long believed — that America can be defined by a single word... possibilities.”

Launched in 2016, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine was established at the Koch Institute for Integrative Research at MIT to serve as a hub for miniaturized biomedical technologies, especially those that address grand challenges in cancer detection, treatment, and monitoring. The center convenes Koch Institute faculty members Sangeeta Bhatia, Paula Hammond, Robert Langer, Angela Belcher, Darrell Irvine, and Daniel Anderson to advance nanomedicine, as well as to facilitate collaboration with industry partners, including Alloy Therapeutics, Danaher Corp., Fujifilm, and Sanofi. 

Ana Jaklenec, a principal research scientist at the Koch Institute, highlighted several groundbreaking technologies in vaccines and disease diagnostics and treatment at the event. Jaklenec gave demonstrations from projects from her research group, including novel vaccine formulations capable of releasing a dozen booster doses pulsed over predetermined time points, microneedle vaccine technologies, and nutrient delivery technologies for precise control over microbiome modulation and nutrient absorption.

Jaklenec describes the event as “a wonderful opportunity to meet our government leaders and policymakers and see their passion for curing cancer. But it was especially moving to interact with people representing diverse communities across the United States and hear their excitement for how our technologies could positively impact their communities.”

Jeremy Li, a former MIT postdoc, presented a technology developed in the Belcher laboratory and commercialized by the spinout Cision Vision. The startup is developing a new approach to visualize lymph nodes in real time without any injection or radiation. The shoebox-sized device was also selected as part of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023 and is currently being used in a dozen hospitals across the United States.

“It was a proud moment for Cision Vision to be part of this event and discuss our recent progress in the field of medical imaging and cancer care,” says Li, who is a co-founder and the CEO of CisionVision. “It was a humbling experience for us to hear directly from patient advocates and cancer survivors at the event. We feel more inspired than ever to bring better solutions for cancer care to patients around the world.”

Other technologies shown at the event included new approaches such as a tortoise-shaped pill designed to enhance the efficacy of oral medicines, a miniature organ-on-a-chip liver device to predict drug toxicity and model liver disease, and a wireless bioelectronic device that provides oxygen for cell therapy applications and for the treatment of chronic disease.

“The feedback from the organizers and the audience at the event has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Tarek Fadel, who led the team’s participation at the event. “Navigating the demonstration space felt like stepping into the future. As a center, we stand poised to engineer transformative tools that will truly make a difference for the future of cancer care.”

Sangeeta Bhatia, the Director of the Marble Center and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, adds: “The showcase of our technologies at the White House Demo Day underscores the transformative impact we aim to achieve in cancer detection and treatment. The event highlights our vision to advance cutting-edge solutions for the benefit of patients and communities worldwide.”

On Nov. 7, a team from the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at MIT showed a Washington audience several examples of how nanotechnologies developed at the Institute can transform the detection and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

The team was one of 40 innovative groups featured at “American Possibilities: A White House Demo Day.” Technology on view spanned energy, artificial intelligence, climate, and health, highlighting advancements that contribute to building a better future for all Americans.

Participants included President Joe Biden, Biden-Harris administration leaders and White House staff, members of Congress, federal R&D funding agencies, scientists and engineers, academics, students, and science and technology industry innovators. The event holds special significance for MIT as eight years ago, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory participated in the last iteration of the White House Demo Day under President Barack Obama.

“It was truly inspirational hearing from experts from all across the government, the private sector, and academia touching on so many fields,” said President Biden of the event. “It was a reminder, at least for me, of what I’ve long believed — that America can be defined by a single word... possibilities.”

Launched in 2016, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine was established at the Koch Institute for Integrative Research at MIT to serve as a hub for miniaturized biomedical technologies, especially those that address grand challenges in cancer detection, treatment, and monitoring. The center convenes Koch Institute faculty members Sangeeta Bhatia, Paula Hammond, Robert Langer, Angela Belcher, Darrell Irvine, and Daniel Anderson to advance nanomedicine, as well as to facilitate collaboration with industry partners, including Alloy Therapeutics, Danaher Corp., Fujifilm, and Sanofi. 

