Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.

MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. 

The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.

The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.

“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.

Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.

Overcoming the limits

In an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.

But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.

To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.

So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.

“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.

The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.

Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.

They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.

To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.

“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.

Leveraging magnetism

This lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.

They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.

The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.

The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.

A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.

“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.

Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.

This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities.

There are many companies manufacturing adversarial clothing designed to confuse facial recognition systems.

It’s a cool idea, but I worry that it’s mostly security theater:

“Our patterns play with that chaos, confuse algorithms and make it way harder to pin you down,” he said.

Bell, however, said “none of these products are tried and tested, and a lot of these surveillance technologies can deal with a little resistance … [but] even if the designs don’t necessarily work perfectly, fashion is also a visible sign of resistance.

“This is consumers collectively coming together to make a visible statement.”...

The country has become a top purchaser of solar panels amid soaring energy prices and supply concerns. “Now is the time,” an analyst says.

A new study finds that global warming made this summer's fire conditions more likely to occur — not Canadian forest management.

Leaders of four Northeastern states asked Trump to reconsider denying them $227 million to recover from a February snowstorm.

Global warming, not climate policy, is bad for business, experts warn.

"Just like human beings, jet engines require lots of cool, dense air to perform well," said the CEO of Aero Consulting Experts.

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung instructed officials to view the ongoing heat wave as "a national disaster." In Japan, three lions died at a Tokyo zoo.

Rome will boost expenditures on green investment and military spending after the EU relaxed its strict spending rules, Giancarlo Giorgetti told parliament.

The country has emerged as one of Africa's largest carbon market destinations, attracting investments in clean cooking, renewable energy, mangrove restoration and forest conservation.

The same overheating problem that happens to our laptops also plagues computer servers and data centers around the world — and heat management is only getting harder as computer chips get more compact and powerful.

Understanding how heat moves through chips at the micro scale is essential for continuing to improve their performance. Unfortunately, most methods for measuring heat flow struggle with multilayered devices like the electronics that power our modern world.

Now MIT researchers have demonstrated a new way to study how heat moves through multilayered materials, combining X-rays that penetrate multiple layers with laser pulses for delivering heat. The researchers used the technique to measure how heat moves inside a promising device for transistors and flexible electronics. 

The method was so precise it allowed the researchers to quantify the effect of a single micron-scale defect in the device, revealing a surprising fourfold reduction in the material’s ability to transfer heat at that spot. They also found that the defect caused heat to spread unevenly, moving more easily in one direction than in the other.

The team believes the approach could help researchers understand overheating in devices and help companies develop more power-dense electronics for everything from AI applications to wearables and clean energy systems.

“Chip developers need devices that can handle heat,” says Mingda Li, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and co-corresponding author on an open-access paper about the work in Nature Communications. “I think overheating has become the real bottleneck in device performance. When doing these diagnoses using traditional techniques, they couldn’t get down to the micro- or nanometer scale. But eventually they’d like to go beyond that to study the heat carriers and understand exactly what causes failure, in order to avoid local hotspots and design better devices. This approach is a step in that direction.”

Joining Li on the paper are co-lead authors Thanh Nguyen PhD ’24 and MIT postdoc Chuliang Fu; PhD candidate Mouyang Cheng; Abhijatmedhi Chotrattanapituk ’21, SM ’26; Denisse Córdova Carrizales SM ’26; Eunbi Rha SM ’26; Tyra Espedal ’26; Buxuan Li PhD ’24; Shivam Kajale SM ’23, PhD ’26; Tongtong Liu PhD ’23; Kuan Qiao PhD ’22; University of Texas at Austin Assistant Professor Zhantao Chen SM ’18, PhD ’22; Argonne National Laboratory researchers Kumar Neeraj, Donald Walko, and Haidan Wen; MIT Principal Research Scientist Svetlana Boriskina; MIT Associate Professor Deblina Sarkar; and co-corresponding author and MIT Associate Professor Jeehwan Kim.

Tracking heat

Making more powerful computers and electronics often comes down to cramming more transistors into a smaller area. But the closer those transistors get to each other, the hotter the device gets as it operates, and the more heat needs to be moved.

Most people learn about the problem from their laptops overheating on their lap. At the data center scale, it means an enormous amount of energy must be devoted to cooling the servers.

The quest to design more power-dense computers and electronics is thus a quest to find materials that can transport heat most efficiently.

