Speed and Foresight in Drug Discovery: Accelerating and De-risking Innovation in Healthcare
In response to new business models, accelerated timelines, and unforeseen market dynamics, healthcare companies are seeking to innovate rapidly and effectively to meet new challenges. A key criterion for success is the adoption of cutting-edge tools that derisk and accelerate the drug development process. Investment in these tools pays dividends across a company's pipeline.
2024 MIT Health Science Forum will delve into MIT's cutting-edge drug development tools, including automation, digitization, and the application of artificial intelligence.
Alongside these increasingly embedded toolsets is an equally critical capability: the establishment of cross-institutional, mutually beneficial collaborations to pool expertise and capabilities. Experts in external innovation and alliance management will share their insights on building and leveraging these key relationships.
Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
Rebekah Miller joined the Office of Corporate Relations team as a Program Director in March 2022. Rebekah brings to the OCR expertise in the life sciences and chemical industries as well as in applications including sensors, consumer electronics, semiconductors and renewable energy.
Prior to joining the OCR, Rebekah worked for over a decade at Merck KGaA, most recently as a Global Key Account Manager in the Semiconductor division. Rebekah also served as Head of Business and Technology Development for the Semiconductor Specialty Accounts, during which time she led strategic planning and technology roadmapping.
While at Merck KGaA, Miller established a strong track record in industry-university partnerships, corporate entrepreneurship, and innovation management, with experience in roles spanning Technology Scouting, Alliance Management, and New Business Development. Early in her career, she led early phase R&D projects as a member of the Boston Concept Lab, which focused on technology transfer from academia.
Miller earned her B.A. in Chemistry and Biology from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. in Chemistry, with a Designated Emphasis in Nanoscale Science and Engineering, from the University of California, Berkeley. She first joined MIT as a postdoctoral associate in the Bioengineering and Material Science Departments.
Professor, MIT Department of Chemistry
Brad Pentelute, Professor in the Department of Chemistry, modifies naturally occurring proteins to enhance their therapeutic properties for human medicine, focusing on the use of cysteine arylation to generate abiotic macromolecular proteins, the precision delivery of biomolecules into cells, and the development of fast flow platforms to rapidly produce polypeptides.
Pentelute earned a B.S. in chemistry and a BA in psychology at the University of Southern California, followed by a Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Chicago. After a postdoc fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Pentelute joined the MIT faculty in 2011. His awards and honors include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Novartis Early Career Award, and an Amgen Young Investigator Award.
Doctoral Candidate, Prof. Laurie Boyer’s Research Group
John Day is a graduate student with Prof. Laurie Boyer’s research group, where he uses high-throughput super-resolution microscopy to study the uptake of macromolecular therapeutics in human cells. John graduated from University of Washington in Seattle with a degree in biochemistry. His research at the University of Washington resulted in the development of open microfluidic technologies for cell culture applications.
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Associate Director, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) Co-Director, Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) Program Cardiologist, Massachusetts General Hospital
Dr. Collin M. Stultz is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a faculty member in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, a Professor in the Institute of Medical Engineering and Sciences at MIT, a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and an associate member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is also a practicing cardiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Dr. Stultz received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from Harvard University; a PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University; and a MD from Harvard Medical School. He did his internship, residency, and fellowship at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. His scientific contributions have spanned multiple fields including computational chemistry, biophysics, and machine learning for cardiovascular risk stratification. He is a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology and he is a past recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences. Currently, research in his group is focused on the development of machine-learning tools that can guide clinical decision-making.
Head of Strategic Partnerships, Mass General Brigham
As Strategic Innovation Leader at Mass General Brigham, Seema Basu, PhD, directs the strategy for open innovation and strategic research collaborations. She leads a team responsible for enabling strategic corporate alliances and new initiatives, such as the Innovation Fellows Program for career development and collaboration with industry. The team also manages licensing and partnering of IP portfolios from Regenerative Medicine, Ragon Institute of Mass General Center for Global Health, MIT, and Harvard. She represents Mass General Brigham at numerous national and regional organizations.
Seema has more than a decade of deep experience in industry-academic collaborations and IP & licensing at Mass General Brigham and Harvard and a successful laboratory career at Parke-Davis and Albany Medical Center. She earned her PhD from the University of Notre Dame.