Ana Jaklenec, a principal research scientist at the Koch Institute, highlighted several groundbreaking technologies in vaccines and disease diagnostics and treatment at the event. Jaklenec gave demonstrations from projects from her research group, including novel vaccine formulations capable of releasing a dozen booster doses pulsed over predetermined time points, microneedle vaccine technologies, and nutrient delivery technologies for precise control over microbiome modulation and nutrient absorption.

Jaklenec describes the event as “a wonderful opportunity to meet our government leaders and policymakers and see their passion for curing cancer. But it was especially moving to interact with people representing diverse communities across the United States and hear their excitement for how our technologies could positively impact their communities.”

Jeremy Li, a former MIT postdoc, presented a technology developed in the Belcher laboratory and commercialized by the spinout Cision Vision. The startup is developing a new approach to visualize lymph nodes in real time without any injection or radiation. The shoebox-sized device was also selected as part of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023 and is currently being used in a dozen hospitals across the United States.

“It was a proud moment for Cision Vision to be part of this event and discuss our recent progress in the field of medical imaging and cancer care,” says Li, who is a co-founder and the CEO of CisionVision. “It was a humbling experience for us to hear directly from patient advocates and cancer survivors at the event. We feel more inspired than ever to bring better solutions for cancer care to patients around the world.”

Other technologies shown at the event included new approaches such as a tortoise-shaped pill designed to enhance the efficacy of oral medicines, a miniature organ-on-a-chip liver device to predict drug toxicity and model liver disease, and a wireless bioelectronic device that provides oxygen for cell therapy applications and for the treatment of chronic disease.

“The feedback from the organizers and the audience at the event has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Tarek Fadel, who led the team’s participation at the event. “Navigating the demonstration space felt like stepping into the future. As a center, we stand poised to engineer transformative tools that will truly make a difference for the future of cancer care.”

Sangeeta Bhatia, the Director of the Marble Center and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, adds: “The showcase of our technologies at the White House Demo Day underscores the transformative impact we aim to achieve in cancer detection and treatment. The event highlights our vision to advance cutting-edge solutions for the benefit of patients and communities worldwide.”

Many of the most promising new pharmaceuticals coming along in the drug development pathway are hydrophobic by nature — that is, they repel water, and are thus hard to dissolve in order to make them available to the body. But now, researchers at MIT have found a more efficient way of processing and delivering these drugs that could make them far more effective.

The new method, which involves initially processing the drugs in a liquid solution rather than in solid form, is reported in a paper in the Dec. 15 print issue of the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials, written by MIT graduate student Lucas Attia, recent graduate Liang-Hsun Chen PhD ’22, and professor of chemical engineering Patrick Doyle.

Currently, much drug processing is done through a long series of sequential steps, Doyle explains. “We think we can streamline the process, but also get better products, by combining these steps and leveraging our understanding of soft matter and self-assembly processes,” he says.

Attia adds that “a lot of small-molecule active ingredients are hydrophobic, so they don’t like being in water and they have very poor dissolution in water, which leads to their poor bioavailability.” Giving such drugs orally, which patients prefer over injections, presents real challenges in getting the material into the patient’s bloodstream. Up to 90 percent of the candidate drug molecules being developed by pharmaceutical companies actually are hydrophobic, he says, “so this is relevant to a large class of potential drug molecules.”

Another advantage of the new process, he says, is that it should make it easier to combine multiple different drugs in a single pill. “For different types of diseases where you’re taking multiple drugs at the same time, this kind of product can be very important in improving patient compliance,” he adds — only having to take one pill instead of a handful makes it much more likely that patients will keep up with their medications. “That’s actually a big issue with these chronic illnesses where patients are on very challenging pill regimes, so combination products have been shown to help a lot.”

One key to the new process is the use of a hydrogel — a sort of sponge-like gel material that can retain water and hold molecules in place. Present processes for making hydrophobic materials more bioavailable involve mechanically grinding the crystals down to smaller size, which makes them dissolve more readily, but this process adds time and expense to the manufacturing process, provides little control over the size distribution of the particles, and can actually damage some more delicate drug molecules.

