Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine

The Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine brings together leading faculty from the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research to focus on grand challenges in cancer detection, treatment, and monitoring that could benefit from the emerging biology and physics of the nanoscale. Marble Center members are collaborating on a wide variety of efforts, from detecting cancer earlier than existing methods allow, to harnessing the immune system to fight cancer even as it evolves, to exploiting therapeutic insights from cancer genomics in order to design therapies for previously undruggable targets, to combining existing drugs for synergistic action, to creating tools for better surgical intervention.

The Marble Center faculty is committed to fighting cancer with nanomedicine—through research, education, and collaboration. The Center’s Incubator Fund will help bridge the gulf between the lab and the patient, helping to support the significant clinical testing required to advance research from the bench to the marketplace. The Center’s competitive fellowship program is designed to attract the very best graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, and prepare them for careers in nanomedicine.

Convergence—the blending of life and physical sciences, and engineering—is a hallmark of MIT, the founding principle of the Koch Institute, and the heart of the Marble Center’s mission. By galvanizing the MIT cancer research communities, and the larger Boston clinical oncology community, the Marble Center will help to revolutionize cancer diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring.

The Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine aims to galvanize the MIT research community in efforts to have an indelible impact on cancer diagnosis and care.

Faculty and trainees at the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine are collaborating on a wide variety of efforts to focus on grand challenges in cancer, including early detection and prevention, treatment, and monitoring. For example, research activities aim to harness the immune system to fight cancer even as it evolves, exploit therapeutic insights from cancer genomics in order to design therapies for previously undruggable targets, combine existing drugs for synergistic action, create tools for better surgical intervention, or engineer diagnostic solutions for early cancer detection.

TRANSFORM: Revolutionizing cancer care -- Nanotechnology encompasses a broad array of materials, devices, and systems that work at a minute scale. To put this scale in perspective, a nanometer is one million times smaller than a millimeter. A human hair is between 80,000 and 100,000 nanometers in width. Given advances in our understanding of the molecular nature of cancer and our ability to work at this extraordinarily minute level, nanotechnology has the potential to transform diagnostic tools, treatment, and monitoring for cancer—in our lifetimes. At the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, nanotechnology is one of the five research focus areas, along with detection and monitoring, metastasis, personalized medicine, and cancer immunology. Marble Center biologists and engineers are working at the molecular level to design processes for early detection and diagnosis, new drugs and drug combinations, and sophisticated devices that can invade cancer cells and selectively destroy them. Working at the nanoscale requires the use of multiple rapidly advancing technologies and the expertise to combine them.

TRNASLATE: Toward new clinical solutions -- The goal of the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine is to provide the MIT research community with the resources—technology, funding, and training—needed to bring both focus and speed to this multidisciplinary effort in order for discoveries to be quickly tested for safety and efficacy, then brought to the clinic for patient use. The center also serves the efforts of local MIT nanotechnology initiatives by working to partner with clinical investigators through collaborations with the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, as well as other clinical partners through the Bridge Project, and by connecting our scientists globally.