Dr. Pramotton specializes in neurological disease models. Her research in Prof. Roger Kamm’s group in the MIT Biological Engineering Department focuses on developing physiologically relevant cellular models of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. Her work aims to dissect the molecular mechanisms underlying the neurodegenerative diseases' pathogenic cascade and study how cellular senescence impacts disease onset and progression. During her PhD at ETH Zurich, Dr. Pramotton focused on the mechanobiology of epithelial collectives.
The Humanizing Drug Development (HDD) consortium focuses on developing an iPSC-derived neurovascular model of neurological diseases to investigate different transporter routes for drug delivery into the brain and for drug screening. Isogenic, self-assembled vascular networks of the blood-brain barrier are interfaced to midbrain organoids carrying familial Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease mutations. These microphysiological systems are key to studying disease development and researching therapeutic possibilities.
Dr. Proestaki specializes in human skin in vitro models. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at MIT working with Prof. Roger D Kamm on developing physiologically relevant 3D human skin cell culture models in microfluidic devices for ADME studies. Her research work aims to understand how such systems can be useful in predicting drug bioavailability or be an alternative to animal studies. Dr. Proestaki received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied the mechanical cues exerted by the extracellular matrix and cell-matrix interactions.
The Humanizing Drug Development (HDD) Skin consortium focuses on developing a 3D microphysiological skin model for subcutaneous delivery of monoclonal antibodies or other therapeutics. The model consists of a self-assembled and perfusable blood vasculature while a lymphatic vasculature is also included in one integrated microfluidic device. This human skin microvascular model can be used for ADME or immune response studies and it can serve as a tool for predicting drug bioavailability.
Chief Executive Officer, CellChorus
Daniel Meyer is the Chief Executive Officer of CellChorus®, the dynamic single-cell analysis company. CellChorus is commercializing the TIMING™ platform, which merges AI/ML, advanced microscopy, and microscale manufacturing to deliver comprehensive single-cell data on cell movement, contact dynamics, potency, viability, and functional other metrics over time. The TIMING platform enables scientists to design, develop, and deliver novel immune cell-based therapies faster, at lower cost, and with higher rates of success. Mr. Meyer is the former Chief Operating Officer and was a board member of Genospace, which was funded by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate and acquired by HCA Healthcare (NYSE: HCA), the largest private hospital company in the United States and one of the largest oncology clinical care and clinical trial organizations in the United States, having led more than 450 first-in-man clinical trials and has been a clinical trial leader in the majority of approved cancer therapies over the past ten years. Mr. Meyer was also a member of the early-stage healthcare and life sciences investment teams at Arboretum Ventures and PJC.vc, where he focused on investments in life sciences, medical devices, healthcare information technology, and healthcare services. Mr. Meyer holds an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a B.A. from Middlebury College.
Chief Executive Officer, qBraid
Kanav Setia is the co-founder and CEO of qBraid. He earned a PhD in Physics from Dartmouth College in 2020, where he worked on quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry, with a particular focus on fermion-to-qubit encodings. Dr. Setia’s work on the Bravyi-Kitaev Superfast (BKSF) algorithm was the first to apply BKSF to quantum chemistry simulation. Collaborating with IBM, he developed the Generalized Superfast Encoding (GSE) for quantum simulation. This work was the first to show the presence of inherent error-correcting properties within the fermion-to-qubit encodings.
During his Ph.D., Dr. Setia interned at IBM twice, contributing to IBM’s open-source quantum chemistry software, Qiskit-Chemistry, and Google’s OpenFermion. He was a co-author on the initial releases of both. Dr. Setia also holds a B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Astronomy and Planetary Sciences from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology. After graduation, he worked for four years at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in the MEMS division of the Semi-Conductor Laboratory, focusing on the design and development of accelerometers and gyroscopes.
Chief Executive Officer, Vivtex
Dr. Deehan joined Vivtex in December 2022 and is a biotechnology and pharmaceutical professional with 22 years of drug development and commercialization experience. She obtained herPh.D. from the Faculty of Medicine at Glasgow University and subsequently spent eight years in academic research before moving into the biopharma industry in 2001. She has gained expertise in all stages of the drug development cycle from discovery to product commercial launch, across a broad range of therapeutic areas. Her last nine years have been spent in global corporate development roles at Novimmune SA and Nordic Nanovector ASA where she gained a successful track record in business development and deal-making,for product and technology platform transactions, with a range of companies, including Genentech and Shire.