Researchers have used a number of methods to measure and model heat flow across materials, but they all have limitations when it comes to studying realistic device architectures. One common optical method to study heat at the microscopic level, for instance, is called time domain thermal reflectance.

“Because that technique uses optics, it doesn’t allow you to study different layers,” Kim explains. “Real devices have five or more layers. It also only provides an overall signal, and that makes it hard to see thermal transport happening in layers buried under the surface.”

Other techniques, like infrared cameras, don’t capture tiny changes at a fast enough frame rate to be useful at small scales.

To address those limitations, the researchers wanted to create something that could measure heat transfer at the nanoscale in multilayer systems. To do that, they used an emerging analysis technique that sends electron pulses and ultrafast X-rays at a material and measures changes in energy.

“Over the last few years, researchers have developed what is basically the brightest X-ray source in the world,” Nguyen says. “That allows you to focus an X-ray beam and get incredibly fine spatial resolution. You can also use a laser to heat the sample while the X-ray scans and shows how the heat dissipates across space in real-time.”

The technique offered a better view of heat transfer because the laser-powered electron pulse can capture changes in material strain at the atomic level while the X-rays can penetrate into multiple layers of the material, and the measurements can be combined to provide a clearer view of how a material moves heat.

“Using previous measurement techniques, in real devices, you couldn’t resolve what happens on one layer versus another, so you’d just measure the average,” Fu says. “X-rays can clearly show how heat propagates across the interface through their diffraction.”

The researchers applied their technique to a test device made of a layer of gallium nitride, which has shown promise for conducting heat efficiently, on top of silicon. The material combination has been studied for years, but its thermal performance has been shown to deteriorate because of tiny defects created during processing.

The researchers measured a fourfold reduction in heat dissipation across a wrinkle defect on the device and a 25 percent drop in heat dissipation across materials, showing more disruption to heat flow than they had expected.

“When people model heat dissipation, they model perfect crystals without defects,” Li says. “But these types of large wrinkle defects are very common in 2D materials. People never even knew how much heat is blocked by these wrinkles. Those are things we can now directly observe with this technique.”

Designing better chips

Li says a leading semiconductor industry consortium has already reached out to collaborate on applying the measurement technique to study different types of chips. He believes the technique will work to study a wide array of materials and devices.

“We can now pass a current and shine an X-ray on a device and see how the heat dissipates at a very small scale,” Kim says. “That’s something the industry has been longing for.”

Li says the approach will provide researchers with new information to improve the design of electronic systems.

“This will enable better thermal design of electronic systems,” Kim says. “Even with the same type of materials, the geometry and how the materials are laid out is quite complicated, so it will show us how those differences impact thermal flow by providing direct experimental measurements.”

The work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the MIT School of Engineering Distinguished Energy Efficiency Fellowship.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 06 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02726-6

The authors integrate dendrochronological records with range shifts to show that shifts in montane tree species are tightly linked to tree hydraulic properties. While climate-sensitive species track warming to higher elevations, stress-resistant species expand downslope.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 06 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02715-9

Changes in the Earth system may persist long after atmospheric CO2 levels decline. This study examines ocean acidification and how it will persist in ocean regions globally, with the Arctic identified as the area that experiences relief from acidification the latest under negative emissions.

On July 26, 1951, the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy signed a charter establishing Project Lincoln, an R&D program managed by MIT to develop the nation's first continent-wide air defense system, SAGE. The charter called for a research center to be opened within the towns of Bedford, Lincoln, and Lexington, Massachusetts, to support Project Lincoln, which was subsequently renamed MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

Seventy-five years later, Lincoln Laboratory — operating as a U.S. Department of War (DoW) federally funded research and development center managed by MIT — continues to innovate technology solutions to pressing national security challenges in partnership with government, industry, and academia. These innovations have at once protected the war fighter and U.S. homeland while impacting society. 

To commemorate the lab’s 75th anniversary, 10 staff members reflect below on key technology impacts. Additional technology impacts, both past and present, are featured on the laboratory’s historical timeline and in its 2025 Impact Report.

Surveilling space

“Since the dawn of the Space Age, Lincoln Laboratory has developed, prototyped, and/or operated essentially all radar and optical systems that the nation uses to surveil space. From detecting Sputnik in 1957 and conducting the first space-based tracking of satellites in 1997 to discovering more than 50 percent of then-known natural objects in the solar system by the early 2000s, these innovations have not only provided space situational awareness for the military but also advanced science.”