Instead, the new process involves dissolving the drug in a carrier solution, then generating tiny nanodroplets of this carrier dispersed throughout a polymer solution — a material called a nanoemulsion. Then, this nanoemulsion is squeezed through a syringe and gelled into a hydrogel. The hydrogel holds the droplets in place as the carrier evaporates, leaving behind drug nanocrystals. This approach allows precise control over the final crystal size. The hydrogel, by keeping the droplets in place as they dry, prevents them from simply merging together to form lumpy agglomerations of different sizes. Without the hydrogel the droplets would merge randomly, and “you’d get a mess,” Doyle says. Instead, the new process leaves a batch of perfectly uniform nanoparticles. “That’s a very unique, novel way that our group has invented, to do this sort of crystallization and maintain the nano size,” he says.

The new process yields a two-part package: a core, which contains the active molecules, surrounded by a shell, also made of hydrogel, which can control the timing between ingestion of the pill and the release of its contents into the body.

“We showed that we can get very precise control over the drug release, both in terms of delay and rate,” says Doyle, who is the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering and Singapore Research Professor. For example, if a drug is targeting disease in the lower intestine or colon, “we can control how long until the drug release starts, and then we also get very fast release once it begins.” Drugs formulated the conventional way with mechanical nanomilling, he says, “would have a slow drug release.”

This process, Attia says, “is the first approach that can form core-shell composite particles and structure drugs in distinct polymeric layers in a single processing step.”

The next steps in developing the process will be to test the system on a wide variety of drug molecules, beyond the two representative examples that were tested so far, Doyle says. Although they have reason to believe the process is generalizable, he says, “the proof is in the pudding — having the data in hand.”

The dripping process they use, he says, “can be scalable, but there’s a lot of details to be worked out.” But because all of the materials they are working with have been chosen as ones that are already recognized as safe for medical use, the approval process should be straightforward, he says. “It could be implemented in a few years. … We’re not worrying about all those typical safety hurdles that I think other novel formulations have to go through, which can be very expensive.”

The work received support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

On Nov. 7, a team from the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at MIT showed a Washington audience several examples of how nanotechnologies developed at the Institute can transform the detection and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

The team was one of 40 innovative groups featured at “American Possibilities: A White House Demo Day.” Technology on view spanned energy, artificial intelligence, climate, and health, highlighting advancements that contribute to building a better future for all Americans.

Participants included President Joe Biden, Biden-Harris administration leaders and White House staff, members of Congress, federal R&D funding agencies, scientists and engineers, academics, students, and science and technology industry innovators. The event holds special significance for MIT as eight years ago, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory participated in the last iteration of the White House Demo Day under President Barack Obama.

“It was truly inspirational hearing from experts from all across the government, the private sector, and academia touching on so many fields,” said President Biden of the event. “It was a reminder, at least for me, of what I’ve long believed — that America can be defined by a single word... possibilities.”

Launched in 2016, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine was established at the Koch Institute for Integrative Research at MIT to serve as a hub for miniaturized biomedical technologies, especially those that address grand challenges in cancer detection, treatment, and monitoring. The center convenes Koch Institute faculty members Sangeeta Bhatia, Paula Hammond, Robert Langer, Angela Belcher, Darrell Irvine, and Daniel Anderson to advance nanomedicine, as well as to facilitate collaboration with industry partners, including Alloy Therapeutics, Danaher Corp., Fujifilm, and Sanofi. 

Ana Jaklenec, a principal research scientist at the Koch Institute, highlighted several groundbreaking technologies in vaccines and disease diagnostics and treatment at the event. Jaklenec gave demonstrations from projects from her research group, including novel vaccine formulations capable of releasing a dozen booster doses pulsed over predetermined time points, microneedle vaccine technologies, and nutrient delivery technologies for precise control over microbiome modulation and nutrient absorption.

Jaklenec describes the event as “a wonderful opportunity to meet our government leaders and policymakers and see their passion for curing cancer. But it was especially moving to interact with people representing diverse communities across the United States and hear their excitement for how our technologies could positively impact their communities.”

