At MIT, a few scribbles on a whiteboard can turn into a potentially transformational cancer treatment.
This scenario came to fruition this week when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a system for treating an aggressive form of bladder cancer. More than a decade ago, the system started as an idea in the lab of MIT Professor Michael Cima at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, enabled by funding from the National Institutes of Health and MIT’s Deshpande Center.
The work that started with a few researchers at MIT turned into a startup, TARIS Biomedical LLC, that was co-founded by Cima and David H. Koch Institute Professor Robert Langer, and acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2019. In developing the core concept of a device for local drug delivery to the bladder — which represents a new paradigm in bladder cancer treatment — the MIT team approached drug delivery like an engineering problem.