—Grant Stokes, laboratory fellow in the Space Systems and Technology Division

Trailblazing military satellite communications (MILSATCOM)

“Today, MILSATCOM is an expectation, used in almost every mission. But when we began the Lincoln Experimental Satellites program in the 1960s, only the glimmer of an idea existed. The laboratory brought this concept into fruition, developing a series of prototypes and then supporting industry as they built multiple generations of operational capabilities. The laboratory continues to provide assessments, test infrastructure, and advanced technologies for ensuring warfighters remain connected globally now and into the future.”

—Tom Macdonald, head of the Communication Systems Division

Advancing capability at a national test range

“For 64 of the laboratory’s 75 years, our staff, accompanied by their families, have been serving the Ronald Reagan Space and Missile Test Range on Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific. As the range’s scientific advisor, we have helped envision, build, operate, and enhance instrumentation critical to missile defense and space situational awareness. With our technical support, this national asset hosts stakeholders across the DoW developing and demonstrating advanced technologies to keep us ahead of adversaries.” 

—Katherine Rink, head of the Air, Missile, and Maritime Defense Technology Division

Protecting air travelers

“Aviation safety around the world has improved tremendously thanks to technologies developed at Lincoln Laboratory. Advanced surveillance and collision-avoidance systems pioneered here were critical to keep aircraft safely separated as traffic levels increased. Laboratory innovations in radar processing and weather forecasting now help controllers guide flights smoothly around storms. Today, we are excited to be designing novel technologies for drones and advanced air mobility systems that will revolutionize air transportation over the next 75 years.” 

—James Kuchar, associate head of the Homeland Protection and Air Traffic Control Division

Miniaturizing microelectronics

“All electronic devices, from smartphones to laptops, rely on ever-shrinking transistors. The laboratory’s pioneering work in 193-nanometer lithography and liquid-immersion lithography enabled chip manufacturers to continue this miniaturization from 2000 onward. For nearly two decades, we had served as the international center of excellence for developing these technologies. The semiconductor industry adopted them worldwide, impacting virtually every aspect of modern life. We continue innovating techniques to fit more transistors on chips powering our digital age.”

—Mordechai Rothschild, principal staff member in the Advanced Technology Division

Saving lives on the front lines

“During operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, Lincoln Laboratory’s work countering improvised explosive devices helped shift the fight from reacting to roadside bombs to anticipating, detecting, and defeating them. We quickly prototyped, integrated, and fielded several advanced surveillance and sensing systems that reduced casualties and improved freedom of maneuver. This approach — combining rapid innovation with rapid transition to the field — continues to strengthen national security and save lives as we confront today’s newest battlefield challenges.”

—Justin Brooke, Lincoln Laboratory assistant director for research and development

Providing actionable intelligence

“How do you find targets hidden in plain sight? The laboratory has been addressing this question for decades. We've developed airborne 3D lidar systems to image beneath triple-canopy jungle, ground-penetrating radar and opto-acoustic systems to locate buried mines, techniques exploiting molecular vibration at terahertz frequencies to identify trace-explosives residue, and airborne synthetic aperture radar systems to map vast areas and pinpoint objects of interest. These technologies have enhanced the effectiveness of U.S. military missions globally.”

—Jalal Khan, assistant head of the ISR and Tactical Systems Division

Beaming data over lasers

“In 2013, the laboratory and NASA made history by transmitting data from the moon to Earth at record-breaking speeds using lasers instead of traditional radio. This laser communications demonstration incorporated decades of laboratory engineering innovation and paved the way for future missions. The same technology was used recently to connect the world with the Artemis II astronauts, enabling near-continuous transmission of awe-inspiring high-definition images and videos — forever shaping how we communicate across the solar system.” 

—Bryan Robinson, leader of the Optical and Quantum Communications Group

Detecting biological threats

“Biological threats, whether from weaponized agents like anthrax or infectious diseases like Covid-19, pose significant risks to national security. For three decades, the laboratory has advanced technologies that strengthen the nation’s ability to detect, prevent, and respond to such threats. Our innovations in environmental biosensing and presymptomatic detection of infection enhance public health resilience and protect infrastructure. For war fighters, these technologies provide improved health monitoring and threat awareness to maintain operational readiness in complex environments.”

—Christina Rudzinski, assistant head of the Biotechnology and Human Systems Division

Securing cyber systems

“The greatest reward of our cybersecurity work is not the research we publish or technologies we create — it is the impact we’ve delivered to the men and women on the front lines using our technology. By understanding the threats, strengthening resilience, and delivering new capabilities to confront our adversaries, we have helped secure the nation. Our innovations have not only supported the DoW and intelligence community but also advanced the world of computing and security research.”

