Kirsty Wienand

New Capabilities

Lead researcher on the isogenic resistance model project

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.

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