Taking a moonshot at a rare childhood cancer
MIT Professor Angela Koehler is part of a team that has been awarded a federal grant to study one of the least-understood but most-fatal forms of childhood cancer, fusion-positive alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma (ARMS). The $5.8 million, five-year grant is part of the Cancer Moonshot Initiative, a National Institutes of Health program dedicating $1.8 billion over seven years to accelerating the discovery of new ways to prevent, diagnose, and cure cancer. Koehler, the Samuel A. Goldblith Career Development Professor in Applied Biology and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, will be part of an international team led by researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Duke University, the National Cancer Institute, and the University of Zurich. ARMS, a cancer affecting skeletal muscle tissue, is rare, accounting for about 1 percent of all cancers among children and adolescents, and an annual incidence that is truly “one in a million.”...