Jeremy Li, a former MIT postdoc, presented a technology developed in the Belcher laboratory and commercialized by the spinout Cision Vision. The startup is developing a new approach to visualize lymph nodes in real time without any injection or radiation. The shoebox-sized device was also selected as part of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023 and is currently being used in a dozen hospitals across the United States.

“It was a proud moment for Cision Vision to be part of this event and discuss our recent progress in the field of medical imaging and cancer care,” says Li, who is a co-founder and the CEO of CisionVision. “It was a humbling experience for us to hear directly from patient advocates and cancer survivors at the event. We feel more inspired than ever to bring better solutions for cancer care to patients around the world.”

Other technologies shown at the event included new approaches such as a tortoise-shaped pill designed to enhance the efficacy of oral medicines, a miniature organ-on-a-chip liver device to predict drug toxicity and model liver disease, and a wireless bioelectronic device that provides oxygen for cell therapy applications and for the treatment of chronic disease.

“The feedback from the organizers and the audience at the event has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Tarek Fadel, who led the team’s participation at the event. “Navigating the demonstration space felt like stepping into the future. As a center, we stand poised to engineer transformative tools that will truly make a difference for the future of cancer care.”

Sangeeta Bhatia, the Director of the Marble Center and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, adds: “The showcase of our technologies at the White House Demo Day underscores the transformative impact we aim to achieve in cancer detection and treatment. The event highlights our vision to advance cutting-edge solutions for the benefit of patients and communities worldwide.”

Many of the most promising new pharmaceuticals coming along in the drug development pathway are hydrophobic by nature — that is, they repel water, and are thus hard to dissolve in order to make them available to the body. But now, researchers at MIT have found a more efficient way of processing and delivering these drugs that could make them far more effective.

The new method, which involves initially processing the drugs in a liquid solution rather than in solid form, is reported in a paper in the Dec. 15 print issue of the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials, written by MIT graduate student Lucas Attia, recent graduate Liang-Hsun Chen PhD ’22, and professor of chemical engineering Patrick Doyle.

Currently, much drug processing is done through a long series of sequential steps, Doyle explains. “We think we can streamline the process, but also get better products, by combining these steps and leveraging our understanding of soft matter and self-assembly processes,” he says.

Attia adds that “a lot of small-molecule active ingredients are hydrophobic, so they don’t like being in water and they have very poor dissolution in water, which leads to their poor bioavailability.” Giving such drugs orally, which patients prefer over injections, presents real challenges in getting the material into the patient’s bloodstream. Up to 90 percent of the candidate drug molecules being developed by pharmaceutical companies actually are hydrophobic, he says, “so this is relevant to a large class of potential drug molecules.”

Another advantage of the new process, he says, is that it should make it easier to combine multiple different drugs in a single pill. “For different types of diseases where you’re taking multiple drugs at the same time, this kind of product can be very important in improving patient compliance,” he adds — only having to take one pill instead of a handful makes it much more likely that patients will keep up with their medications. “That’s actually a big issue with these chronic illnesses where patients are on very challenging pill regimes, so combination products have been shown to help a lot.”

One key to the new process is the use of a hydrogel — a sort of sponge-like gel material that can retain water and hold molecules in place. Present processes for making hydrophobic materials more bioavailable involve mechanically grinding the crystals down to smaller size, which makes them dissolve more readily, but this process adds time and expense to the manufacturing process, provides little control over the size distribution of the particles, and can actually damage some more delicate drug molecules.

Instead, the new process involves dissolving the drug in a carrier solution, then generating tiny nanodroplets of this carrier dispersed throughout a polymer solution — a material called a nanoemulsion. Then, this nanoemulsion is squeezed through a syringe and gelled into a hydrogel. The hydrogel holds the droplets in place as the carrier evaporates, leaving behind drug nanocrystals. This approach allows precise control over the final crystal size. The hydrogel, by keeping the droplets in place as they dry, prevents them from simply merging together to form lumpy agglomerations of different sizes. Without the hydrogel the droplets would merge randomly, and “you’d get a mess,” Doyle says. Instead, the new process leaves a batch of perfectly uniform nanoparticles. “That’s a very unique, novel way that our group has invented, to do this sort of crystallization and maintain the nano size,” he says.