Co-Founder & CEO, DeepCure
Kfir Schreiber is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at DeepCure Inc. where he reimagines small-molecule drug development using a revolutionary Artificial Intelligence platform. Kfir is an AI enthusiast and firmly believes in its immense potential to transform the pharmaceutical industry by unveiling new chemical horizons, and delivering affordable and improved therapeutics to patients. Kfir is a passionate mathematician as well as a pilot and officer in the Israeli Air Force, where he headed diverse teams and various large-scale R&D projects, consisting of tens of people, and 200 million of USD under management. The systems he developed are deployed on multiple platforms and used in active duty. For his research in the field of AI and drug development, Kfir was honored with the inaugural Marvin Minsky Fellowship for AI researchers of great promise. He holds numerous prizes and awards including the Air Force Outstanding Officer Award and the E14 Fellowship. Kfir received a Master of Science degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science degree from The Open University of Israel.
Senior Director of the Imaging Platform, Institute Scientist, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
Dr. Carpenter is an Institute Scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Her research group develops algorithms and strategies for large-scale experiments involving images. The team’s open-source CellProfiler software is used by thousands of biologists worldwide and their Cell Painting assay has been adopted throughout the pharma industry to accelerate drug discovery. She leads industry-wide consortia such as JUMP-Cell Painting and OASIS.
Her PhD is in cell biology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and her postdoc in high-throughput image analysis was at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and MIT’s CSAIL (Computer Sciences/Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). Carpenter has been named an NSF CAREER awardee, and an NIH MIRA awardee, and is listed in Deep Knowledge Analytics’ top-100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Advanced Healthcare.
Cell images contain a vast amount of quantifiable information about the status of the cell: for example, whether it is diseased, whether it is responding to a drug treatment, or whether a pathway has been disrupted by a genetic mutation. We aim to go beyond measuring individual cell phenotypes that biologists already know are relevant to a particular disease. Instead, in a strategy called image-based profiling, often using the Cell Painting assay, we extract hundreds of features of cells from microscopy images. Just like transcriptional profiling, the similarities and differences in the patterns of extracted features reveal connections among diseases, drugs, and genes.
We are harvesting similarities in image-based profiles to identify, at a single-cell level, how diseases, drugs, and genes affect cells, which can uncover small molecules’ mechanism of action, discover gene functions, predict assay outcomes, discover disease-associated phenotypes, identify the functional impact of disease-associated alleles, and find novel therapeutic candidates. This is leading to a growing impact on the pharmaceutical industry as cell morphology becomes a powerful data source for systems biology alongside molecular omics.
Postdoctoral Researcher, Prof. Douglas Lauffenburger’s Group
Dr. Kate Bridges is a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Douglas Lauffenburger’s research group, where she develops computational strategies for translating omics datasets across species to understand mechanisms of host immune response to infectious disease. Prior, Dr. Bridges completed her PhD in biomedical engineering at Yale, where she studied immune cell heterogeneity in tumors and healing wounds from single-cell omics datasets.
Dr. Katarina DiLillo is a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Douglas Lauffenburger’s research group, where her focus is on the computational analysis of multi-modal immune networks in systems biology. She earned her PhD Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, specializing in systems biology and bioinformatics. Her research encompasses a breadth of topics including data-driven mathematical modeling, machine learning, and multi-omics analysis to understand disease mechanisms, discover therapeutic targets, and identify molecular biomarkers for prognosis and treatment.
Doctoral Candidate, Martin Fellow, Prof. Matthew Shoulders Research Group
Julie McDonald is a doctoral candidate in Prof. Matthew Shoulders' group at MIT’s Department of Chemistry. Prior to joining MIT, Julie served as a Research Technician in the Chao Lab at Massachusetts General Brigham, where she investigated the regulation of membrane transporters. Julie earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Wesleyan University, where she researched the thermodynamic characteristics of DNA secondary structures.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Prof. Matthew Shoulders Research Group
Dr. Kathryn Yammine is a recent alumnus of Prof. Matthew Shoulders’ research group. While at MIT, Kathryn was named an MIT Presidential Fellow and an NIH Ruth L Kirschstein F31 Predoctoral Fellow. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Alan Beggs Laboratory, Boston Children’s Hospital Division of Genetics and Genomics.
Doctoral Candidate, NSF Fellow, Prof. Matthew Shoulders Research Group
Anton Barybin is a doctoral candidate in Prof. Matthew Shoulders's group at MIT’s Department of Chemistry, where his research focuses on the directed evolution of biomolecules in mammalian cells. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the University of Kansas, where he developed microchip electrophoresis separation-based sensors to monitor neurochemicals.