MIT Department of Chemistry

Philip West has been at MIT since the Fall of 2022, and is originally from Haw River, North Carolina. His research in the Radosevich Group aims to develop a novel way to access aryl and alkyl carbenes from carbonyl compounds by deoxygenation with low-valent silicon. This approach would allow for greater molecular diversity through broad functionalization of ubiquitous starting materials, in addition to pioneering a meaningful place for silicon(II) reagents in the synthetic chemist’s toolbox. “I chose to pursue a PhD in chemistry because it provided the opportunity to explore my scientific interests in discovering/designing fundamentally interesting and practically useful chemical transformations,” said Philip. As the subject of this month’s Graduate Student Spotlight, Philip reveals his secret talent, the movie that consistently makes him laugh, the museum he’d open, and more! https://lnkd.in/e3mNTpvh

Breast cancer is the second most common type of cancer and cause of cancer death for women in the United States, affecting one in eight women overall. Most women with breast cancer undergo lumpectomy surgery to remove the tumor and a rim of healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. After the procedure, the removed tissue is sent to a pathologist to look for signs of disease at the edge of the tissue assessed. Unfortunately, about 20 percent of women who have lumpectomies must undergo a second surgery to remove more tissue. Now, an MIT spinout is giving surgeons a real-time view of cancerous tissue during surgery. Lumicell has developed a handheld device and an optical imaging agent that, when combined, allow surgeons to scan the tissue within the surgical cavity to visualize residual cancer cells. The surgeons see these images on a monitor that can guide them to remove additional tissue during the procedure. In a clinical trial of 357 patients, Lumicell’s technology not only reduced the need for second surgeries but also revealed tissue suspected to contain cancer cells that may have otherwise been missed by the standard of care lumpectomy. The company received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the technology earlier this year, marking a major milestone for Lumicell and the founders, who include MIT professors Linda Griffith and Moungi Bawendi along with PhD candidate W. David Lee ’69, SM ’70. Much of the early work developing and testing the system took place at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, beginning in 2008. The FDA approval also held deep personal significance for some of Lumicell’s team members, including Griffith, a two-time breast cancer survivor, and Lee, whose wife’s passing from the disease in 2003 changed the course of his life. https://lnkd.in/eDtU8GcR

The Department of Chemistry is pleased to welcome Professor Yang Shao-Horn to the faculty as a jointly appointed Professor of Chemistry, alongside MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE), where she holds a primary appointment, and MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), where she holds a secondary appointment. Shao-Horn received her Bachelor’s Degree in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from Beijing University of Technology, and a PhD in the same discipline from Michigan Technological University. Before coming to MIT in 2002, she was a staff scientist at the Eveready Battery Company in Westlake, Ohio, where she researched materials for various types of batteries. She later received a National Science Foundation International Research Fellowship to work with Claude Delmas at the Institute of Condensed Matter Chemistry in Bordeaux, France. Outside of her professorial duties, she serves as senior editor for accounts of Materials Research of the American Chemical Society and on advisory and editorial boards for several leading journals. Shao-Horn’s research is centered on exploiting chemical/materials physics to understand and control kinetics and dynamics at interface and in bulk for energy storage and making of sustainable fuels and chemicals. Such fundamental understanding is used to design processes and materials for applications including Li-ion batteries, metal-air batteries, water splitting, CO2 reduction and N2 reduction. https://lnkd.in/eZ8WQNDV

A classical way to image nanoscale structures in cells is with high-powered, expensive super-resolution microscopes. As an alternative, MIT researchers have developed a way to expand tissue before imaging it — a technique that allows them to achieve nanoscale resolution with a conventional light microscope. In the newest version of this technique, the researchers have made it possible to expand tissue 20-fold in a single step. This simple, inexpensive method could pave the way for nearly any biology lab to perform nanoscale imaging. “This democratizes imaging,” says Laura Kiessling, the Novartis Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “Without this method, if you want to see things with a high resolution, you have to use very expensive microscopes. What this new technique allows you to do is see things that you couldn’t normally see with standard microscopes. It drives down the cost of imaging because you can see nanoscale things without the need for a specialized facility.” At the resolution achieved by this technique, which is around 20 nanometers, scientists can see organelles inside cells, as well as clusters of proteins. “Twenty-fold expansion gets you into the realm that biological molecules operate in. The building blocks of life are nanoscale things: biomolecules, genes, and gene products,” says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT; a professor in the MIT Department of Biological Engineering, media arts and sciences, and brain and cognitive sciences; a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Boyden and Kiessling are the senior authors of the new study, which recently appeared in Nature Methods. MIT graduate student Shiwei Wang and Tay Won Shin PhD ’23 are the lead authors of the paper.