The new process yields a two-part package: a core, which contains the active molecules, surrounded by a shell, also made of hydrogel, which can control the timing between ingestion of the pill and the release of its contents into the body.

“We showed that we can get very precise control over the drug release, both in terms of delay and rate,” says Doyle, who is the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering and Singapore Research Professor. For example, if a drug is targeting disease in the lower intestine or colon, “we can control how long until the drug release starts, and then we also get very fast release once it begins.” Drugs formulated the conventional way with mechanical nanomilling, he says, “would have a slow drug release.”

This process, Attia says, “is the first approach that can form core-shell composite particles and structure drugs in distinct polymeric layers in a single processing step.”

The next steps in developing the process will be to test the system on a wide variety of drug molecules, beyond the two representative examples that were tested so far, Doyle says. Although they have reason to believe the process is generalizable, he says, “the proof is in the pudding — having the data in hand.”

The dripping process they use, he says, “can be scalable, but there’s a lot of details to be worked out.” But because all of the materials they are working with have been chosen as ones that are already recognized as safe for medical use, the approval process should be straightforward, he says. “It could be implemented in a few years. … We’re not worrying about all those typical safety hurdles that I think other novel formulations have to go through, which can be very expensive.”

The work received support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

On Nov. 7, a team from the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at MIT showed a Washington audience several examples of how nanotechnologies developed at the Institute can transform the detection and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

The team was one of 40 innovative groups featured at “American Possibilities: A White House Demo Day.” Technology on view spanned energy, artificial intelligence, climate, and health, highlighting advancements that contribute to building a better future for all Americans.

Participants included President Joe Biden, Biden-Harris administration leaders and White House staff, members of Congress, federal R&D funding agencies, scientists and engineers, academics, students, and science and technology industry innovators. The event holds special significance for MIT as eight years ago, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory participated in the last iteration of the White House Demo Day under President Barack Obama.

“It was truly inspirational hearing from experts from all across the government, the private sector, and academia touching on so many fields,” said President Biden of the event. “It was a reminder, at least for me, of what I’ve long believed — that America can be defined by a single word... possibilities.”

Launched in 2016, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine was established at the Koch Institute for Integrative Research at MIT to serve as a hub for miniaturized biomedical technologies, especially those that address grand challenges in cancer detection, treatment, and monitoring. The center convenes Koch Institute faculty members Sangeeta Bhatia, Paula Hammond, Robert Langer, Angela Belcher, Darrell Irvine, and Daniel Anderson to advance nanomedicine, as well as to facilitate collaboration with industry partners, including Alloy Therapeutics, Danaher Corp., Fujifilm, and Sanofi. 

Ana Jaklenec, a principal research scientist at the Koch Institute, highlighted several groundbreaking technologies in vaccines and disease diagnostics and treatment at the event. Jaklenec gave demonstrations from projects from her research group, including novel vaccine formulations capable of releasing a dozen booster doses pulsed over predetermined time points, microneedle vaccine technologies, and nutrient delivery technologies for precise control over microbiome modulation and nutrient absorption.

Jaklenec describes the event as “a wonderful opportunity to meet our government leaders and policymakers and see their passion for curing cancer. But it was especially moving to interact with people representing diverse communities across the United States and hear their excitement for how our technologies could positively impact their communities.”

Jeremy Li, a former MIT postdoc, presented a technology developed in the Belcher laboratory and commercialized by the spinout Cision Vision. The startup is developing a new approach to visualize lymph nodes in real time without any injection or radiation. The shoebox-sized device was also selected as part of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023 and is currently being used in a dozen hospitals across the United States.

“It was a proud moment for Cision Vision to be part of this event and discuss our recent progress in the field of medical imaging and cancer care,” says Li, who is a co-founder and the CEO of CisionVision. “It was a humbling experience for us to hear directly from patient advocates and cancer survivors at the event. We feel more inspired than ever to bring better solutions for cancer care to patients around the world.”

