Thank you for your patients
As Jesse Patterson, an MIT research scientist, and Frank Lovell, a finance industry retiree with a penchant for travel, chatted in the Koch Institute auditorium after a public lecture, they realized the anomaly of the experience: Cancer patients rarely get to meet researchers working on their treatments, and cancer researchers rarely get to put a name and a face to the people they aim to help through their work. Lovell was participating in a clinical trial for a prostate cancer therapy that combines the widely-used targeted therapy abiraterone with the Plk1 inhibitor onvansertib. Patterson, working in the laboratory of Professor Michael Yaffe, the David H. Koch Professor of Science and director of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, played a significant role in identifying the new drug combination and its powerful potential. While their encounter was indeed fortunate, it was not random. They never would have met if not for the...