Geoffrey von Maltzahn, a 28-year-old Ph.D. candidate in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, won a $30,000 Lemelson-MIT award for his nanomedicine cancer therapy inventions.
Von Maltzahn has been working with a Harvard-MIT HST electrical engineering and computer science professor to invent treatments that could precisely target and destroy cancer cells without affecting healthy tissue. Von Maltzahn developed polymer-coated gold “nano-antennas” that target tumors and destroy them with heat.