Other technologies shown at the event included new approaches such as a tortoise-shaped pill designed to enhance the efficacy of oral medicines, a miniature organ-on-a-chip liver device to predict drug toxicity and model liver disease, and a wireless bioelectronic device that provides oxygen for cell therapy applications and for the treatment of chronic disease.

“The feedback from the organizers and the audience at the event has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Tarek Fadel, who led the team’s participation at the event. “Navigating the demonstration space felt like stepping into the future. As a center, we stand poised to engineer transformative tools that will truly make a difference for the future of cancer care.”

Sangeeta Bhatia, the Director of the Marble Center and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, adds: “The showcase of our technologies at the White House Demo Day underscores the transformative impact we aim to achieve in cancer detection and treatment. The event highlights our vision to advance cutting-edge solutions for the benefit of patients and communities worldwide.”

Many of the most promising new pharmaceuticals coming along in the drug development pathway are hydrophobic by nature — that is, they repel water, and are thus hard to dissolve in order to make them available to the body. But now, researchers at MIT have found a more efficient way of processing and delivering these drugs that could make them far more effective.

The new method, which involves initially processing the drugs in a liquid solution rather than in solid form, is reported in a paper in the Dec. 15 print issue of the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials, written by MIT graduate student Lucas Attia, recent graduate Liang-Hsun Chen PhD ’22, and professor of chemical engineering Patrick Doyle.

Currently, much drug processing is done through a long series of sequential steps, Doyle explains. “We think we can streamline the process, but also get better products, by combining these steps and leveraging our understanding of soft matter and self-assembly processes,” he says.

Attia adds that “a lot of small-molecule active ingredients are hydrophobic, so they don’t like being in water and they have very poor dissolution in water, which leads to their poor bioavailability.” Giving such drugs orally, which patients prefer over injections, presents real challenges in getting the material into the patient’s bloodstream. Up to 90 percent of the candidate drug molecules being developed by pharmaceutical companies actually are hydrophobic, he says, “so this is relevant to a large class of potential drug molecules.”

Another advantage of the new process, he says, is that it should make it easier to combine multiple different drugs in a single pill. “For different types of diseases where you’re taking multiple drugs at the same time, this kind of product can be very important in improving patient compliance,” he adds — only having to take one pill instead of a handful makes it much more likely that patients will keep up with their medications. “That’s actually a big issue with these chronic illnesses where patients are on very challenging pill regimes, so combination products have been shown to help a lot.”

One key to the new process is the use of a hydrogel — a sort of sponge-like gel material that can retain water and hold molecules in place. Present processes for making hydrophobic materials more bioavailable involve mechanically grinding the crystals down to smaller size, which makes them dissolve more readily, but this process adds time and expense to the manufacturing process, provides little control over the size distribution of the particles, and can actually damage some more delicate drug molecules.

Instead, the new process involves dissolving the drug in a carrier solution, then generating tiny nanodroplets of this carrier dispersed throughout a polymer solution — a material called a nanoemulsion. Then, this nanoemulsion is squeezed through a syringe and gelled into a hydrogel. The hydrogel holds the droplets in place as the carrier evaporates, leaving behind drug nanocrystals. This approach allows precise control over the final crystal size. The hydrogel, by keeping the droplets in place as they dry, prevents them from simply merging together to form lumpy agglomerations of different sizes. Without the hydrogel the droplets would merge randomly, and “you’d get a mess,” Doyle says. Instead, the new process leaves a batch of perfectly uniform nanoparticles. “That’s a very unique, novel way that our group has invented, to do this sort of crystallization and maintain the nano size,” he says.

The new process yields a two-part package: a core, which contains the active molecules, surrounded by a shell, also made of hydrogel, which can control the timing between ingestion of the pill and the release of its contents into the body.

“We showed that we can get very precise control over the drug release, both in terms of delay and rate,” says Doyle, who is the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering and Singapore Research Professor. For example, if a drug is targeting disease in the lower intestine or colon, “we can control how long until the drug release starts, and then we also get very fast release once it begins.” Drugs formulated the conventional way with mechanical nanomilling, he says, “would have a slow drug release.”

