The Marble Center celebrates its 10th anniversary, showcases success stories behind translating experiments to clinical products
Since 2016, MIT’s Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine has been working to bring cutting-edge nanoscience to cancer care
“The world that we can't see is so rich in detail and possibility,” said Susan Hockfield, professor of Neuroscience and President Emerita of MIT. From bacteria and viruses to DNA and proteins, much of biology exists at the nanoscale. MIT’s Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine was born to meet the need for a research center that focuses on the power of cancer technology at this scale.
Founded in 2016, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine is a collective of faculty research labs that aims to advance cancer nanomedicine, a field that seeks to detect, treat, and monitor cancer progression through biomaterials only a few water molecules in size. On April 9, 2026, the Marble Center celebrated its 10th anniversary at the Broad Institute.
Director Sangeeta Bhatia PhD ’97 stated that the center’s goal is “to build a community, to train the next generation of leaders, and to translate inventions that maybe were considered high risk or futuristic towards patients and into the future.” Since the Marble Center’s creation, these labs have published hundreds of papers, trained 491 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, begun eight Investigational New Drug-IND enabling studies (the final pre-clinical experiments before human testing), and created 23 startups, some of which presented at the celebration’s panel.
The event featured opening remarks by Bhatia, as well as Marble Center member and David H. Koch Institute Professor Robert Langer ScD ’74. This was followed by a panel of biotechnology executives led by Hockfield, who shared success stories behind translating an experimental discovery into products for real patients.
Because cancers are so diverse, their treatments need to be diverse too. The panelists tackled cancer treatments from various angles, all showing success stories of translation, from ideas to clinical trials and eventually, manufacturing.
Viktor Adalsteinsson PhD ’15, co-founder of biotechnology start-up Amplifyer Bio and director of the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, described his experience in studying cancer detection. A potential non-invasive way to diagnose cancer is to draw blood from a patient and screen it for shed tumor DNA, a test known as a liquid biopsy. However, patients’ livers ingested and destroyed most of these molecules, leaving behind an undetectable amount for the liquid biopsy. While obtaining his PhD at MIT’s Love Lab, Adalsteinsson founded Amplifyer Bio. This company produces a decoy nanoparticle that acts as a priming agent and distracts the liver for long enough to allow tumor DNA to accumulate to detectable levels. Then, the blood sample is taken and properly screened for this DNA, enabling doctors to monitor and detect cancer early, when it’s most treatable.
Meanwhile, precise treatment is the mission of Noor Jailkhani, the CEO, co-founder, and president of Martisome Bio, which focuses on radiopharmaceuticals. Radiation therapy is currently a standard of care treatment for solid tumors. It uses high-energy beams to induce DNA damage, leading to cell death. However, radiation also kills healthy cells in the process, causing unnecessary damage and side effects in patients. Matrisome Bio’s product is a small, highly specific protein called a nanobody attached to a radioactive payload. The nanobody is engineered to bind to the extracellular matrix (ECM), a scaffold of proteins and sugars that surrounds both cancerous and normal cells. The ECM undergoes a process called ECM remodeling around sites of inflammation, such as tumors. This makes the cancerous ECM a conserved drug target across patients. Matrisome Bio’s nanobody delivers targeted radiation to the remodeled ECM and thus, cancer cells. Jailkhani hopes that this technology will address what she calls “the largest unmet need for oncology”: metastatic tumors, or cancer cells that spread from the primary tumor.
Peter DeMuth, the chief scientific officer of Elicio Therapeutics, explained how his company develops peptide-based cancer vaccines that target the lymph nodes, where most immune cells are created. However, in developing such technologies, the company ran into a fundamental problem with vaccine delivery. On paper, peptides are perfect candidates for cancer vaccines, since they can be engineered to bind to specific biomolecules. However, the lymph nodes are a difficult destination; the body can easily ship them off to the blood or destroy them entirely. Elicio Therapeutics utilizes albumin hitchhiking to tackle this obstacle, according to DeMuth. With this strategy, components are bound to albumin, the same protein that makes up egg whites. Using albumin as a shuttle, Elicio Therapeutics’s peptide-based cancer vaccines target a mutated driver of cancer growth known mKRAS that can reach the lymph nodes, and eventually the blood.
While Elicio Therapeutics focuses on delivering peptides to lymph nodes, Souffle Therapeutics aims to enable the targeted delivery of siRNA-based medicines to any cell in the body. Small interfering RNA (siRNA) is a class of double-stranded RNA molecules that silence specific genes that create disease-causing proteins. Like with previous technologies, delivery of these siRNA-based medicines to the cells became a problem. The siRNA’s hydrophilic nature can prevent it from passing through the hydrophobic cell membrane.
Vadim Dudkin, the founding chief technology officer at Souffle Therapeutics, talked about the company’s systematic approach to this problem. When delivering molecules to cells, they often need to be attached to a ligand which interacts with cell surface receptors, akin to a key being inserted into a door lock.
“We [screen] cells and whole tissues to identify what receptors are on the surface, and then how we can identify subsets of them that can drive productive delivery,” Dudkin said. Using these subsets of receptors, ligands can then be designed so that molecules are allowed entry into certain cells in the body.
Panelists agreed that scaling up novel technologies was one of the biggest challenges in translating their ideas to an actual product. Manufacturers have to decide if new and innovative ideas can withstand large-scale manufacturing.
“Do I want to use the most exciting, novel approach? It works great in the discovery setting, but it has impacts [in the manufacturing side],” Dudkin said.
The solution, Dudkin explained, is to balance between innovation and reliability. “We ended up going from the fanciest, most sophisticated… technologies to things that are in already approved drugs and have been in them for decades,” he remarked.
DeMuth similarly noted that, in scaling up discoveries, simplifying a complex process is often key. For example, polyethylene glycol (PEG) is a cheap and readily-available polymer frequently used in many academic settings for the synthesis and modification of drug molecules, often binding drugs to ligands or coating the drug. However, PEG is a chain of ethylene glycol units, and they often come in different sizes determined by how many units are in the chain. If researchers use different masses of PEG, they will yield different products.
“We started to imagine this convoluted mass problem where many [products] would have very complex mass profiles,” DeMuth said.
Instead of dealing with this complication, DeMuth chose to simplify the problem by using a variant of PEG called discrete PEG, in which every chain has the same number of ethylene glycol units and, therefore, the same mass. “That eliminates a lot of complexity and ultimately gives us a lot more control over the product as it goes forward,” DeMuth explained.
Hockfield closed the discussion by asking the panelists what they think the next decade of nanomedicine will yield. Both Jailkhani and DeMuth answered that precision will be the key impact of nanomedicine, allowing scientists to eliminate treatments’ side effects and deliver payloads more effectively and accurately.
According to Dudkin, solving the problem of drug delivery will eventually allow researchers to better control cells. “When we figure out delivery, we will figure out how to drive the molecular biology of the cell in a way that will alleviate the disease,” Dudkin said.
From exploiting the extracellular matrix to using albumin to deliver molecules to the lymph nodes, the Marble Center’s 10th anniversary celebration was a showcase of stories where bold, innovative ideas get transformed into solutions for the real world.