Fall 2025
By Alice Levitt
Rice’s research has long pushed the boundaries of the possible. At Rice’s SynthX Center — short for Synthesis X — that spirit now seeks bold new strategies to pair Rice’s scientific muscle with the clinical might of the world’s largest medical center to fight cancer in ways once thought unimaginable.
Led by Han Xiao and housed in the Bioscience Research Collaborative, SynthX brings together experts in organic chemistry, chemical biology and nanomaterials.
“We know what we can do, and I believe it’s not limited,” said Xiao in his office, surrounded by modern laboratory space. In those labs, Xiao and his colleagues are quietly making inroads that will likely be part of the Emperor of All Maladies’ final chapter.
There are many pieces to this puzzle, but one of the most promising is the use of artificial intelligence in drug discovery and tasks including virtual screenings that will help select the best patients for clinical trials.
“Rice is not known as a super leader in the machine learning field,” said Xiao. “We needed to find a collaboration. We reached some people from Microsoft, and they got super excited, so we decided to work together.”
For now, the project is hush-hush, but Xiao says that the collaboration with one of the world’s leaders in AI has been smooth, thanks to the fact they’re solving a problem that even those without a medical background can understand. Cancer, after all, is one of the great equalizers.
Our major goal is to solve problems — real problems
It could be said that so is AI. Xiao said part of his goal is for cancer principal investigators — including researchers in the realms of breast cancer, prostate cancer, glioblastoma, Ewing sarcoma, pediatric osteosarcoma and oral cancer — to understand the power of machine learning. Inversely, machine learning specialists must be enlightened about the precise problems suffered by people with cancer. Only then will they be able to build new technologies together.
Xiao expects to see the first milestone of a machine learning-conceived drug soon. But the SynthX Center has already made exciting inroads outside of AI. Imagine that your breast or prostate cancer has metastasized to your bones, which happens frequently: 70% of metastatic breast cancer and 80% of metastatic prostate cancer will move into the skeleton, according to the National Institutes of Health. When it does, it plays havoc with bone density, leading to fractures.
BonTarg is a platform that aims straight for the bone, saving it and allowing patients to retain their mobility. “Our teeth and our bones are very unique, because they’re all made of calcium phosphate crystal,” explained Xiao, who worked with Baylor College of Medicine’s Xiang Zhang on the technology. “Calcium has a positive charge. We use a different, negative charge that’s put onto the drug. Just by electrostatic iteration, the drug will enrich the bone.”
Xiao is quick to credit his team at Xiao Lab for every stride made, and Rice as well: “Rice is a great school, and I think the leadership has a really cutting-edge vision,” he said. Part of the appeal of having Xiao Lab at Rice is also the support of Texas-based bodies like The Welch Foundation, one of the country’s largest private funds for chemistry research.
And chemistry holds the keys to drug discovery, which is still our greatest defense against tough cancers such as acute myeloid leukemia, for which SynthX is also developing a promising medicament.
“We publish a lot of papers. We get a lot of grants. Yeah, it’s important, but it’s not our major goal. Our major goal is to solve problems — real problems,” said Xiao.