MIT researchers tackle vaccines, drug delivery, and climate with cross-disciplinary push

At MIT, a single-injection vaccine is being developed using techniques borrowed from semiconductor manufacturing. Ingestible pills are being designed by studying how squid and fish move through water. Solar cells are becoming more efficient through nanomaterials. These aren't separate breakthroughs — they're part of a deliberate shift toward solving problems at scale by connecting researchers across disciplines.

Angela Koehler, who directs MIT's Health and Life Sciences Collaborative, framed the challenge simply: how does an institution full of experts actually work together on transformative problems. Three sessions this week showed what that looks like in practice.

Health: From Microelectronics to Medicine

Ana Jaklenec has spent years trying to make vaccines simpler. Most vaccines require multiple shots spaced weeks apart — a barrier in developing countries where follow-up care is difficult. Her approach: steal from the semiconductor industry. Microelectronics manufacturing techniques, refined over decades to build precise structures at tiny scales, can now create vaccine particles that release their payload slowly after a single injection. MIT.nano, the institute's fabrication facility, was essential to proving this works.

Giovanni Traverso took a different path. As both a mechanical engineer and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, he noticed something: squid can squeeze through impossibly tight spaces, and remora fish can stick to larger animals without damaging them. He's using those principles to design pills that can deliver drugs directly to the stomach lining or intestines — targeting treatments where they're needed most. Jagesh Shah's company, Mirai Bio, is pursuing similar precision through lipid nanoparticles that can deliver therapies to specific cell types.

The pattern here matters. These researchers aren't waiting for perfect lab conditions. They're collaborating with industry partners, which accelerates the path from discovery to patients who actually need these tools.

Manufacturing: Closing the Gap Between Lab and Market

Dan Oran started as a technician, earned his PhD, and then founded Irradiant Technologies — a company developing advanced manufacturing equipment. His trajectory represents something MIT is deliberately trying to enable: the pipeline from education to workforce to entrepreneurship.

A. John Hart, who heads MIT's Initiative for New Manufacturing, emphasized that the institute's focus isn't just on flashy research. It's about understanding how manufacturing actually works, where it's happening, and how to rebuild capacity domestically. That means getting students into real workshops, not just lectures.

The Master of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing and Design program exemplifies this. Students don't just study theory; they build things. The low-cost fiber extrusion device (FrED) that emerged from the program is now used for hands-on learning — a tool that could eventually help small manufacturers access technologies previously available only to large companies.

Climate: Nanoscale Solutions to Planetary Problems

The climate session connected three separate research directions into a coherent strategy. Michael Strano is using nanomaterials to improve solar cells and energy storage — making renewable energy more efficient. Desirée Plata is working with bacteria that eat methane, exploring biological approaches to removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Kripa Varanasi has developed ice-phobic coatings and water-harvesting systems that make power plants and refrigeration more efficient.

None of these solves climate change alone. Together, they represent the kind of cross-disciplinary effort the problem actually requires. Materials science, biology, engineering, and policy all have to move in the same direction.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth's closing remark captured the underlying idea: "If we harness our collective efforts, we can make a serious positive impact." It's not a guarantee. But it's the recognition that the problems worth solving aren't solved by one lab or one discipline. They're solved when researchers stop working in isolation and start building on each other's work — from the nanoscale up to the systems that shape how billions of people live.