A team led by researchers at MIT has discovered that a distant interstellar cloud contains an abundance of pyrene, a type of large, carbon-containing molecule known as a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH). The discovery of pyrene in this far-off cloud, which is similar to the collection of dust and gas that eventually became our own solar system, suggests that pyrene may have been the source of much of the carbon in our solar system. That hypothesis is also supported by a recent finding that samples returned from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu contain large quantities of pyrene. “One of the big questions in star and planet formation is: How much of the chemical inventory from that early molecular cloud is inherited and forms the base components of the solar system? What we’re looking at is the start and the end, and they’re showing the same thing. That’s pretty strong evidence that this material from the early molecular cloud finds its way into the ice, dust, and rocky bodies that make up our solar system,” says Brett McGuire, an assistant professor of chemistry at MIT. Due to its symmetry, pyrene itself is invisible to the radio astronomy techniques that have been used to detect about 95 percent of molecules in space. Instead, the researchers detected an isomer of cyanopyrene, a version of pyrene that has reacted with cyanide to break its symmetry. The molecule was detected in a distant cloud known as TMC-1, using the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope (GBT), a radio telescope at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. McGuire and Ilsa Cooke, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of British Colombia, are the senior authors of a paper describing the findings, which appears today in Science. Gabi Wenzel, an MIT postdoc in McGuire’s group, is the lead author of the study. https://lnkd.in/ebUXy8dn

Many thanks to the MIT Club of Germany for recently welcoming Professor Moungi Bawendi, a 2023 Chemistry Nobel Laureate, to Frankfurt for a fireside chat.

Some of the most widely used drugs today, including penicillin, were discovered through a process called phenotypic screening. Using this method, scientists are essentially throwing drugs at a problem — for example, when attempting to stop bacterial growth or fixing a cellular defect — and then observing what happens next, without necessarily first knowing how the drug works. Perhaps surprisingly, historical data show that this approach is better at yielding approved medicines than those investigations that more narrowly focus on specific molecular targets. But many scientists believe that properly setting up the problem is the true key to success. Certain microbial infections or genetic disorders caused by single mutations are much simpler to prototype than complex diseases like cancer. These require intricate biological models that are far harder to make or acquire. The result is a bottleneck in the number of drugs that can be tested, and thus the usefulness of phenotypic screening. Now, a team of scientists led by Professor Alex Shalek's Lab has developed a promising new way to address the difficulty of applying phenotyping screening to scale. Their method allows researchers to simultaneously apply multiple drugs to a biological problem at once, and then computationally work backward to figure out the individual effects of each. For instance, when the team applied this method to models of pancreatic cancer and human immune cells, they were able to uncover surprising new biological insights, while also minimizing cost and sample requirements by several-fold — solving a few problems in scientific research at once. https://lnkd.in/drXKcHE5

Happy National Chemistry Week! 🧪 Celebrate with fun (and free!) online courses taught by MIT Department of Chemistry faculty: https://bit.ly/3Y8NIIK MIT OpenCourseWare MITx Courses MIT School of Science #ACS_NCW #NationalChemistryWeek #Chemistry #OnlineLearning #OnlineEducation #OpenEducation #OER #OpenEducationalResources #FreeEducation #STEMEducation #STEM #STEAM #STEAMEducation

Save the Date and join us next week for MIT's Virtual Graduate Fair on Tuesday, October 22 from 3PM–5PM ET. This event is an opportunity for prospective graduate students to learn about MIT's 47 graduate programs and summer research opportunities. The schedule of events are as follows: 1:00 -1:30 PM: Welcome from Dean Denzil Streete and GradDiversity 1:30 - 2:30 PM: GradCatalyst: An MIT Student Perspective 2:30 - 3:00 PM: MSRP Info Session 3:00 -5:00 PM: Virtual Graduate Fair The Zoom link is posted below - we look forward to seeing you! https://lnkd.in/dWArvGR9

David Sarabia is originally from a rural town known as Mexia, Texas, and is a second-year graduate student in the Pentelute Lab. David’s research focuses on advancing methods for the rapid production of chemically synthesized biomacromolecules, including mirror image proteins (D-proteins) and peptide nucleic acids (PNAs). These synthetically challenging classes of biomacromolecules are valued for their unique properties, which have a wide range of potential applications. “I chose to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry because I love problem-solving, which can be addressed by the development of creative solutions,” said David. “Also, I want to make chemistry more attainable for individuals and communities who might not have the opportunity to discover its marvels and complexities.” As the subject of this month’s Graduate Student Spotlight, David reveals the most interesting place he’s ever been, the people who have impressed him the most with their accomplishments, what makes his hometown special, and more! https://lnkd.in/eaMUmubm