—Stephen Rejto, head of the Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division

Looking forward

“Our founding charter called upon MIT to solve an urgent national security crisis. That mission still drives us 75 years later. Lincoln Laboratory’s technological innovations have defended the homeland from emerging threats, enhanced war fighter operations on the modern battlefield, protected the public from natural and deliberate hazards, and enhanced daily life. Across air, land, sea, space, and cyber, we are advancing technologies and prototyping complex systems to help safeguard the nation for decades to come.” 

—Melissa Choi, Lincoln Laboratory director

Super-thin superconducting materials, which are only one or a few atoms thick, have unique properties scientists can leverage to produce more compact, scalable, and efficient quantum devices. But these fragile materials degrade so rapidly in air that they are difficult to study or manufacture.

Now, researchers from MIT and elsewhere have discovered and harnessed a method to generate a large, uniform area of ultrathin superconducting material that remains stable in air. 

They “grow” the superconducting material, called niobium diselenide, underneath another atomically thin material, carbon-based graphene. The graphene layer protects the fragile superconductor from oxidation, while guiding it to grow in a smooth layer over a large wafer-scale area.

The researchers further integrated this air-stable superconductor into a superconducting microwave circuit. When tested, the material maintained its superconducting properties and exhibited high kinetic inductance, which is a resource for many quantum devices. 

In the long run, this advance could help miniaturize superconducting quantum computing hardware, as well as technologies like ultrasensitive quantum detectors for communications or cosmology.

“Emerging superconductors that are only a monolayer thick have a lot of potential. Thanks to our new process, they are no longer materials that can only be made at a very small scale. There are now exciting opportunities for scientists to study these materials, utilize them in circuits, and explore their practical applications,” says co-lead author Xudong Sheldon Zheng, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

He is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Sameia Zaman SM ’24, an EECS graduate student, and Kenan Zhang, a recent postdoc in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE); corresponding authors William D. Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of EECS and professor of physics, director of the Center for Quantum Engineering, and associate director of RLE; Joel Î-j. Wang, an assistant professor at New York University; and Jing Kong, the Jerry Mcafee (1940) Professor in Engineering at MIT and a member of RLE; as well as others at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory, Rice University, Yale University, and Pohang University in South Korea. The research appears today in Nature.

Powerful properties

Superconductors are materials that can conduct electricity without resistance, and they are essential for some types of quantum devices. 

Two-dimensional superconducting materials retain their superconducting properties despite being only a few atoms thick. These materials hold the promise to miniaturize superconducting circuitry.

Niobium diselenide, an ultrathin superconductor composed of a single, closely packed layer of niobium atoms sandwiched between a single layer of selenium atoms on either side, has a very high kinetic inductance, as members of the research team recently reported.

This enables the material to store a great deal of inductive energy in a very small area. Large kinetic inductance in a small form-factor is a desirable design element in many quantum devices. 

One commonly used approach to realizing a large kinetic inductance is to string together an array of devices called Josephson junctions.

If scientists could incorporate materials such as thin niobium diselenide with sufficiently large kinetic inductance into a quantum circuit, they could replace the large area of electronic junctions with a tiny piece of thin-film material, making the circuit more compact. But because niobium diselenide degrades rapidly in air, scientists have not been able to reliably fabricate devices at the wafer scale. Instead, they rely on exfoliation techniques that yield small flakes. Furthermore, researchers have struggled to grow material with uniform monolayer thickness. Consequently, it has been challenging to fully probe its properties or test it in practical applications.

“Typically, once we make the material and remove it from its inert environment, it immediately starts to oxidize and degrade, ultimately becoming damaged,” Zheng explains.

Scientists usually grow niobium diselenide by depositing chemical precursors onto a silicon dioxide substrate. Then they place another layer of two-dimensional material, like graphene or hexagonal boron nitride, on top to protect the fragile superconductor from air.

But such postgrowth protection presents a challenge. The superconductor begins to oxidize almost immediately after synthesis, degrading its properties before it is protected. Meanwhile, the protection process requires a stringent inert environment and delicate processing.

Mind the gap

The MIT researchers used a different tactic. They put the layer of graphene on top of the silicon dioxide substrate first. Then they deposited the precursors and grew the superconducting material in the tiny gap between the two layers.