This process, Attia says, “is the first approach that can form core-shell composite particles and structure drugs in distinct polymeric layers in a single processing step.”

The next steps in developing the process will be to test the system on a wide variety of drug molecules, beyond the two representative examples that were tested so far, Doyle says. Although they have reason to believe the process is generalizable, he says, “the proof is in the pudding — having the data in hand.”

The dripping process they use, he says, “can be scalable, but there’s a lot of details to be worked out.” But because all of the materials they are working with have been chosen as ones that are already recognized as safe for medical use, the approval process should be straightforward, he says. “It could be implemented in a few years. … We’re not worrying about all those typical safety hurdles that I think other novel formulations have to go through, which can be very expensive.”

The work received support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

On Nov. 7, a team from the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at MIT showed a Washington audience several examples of how nanotechnologies developed at the Institute can transform the detection and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

The team was one of 40 innovative groups featured at “American Possibilities: A White House Demo Day.” Technology on view spanned energy, artificial intelligence, climate, and health, highlighting advancements that contribute to building a better future for all Americans.

Participants included President Joe Biden, Biden-Harris administration leaders and White House staff, members of Congress, federal R&D funding agencies, scientists and engineers, academics, students, and science and technology industry innovators. The event holds special significance for MIT as eight years ago, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory participated in the last iteration of the White House Demo Day under President Barack Obama.

“It was truly inspirational hearing from experts from all across the government, the private sector, and academia touching on so many fields,” said President Biden of the event. “It was a reminder, at least for me, of what I’ve long believed — that America can be defined by a single word... possibilities.”

Launched in 2016, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine was established at the Koch Institute for Integrative Research at MIT to serve as a hub for miniaturized biomedical technologies, especially those that address grand challenges in cancer detection, treatment, and monitoring. The center convenes Koch Institute faculty members Sangeeta Bhatia, Paula Hammond, Robert Langer, Angela Belcher, Darrell Irvine, and Daniel Anderson to advance nanomedicine, as well as to facilitate collaboration with industry partners, including Alloy Therapeutics, Danaher Corp., Fujifilm, and Sanofi. 

Ana Jaklenec, a principal research scientist at the Koch Institute, highlighted several groundbreaking technologies in vaccines and disease diagnostics and treatment at the event. Jaklenec gave demonstrations from projects from her research group, including novel vaccine formulations capable of releasing a dozen booster doses pulsed over predetermined time points, microneedle vaccine technologies, and nutrient delivery technologies for precise control over microbiome modulation and nutrient absorption.

Jaklenec describes the event as “a wonderful opportunity to meet our government leaders and policymakers and see their passion for curing cancer. But it was especially moving to interact with people representing diverse communities across the United States and hear their excitement for how our technologies could positively impact their communities.”

Jeremy Li, a former MIT postdoc, presented a technology developed in the Belcher laboratory and commercialized by the spinout Cision Vision. The startup is developing a new approach to visualize lymph nodes in real time without any injection or radiation. The shoebox-sized device was also selected as part of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023 and is currently being used in a dozen hospitals across the United States.

“It was a proud moment for Cision Vision to be part of this event and discuss our recent progress in the field of medical imaging and cancer care,” says Li, who is a co-founder and the CEO of CisionVision. “It was a humbling experience for us to hear directly from patient advocates and cancer survivors at the event. We feel more inspired than ever to bring better solutions for cancer care to patients around the world.”

Other technologies shown at the event included new approaches such as a tortoise-shaped pill designed to enhance the efficacy of oral medicines, a miniature organ-on-a-chip liver device to predict drug toxicity and model liver disease, and a wireless bioelectronic device that provides oxygen for cell therapy applications and for the treatment of chronic disease.

“The feedback from the organizers and the audience at the event has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Tarek Fadel, who led the team’s participation at the event. “Navigating the demonstration space felt like stepping into the future. As a center, we stand poised to engineer transformative tools that will truly make a difference for the future of cancer care.”

Sangeeta Bhatia, the Director of the Marble Center and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, adds: “The showcase of our technologies at the White House Demo Day underscores the transformative impact we aim to achieve in cancer detection and treatment. The event highlights our vision to advance cutting-edge solutions for the benefit of patients and communities worldwide.”

