Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

New Capabilities

Received 2026 AACR Team Science Award for DepMap; poster presented at AACR 2026; awaiting DepMap portal data release for resistance models

Every year, hundreds of thousands of lung cancer patients start treatment with osimertinib, the leading targeted therapy for tumors driven by mutations in the EGFR gene. Most of them will respond. Nearly all of them will eventually stop responding, as their cancers evolve resistance through a dozen different molecular escape routes. Until now, researchers trying to understand those escape routes had to work with messy, inconsistent lab models that made it difficult to pin down which genetic change caused which failure. On April 20, 2026, the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard released a panel of 13 precisely engineered cancer cell lines, each genetically identical except for a single, defined resistance mechanism, giving researchers clean, standardized tools to study exactly how and why treatments stop working.

Updated Apr 22

New Capabilities

Home institution of the DefensePredictor team

Every major tool in genetic engineering — from the enzymes that cut DNA in the 1970s to CRISPR gene editing — started as a defense weapon bacteria use against viruses. Two research teams just revealed that bacteria carry roughly three times more of these weapons than anyone realized, identifying millions of antiviral proteins across tens of thousands of genomes using machine-learning models that can flag a new defense system in five minutes.

Updated Apr 17