“It took a long time for us to understand how the growth could happen underneath the graphene. Through collaboration and discussion, we eventually uncovered the mechanism for growing the material at the interface, and this solves a lot of problems and allows us to simplify our fabrication steps,” Zheng says.

The silicon dioxide substrate helps trap the precursors long enough for the crystal to begin forming, while the graphene layer allows them to move around easily and spread into a continuous monolayer.

The researchers used this technique to generate a perfectly smooth layer of niobium diselenide more than an inch in size.

“By carefully tuning the growth conditions, we can ensure the material grows between the layers in exactly the way we’ve designed,” Zheng says.

Even though the graphene is placed on top of the silicon dioxide, the weak adhesion between these materials leaves a gap between them less than 1 nanometer thick. The niobium diselenide grows only within that gap. Then, since it is already encapsulated by graphene, the researchers can safely remove it into the ambient environment without causing degradation.

Careful connections

The researchers also designed an oxidation-free transfer technique to peel the graphene-niobium diselenide structure from its growth substrate, building on prior work by members of the team.

Then, they developed a method to integrate the thin film into a quantum circuit without hampering the fragile superconductor or its properties.

“It is challenging to make a good electrical connection between this very thin material, which is only about 1 nanometer in thickness, and our electrodes, which are a few hundred nanometers in thickness,” Zaman says.

They carefully etch the side walls of the thin-film superconductor in a vacuum chamber, which preserves the smooth edge of the material. When they integrate the prepared niobium-graphene structure into a conventional superconducting circuit, it forms a reliable electrical connection. Importantly, the material maintained its superconducting properties and exhibited high kinetic inductance after clean room fabrication and integration into the circuit. This makes it particularly attractive for fabricating compact superconducting quantum devices and other quantum technologies.

Furthermore, the growth strategy is not limited to monolayer niobium diselenide. The researchers demonstrated that it can be extended to a broad family of monolayer quantum materials with diverse and technologically important properties.

In the future, the researchers aim to integrate these ultrathin superconducting materials into functional device architectures to enable the exploration of fundamental physics and the prototyping of quantum devices and other advanced technologies.

“We’ve taken a very good step toward exploring both the physics and the application side of this thin, monolayer superconductor, which we can now grow in wafer scale or in even larger areas. There are a lot of directions we can go in the future,” Zaman says.

This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Schlumberger Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Semiconductor Research Corporation Center, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the National Research Foundation of Korea. This work was carried out, in part, using MIT.nano facilities.

To develop new targeted treatments for cancer, scientists need tissue models that accurately represent the genetic and molecular traits of the cancer they’re studying. An international team led by researchers at MIT’s Koch Institute, the Broad Institute, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the National Cancer Institute, and numerous other partnering institutions has developed nearly 700 new cancer models, derived from patient tumors, which they hope will aid in drug development. 

These cells, which represent 25 different types of cancer, are now available for cancer researchers around the world to use. The project is described in a new paper appearing today in Nature, with contributors from more than two dozen institutions.

The models are the result of a 10-year initiative, funded by the National Cancer Institute, to expand the number of patient-derived tissue models available. For most of these models, the researchers converted tumor cells into organoids — 3D cell cultures that can survive indefinitely and mimic the genetic and molecular features of the tumors that they originally came from.

This type of model could help researchers identify new drug targets and test potential new treatments for many more types of cancer.

“Since the sequencing of the human genome and the analysis of cancer genomes over the last 20 years, we have had many ideas about cancer targets, but we need experimental systems in the lab to validate those targets and launch drug discovery projects,” says Jesse Boehm, a research scientist at the Koch Institute and one of the senior authors of the study.

From tumors to organoids

The Human Cancer Models Initiative was launched in 2016, following the completion of the Cancer Genome Atlas, an effort to catalog the genomic alterations responsible for cancer growth. 

For the atlas project, researchers sequenced cancer cell samples from thousands of patients. That work revealed that the diversity of tumor genetic profiles was not fully captured by the roughly 1,000 patient-derived cancer cell lines that existed at the time.

“We realized that a thousand wasn’t enough, that the international community needed to invest in many more thousands to represent all cancers, all genotypes, all ethnicities,” Boehm says. “Most existing models come from European and Southeast Asian patients, and many rare cancers are missing.”

Funded by the National Cancer Institute and the United Kingdom’s Wellcome Trust, hundreds of scientists across dozens of institutions participated in obtaining patient samples and developing them into cell lines that could be used for research.