Many of the most promising new pharmaceuticals coming along in the drug development pathway are hydrophobic by nature — that is, they repel water, and are thus hard to dissolve in order to make them available to the body. But now, researchers at MIT have found a more efficient way of processing and delivering these drugs that could make them far more effective.

The new method, which involves initially processing the drugs in a liquid solution rather than in solid form, is reported in a paper in the Dec. 15 print issue of the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials, written by MIT graduate student Lucas Attia, recent graduate Liang-Hsun Chen PhD ’22, and professor of chemical engineering Patrick Doyle.

Currently, much drug processing is done through a long series of sequential steps, Doyle explains. “We think we can streamline the process, but also get better products, by combining these steps and leveraging our understanding of soft matter and self-assembly processes,” he says.

Attia adds that “a lot of small-molecule active ingredients are hydrophobic, so they don’t like being in water and they have very poor dissolution in water, which leads to their poor bioavailability.” Giving such drugs orally, which patients prefer over injections, presents real challenges in getting the material into the patient’s bloodstream. Up to 90 percent of the candidate drug molecules being developed by pharmaceutical companies actually are hydrophobic, he says, “so this is relevant to a large class of potential drug molecules.”

Another advantage of the new process, he says, is that it should make it easier to combine multiple different drugs in a single pill. “For different types of diseases where you’re taking multiple drugs at the same time, this kind of product can be very important in improving patient compliance,” he adds — only having to take one pill instead of a handful makes it much more likely that patients will keep up with their medications. “That’s actually a big issue with these chronic illnesses where patients are on very challenging pill regimes, so combination products have been shown to help a lot.”

One key to the new process is the use of a hydrogel — a sort of sponge-like gel material that can retain water and hold molecules in place. Present processes for making hydrophobic materials more bioavailable involve mechanically grinding the crystals down to smaller size, which makes them dissolve more readily, but this process adds time and expense to the manufacturing process, provides little control over the size distribution of the particles, and can actually damage some more delicate drug molecules.

Instead, the new process involves dissolving the drug in a carrier solution, then generating tiny nanodroplets of this carrier dispersed throughout a polymer solution — a material called a nanoemulsion. Then, this nanoemulsion is squeezed through a syringe and gelled into a hydrogel. The hydrogel holds the droplets in place as the carrier evaporates, leaving behind drug nanocrystals. This approach allows precise control over the final crystal size. The hydrogel, by keeping the droplets in place as they dry, prevents them from simply merging together to form lumpy agglomerations of different sizes. Without the hydrogel the droplets would merge randomly, and “you’d get a mess,” Doyle says. Instead, the new process leaves a batch of perfectly uniform nanoparticles. “That’s a very unique, novel way that our group has invented, to do this sort of crystallization and maintain the nano size,” he says.

The new process yields a two-part package: a core, which contains the active molecules, surrounded by a shell, also made of hydrogel, which can control the timing between ingestion of the pill and the release of its contents into the body.

“We showed that we can get very precise control over the drug release, both in terms of delay and rate,” says Doyle, who is the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering and Singapore Research Professor. For example, if a drug is targeting disease in the lower intestine or colon, “we can control how long until the drug release starts, and then we also get very fast release once it begins.” Drugs formulated the conventional way with mechanical nanomilling, he says, “would have a slow drug release.”

This process, Attia says, “is the first approach that can form core-shell composite particles and structure drugs in distinct polymeric layers in a single processing step.”

The next steps in developing the process will be to test the system on a wide variety of drug molecules, beyond the two representative examples that were tested so far, Doyle says. Although they have reason to believe the process is generalizable, he says, “the proof is in the pudding — having the data in hand.”

The dripping process they use, he says, “can be scalable, but there’s a lot of details to be worked out.” But because all of the materials they are working with have been chosen as ones that are already recognized as safe for medical use, the approval process should be straightforward, he says. “It could be implemented in a few years. … We’re not worrying about all those typical safety hurdles that I think other novel formulations have to go through, which can be very expensive.”

The work received support from the U.S. Department of Energy.