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The Merkin Family Foundation today announced a commitment to the Ó³»­´«Ã½ of Harvard and MIT to establish the Merkin Institute Fellows, a program that will support some of the most promising and ambitious scientists pursuing bold research at the Ó³»­´«Ã½. The Merkin Family Foundation’s commitment will be used to create the first endowed fellowship program at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and will provide sustained support for these outstanding scientists as they blaze important new trails in science and medicine.

A research team pursuing one of the most commonly altered genes in cancer has laid a critical foundation for understanding this gene that could point the way toward developing drugs against it. A recent study of cancer genetics pointed to the gene MCL1, which encodes a protein that helps keep cells alive. The new research pinpoints compounds that repress MCL1’s activity and highlights an important companion gene that predicts if a tumor is dependent upon MCL1 for survival. Together, these tools suggest a path toward new therapeutics directed at MCL1.

Even when everything is in working order, the team in the Ó³»­´«Ã½â€™s Genome Sequencing Platform is never completely satisfied. Someone is always tinkering, inventing, or thinking about a way to strengthen one of the links in the chain of events that leads to sequenced DNA.

For patients with infectious diseases like tuberculosis, timing is critical. Tuberculosis is one of the most common causes of death from a curable disease, and cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis are on the rise. But determining if a patient carries an antibiotic-resistant strain can take weeks or months using current clinical diagnostics. During this period, patients are often treated with ineffective drugs and can continue to spread their illness as time slips away. This problem is not unique to tuberculosis – quicker diagnostics are urgently needed for all infectious diseases.