“It’s been an enormous initiative, and this Nature paper is the culmination of that 10-year swath of activity,” Boehm says.

More than 2,700 tumor samples were obtained from hospitals participating in the study, from patients who gave their permission for their cells to be used for research. These samples were collected by hospitals in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. 

“A resource of this scale depends on the kind of systematic effort that often happens behind the scenes,” says Mushriq Al-Jazrawe, scientific director of the High Throughput Sciences (HTS) platform at the Koch Institute and one of the lead authors of the study. “I’m especially grateful to the technical and scientific teams across the participating institutes whose careful, expert work turns patient tumor samples into well-characterized models and data that researchers everywhere can use with confidence.”

Most of these samples came from commonly seen cancers such as lung, liver, and pancreatic, but they also included about 150 rare types including tumors of the gallbladder and the small intestine.

To convert these samples into cells that can survive indefinitely in the lab, the researchers developed techniques for culturing the cells in specialized growth media with a scaffold that helps them grow into a 3D structure. Overall, the researchers were able to successfully convert about one-third of the patient samples that they received.

Most of these new models consist of organoids, which in some cases more closely mimic the structure of the tissue that the cells came from. Traditional cancer cell lines, which were developed beginning in the 1950s, exist as single layers of cells grown in a lab dish, while organoids consist of three-dimensional balls of cells embedded in a gelatin-like structure.

Once the organoids and cell lines were established, which can take up to a year, the researchers analyzed them to make sure that their genomic sequences, RNA expression, and epigenomic modifications closely matched those of the tumor cells that they were derived from.

Cancer vulnerabilities

All of the models developed as part of the HCMI were deposited at the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), a nonprofit distributor of cell lines. Each model also has extensive data from the patient whose cells were used to start the cell line, including mutations that the patient inherited from their parents (germline mutations), and information on the cancer treatments they received.

Using these models, scientists should be able to perform much larger scale screens that could aid in drug development efforts. 

In another paper also appearing in Nature today, Broad Institute researchers reported that they were able to profile more than 300 of the new models using high-throughput genome-sequencing, RNA sequencing, and more than 100 with CRISPR loss-of-function screens. This enabled them to identify vulnerabilities in each model that could be targeted with new drugs.

These findings have been added to a resource known as the Cancer Dependency Map (DepMap), which now includes information on more than 2,000 types of cancer.

In another Nature companion paper, researchers at the Sanger Institute led an effort to characterize an additional 256 organoids developed through the HCMI project. 

Additionally, even though most aspects of the formal HCMI project are currently winding down, researchers hope to continue developing models derived from additional patient tumor samples, including more pediatric cancers and rare cancers.

“We now have about 2,000, but if we really want to represent all humans with cancer in our preclinical research, more work is needed. We have to invite patients to donate tissue to make research tools that the whole world can use,” Boehm says. “I think this will hopefully be not the end, but the beginning.”

“A major opportunity now is to carry the lessons of HCMI forward, so we can generate as much insight as possible from these precious tissue donations,” says Al-Jazrawe, who is also a researcher in the Broad Institute’s Cancer Program. “Here at HTS, we are continuing the work by developing methods to study patient-derived samples and models reproducibly and at scale, and by providing a platform for close collaboration with clinical and research teams.”

Other senior authors of the HCMI paper are Mathew Garnett of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, David Tuveson of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Andrea Califano of Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Paul Spellman of the University of California at Los Angeles, Keith Ligon of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Daniela Gerhard of the NCI Center for Cancer Genomics, and Louis Staudt of the NCI Center for Cancer Research.

In addition to Al-Jazrawe, the paper’s lead authors are Dina El-Harouni of the Broad Institute and Dana Farber, Seongmin Choi of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Merve Dede of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Toshinori Hinoue of the Van Andel Institute, Sean Misek of the Broad Institute and Dana-Farber, Heeju Hoh of the Institute of Systems Biology and the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Luca Zanella of the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. 

The research was funded primarily by the National Cancer Institute and the Wellcome Trust.

An appeals court ruling unfreezing the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund could be the big break for efforts to bring clean energy to communities around the country — or just the latest turn of the legal screw.

The three wildfires near Spokane have so far burned far fewer acres than other ongoing Washington fires. But they have wrought outsize destruction.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers discussed ways of advancing a host of legislation.

The Government Accountability Office says the disaster agency is at risk of failure and operates "in uncertainty and confusion."