Laura Kiessling is an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a member of Koch
Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, and the Novartis Professor of Chemistry at MIT. Prior to
MIT, she was the Laurens Anderson Professor of Biochemistry and the Hilldale Professor of Chemistry at
the University of Wisconsin, where she also directed the Keck Center for Chemical Genomics. She has
received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1998) and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2008).
In 2018, Kiessling was the first woman to receive the Tetrahedron Award. Kiessling is a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003), a Member of the American Academy of Microbiology
(2007), the American Philosophical Society (2017), the National Academy of Sciences (2007) and the
National Academy of Medicine (2022).
Kiessling began her undergraduate studies at UW-Madison but transferred to MIT after spring break trip
to Boston, because she saw so many women excelling in science there. She earned her BS in Chemistry
from MIT where she carried out research into asymmetric organic transformations with Professor Bill
Roush. She followed her interest in organic synthesis to Yale, where she worked in the group of Stuart
Schreiber. Her graduate research laid the foundation for the group’s synthesis of the ene-diyne core
natural product calicheamicin γ, a DNA-cleaving compound with anticancer activity. She postulated that
the sugars of this natural product were critical for DNA recognition, a hypothesis that was later borne out
in subsequent research by the Danishefsky and Kahne groups. Kiessling’s interest in DNA recognition led
her to postdoctoral studies at Caltech with Peter Dervan. There she synthesized the first non-natural bases
to recognize mixed DNA sequences via triple helix formation.
Kiessling’s graduate and postdoctoral studies sparked an interest in understanding the recognition
mechanisms of glycans. Because individual protein-glycan interactions are weak (Kd 10-3 M), she sought
to understand and leverage multivalency to explore these processes. She recognized that defined
multivalent ligands could serve as mechanistic probes and leads. Her approach to generate such ligands
was to use controlled living polymerizations, such as the ring-opening metathesis polymerization
(ROMP). Indeed, she was the first to use ROMP to synthesize bioactive polymers. She also pioneered the
concept of “post-polymerization modification” to generate a series of polymers whose activities can be
compared directly.
Kiessling used her access to synthetic ligands to show that low affinity, multivalent binding interactions
can be remarkably specific. She also showed that multivalent ligands generated through this method could
mimic mucins, and she generated the most potent ligands known for L-selectin, a protein involved in the
inflammatory/immune response. These ligands functioned by recruiting an endogenous cell surface
protease—an early demonstration that protease recruitment can downregulate a protein and the first
example on the cell surface.
Kiessling studies of multivalent recognition led her to introduce the concept of using bifunctional ligand
to recruit natural antibodies to cells for destruction of tumor cells. In addition, she has shown that viruslike
particles can be adorned with glycans to deliver antigens to dendritic cells. The result is an anticancer
(Th2) immune response. In summary, Kiessling’s interdisciplinary research has elucidated and exploited
the mechanisms of cell surface recognition processes. She has pioneered the synthesis of multiple types of
molecular arrays and used them to elucidate the principles underlying multivalent interactions. She
leveraged these findings to achieve cell specific recognition, elicit and illuminate mechanisms underlying
signal transduction. Her recent studies focus on understanding the role of multivalent lectins in cell
recognition.