After 19 years, legendary Koch Institute director Tyler Jacks passes the torch to Matthew Vander Heiden E! News UK

Tyler Jacks, the longtime director of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, said months ago he would step down from the bar after finding a successor. Thursday, that day has finally arrived.

After more than 19 years at the head of the institute, Jacks handed over the reins to Matthew Vander Heiden, professor of biology at MIT and researcher on the metabolism of cancer cells. The longtime director isn’t going far: MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in October that Jacks would return “full time in the excitement of the lab.”

In addition to teaching, mentoring and managing labs at Koch, Jacks is now president of Break Through Cancer, a foundation started earlier this year with $ 250 million from the William H. Goodwin family. The foundation, with the aim of uniting researchers from major American cancer centers, has already forged partnerships with the Koch Institute, Dana-Farber, the Sydney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Memorial Sloan Kettering and MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas. .

“Jacks is a renowned scientist whose personal research has changed cancer prevention and treatment,” said Phillip Sharp, former director of the MIT Cancer Research Center before it was the Koch Institute.

The Harvard University graduate pioneered the use of gene targeting technology to build mouse models, which are used in laboratories around the world today. And because the models so closely resemble human forms of cancer, they have allowed researchers to track tumor progression and test new ways to detect and treat the disease, MIT said.

Jacks oversaw the transformation of the JRC into the Koch Institute in 2007. The center was originally founded by Nobel laureate Salvador Luria in 1974, shortly after the Nixon administration declared a “war on cancer. “. Jacks was the fourth director of the CCR.

In 2015, he co-founded Dragonfly Therapeutics with entrepreneur and filmmaker Bill Haney and David Raulet, an expert in natural killer cell biology. Seeking to build on cell therapy 1.0, the team began working on therapies to engage tri-specific NK cells. In July, Biotech concluded the third in a series of deals with Bristol Myers Squibb and announced plans to add a facility in Copenhagen.

Vander Heiden plans to lead the Koch Institute into the future, with a focus on machine learning and AI.

“With the launch of MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, there is a tremendous opportunity to use the rapid advancements in machine learning and computing for healthcare,” he said in a statement. . “I think this is something that MIT should absolutely be a leader in, especially when it comes to cancer.”

The Wisconsin native received his bachelor’s, medical and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago and then continued his postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School. While there, he worked on research that paved the way for drugs targeting cancer cells with a mutation in the HDI gene – the first modern drugs approved by the FDA to target metabolism, according to MIT.

In 2010, he became one of the first new recruits to the Koch Institute after his transformation from CCR. The director will continue his personal research on cell metabolism and cancer, as well as his work on the treatment of prostate cancer patients at Dana-Farber.