Healthcare Reimagined and Re-Engineered
Registration Fee ILP Member: Complimentary Contact ocrevents@mit.edu for your comp code.
At MIT, researchers are working across disciplines—drawing on breakthroughs in biology, computer science, and materials engineering, among others—to improve healthcare. This convergence is enabling a new paradigm that is more personalized, precise, and data-driven, impacting everything from molecular discovery to clinical care.
The 2025 MIT Health Science Forum will showcase cutting-edge research by MIT's leading faculty and researchers, alongside innovative startups emerging from the MIT ecosystem. The program will explore five critical areas at the forefront of healthcare transformation:
Together, these topics reflect the integrated, technology-enabled approach to health and life science innovation at MIT. We invite you to join this dynamic event for an opportunity to network with leading scientists, entrepreneurs, and industry partners who are collectively shaping the future of healthcare.
Miki Kato joined the MIT Industrial Liaison Program as a Program Director in October 2021. Mr. Kato has over 20 years of experience in new business development, including various activities with MIT.
Prior to joining the ILP, Kato worked at FUJIFILM Corporation for 40 years in various new business development sectors. He was President of FUJIFILM Pharmaceuticals U.S.A., Inc., conducting the clinical trials of FUJIFILM pipeline drugs and leading the joint research project in drug delivery with MIT’s Koch Institute. During his tenure, he also collaborated with the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT for digital camera’s CMOS image sensors and the Department of Materials Sciences and Engineering for high-speed photodetectors.
Kato has presented at several conferences at the Cambridge Innovation Center, including the 2018 Japan Innovation Forum with the Consulate General of Japan and the 60th-anniversary Kyoto-Boston sister city celebration Life Science Forum (2019) with the City of Boston, the Japan Society of Boston, and the Consulate General of Japan.
He holds an M.E. in Polymer Chemistry from Kyoto University and an M.S. in Management of Technology from MIT.
James Mason Crafts Professor and Professor, MIT Department of Biological Engineering
Professor Angela Belcher is the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering, Materials Science and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and the head of the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT. She is a biological and materials engineer with expertise in the fields of biomaterials, biomolecular materials, organic-inorganic interfaces and solid-state chemistry and devices.
Her primary research focus is evolving new materials for energy, electronics, the environment, and medicine. She received her B.S. in Creative Studies from The University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at UCSB in 1997. Following her postdoctoral research in electrical engineering at UCSB, she joined the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Chemistry. She joined the faculty at MIT in 2002. Some recent awards include 2022 NAS (National Academy of Science), 2018 NAE (National Academy of Engineers) Fellow, 2015 NAI (National Academy of Inventors) Fellow, the 2013 $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for her Inventions, 2012 AAAS (American Academy of Arts and Sciences) Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, 2010 Eni Prize for Renewable and Non-conventional Energy, in 2009 Rolling Stone Magazine listed her as one of the top 100 people changing the country.
She has founded five companies. She also holds 36 patents with many pending. In July 2019, she took over as the head of the Biological Engineering Department at MIT. In 2022 she joined the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology.
Prof. Angela Belcher leads research focused on understanding and harnessing nature’s own processes in order to design technologically important materials and devices for energy, the environment, and medicine. Prof. Belcher will introduce her efforts to develop novel probes for near-infrared imaging, which have produced promising data for imaging tumors in both ovarian and brain cancer for detection of 1/2 millimeter-sized tumors, as well as ovarian cancer animal studies showing a 40% increase in median survival using this new technology. The Belcher Lab has also developed a new optical imaging system to facilitate non-invasive, in vivo cellular-level imaging of whole mice and rats, with a demonstrated depth of 6 centimeters in muscle tissue.
Executive Director, MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation (CBI)
Dr. Stacy Springs is the Executive Director at the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation (CBI). The Center integrates the Institute’s technical, scientific, and management expertise to solve complex biopharmaceutical challenges. CBI leads multi-stakeholder, multidisciplinary research and educational initiatives with real world impact, including MIT's Biomanufacturing Consortium, (BioMAN), and its Consortium on Adventitious Agent Contamination in Biomanufacturing, (CAACB). Dr. Springs is a principal investigator on several research programs in biologics manufacturing, from application of data analytics and PAT in the continuous production of monoclonal antibodies, viral vectors, and vaccines; to development of innovative rapid sterile tests and new approaches to adventitious agent contamination through long read sequencing. Dr. Springs is a principal investigator at SMART CAMP, an interdisciplinary research group focused on Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized- Medicine at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) and serves as the Chair of Landmark Bio’s Science and Technology Committee and is a member of Avantor’s SAB and HeMAB’s CMC advisory group. Dr. Springs’ research interests include biopharmaceutical development and manufacturing, risk management, regulatory science, translational science and food safety and control. She holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin and gained postdoctoral training in protein and biophysical chemistry at Princeton University.
Biologic medicines (e.g., monoclonal antibodies, gene and cell therapies, vaccines) are critical to treating and preventing disease. Recent regulatory approvals of exciting new biomedicines such as cell and gene therapies provide new hope to patients who have exhausted alternative therapies or suffer from a rare disease with no other treatment. To help patients access these medicines, biopharmaceutical companies must be able to manufacture very complex molecules safely, reliably, and in the quantities needed, which can range from the very large (industrialized) scale to the very small (personalized) scale. This presentation will review the challenges in manufacturing these complex biologic medicines as well as approaches to modernization of biomanufacturing with the goal of providing broadened access to biologic medicines. Dr. Springs will describe multiple approaches that MIT’s Center for Biomedical Innovation and collaborators are taking to achieve this goal, including continuous manufacturing, novel purification strategies, novel analytical technologies for assessing novel product quality attributes, and rapid methods for sterility and viral safety assessment.
Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT
Dr. Witten is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Daniel Anderson’s lab at MIT, where he is developing computational and experimental approaches to improving gene therapy. He majored in Biophysics and Mathematics at Amherst College and completed his Ph.D. in Dr. Katharina Ribbeck’s lab at MIT, where he studied the interaction of mucus with drugs, nanoparticles, and pathogens.
Ionizable lipids are a key component of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), a leading nonviral messenger RNA (mRNA) delivery technology. Here, we introduce Lipid Optimization using Neural networks (LiON), a deep-learning strategy for designing ionizable lipids. To train LiON, we generated a dataset of over 9,000 lipid nanoparticle activity measurements and fed this data into a directed message-passing neural network to predict nucleic acid delivery across diverse lipid structures.
Lipid optimization using LiON successfully predicted RNA delivery in both in vitro and in vivo held-out test sets and extrapolated to structures distinct from the training set. Next, we evaluated 1.6 million lipids in silico and identified two structures, FO-32 and FO-35, which demonstrated state-of-the-art local mRNA delivery to mouse muscle and nasal mucosa. FO-32 also matched the state of the art for nebulized mRNA delivery to the mouse lung, while both FO-32 and FO-35 efficiently delivered mRNA to ferret lungs—representing the first published example of mRNA delivery to ferret conducting airways.
Overall, this work highlights the potential of deep learning to enhance nanoparticle delivery and introduces LNPs with promising activity for pulmonary gene therapy.
Professor, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Manolis Kellis is a professor of computer science at MIT, a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a principal investigator of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group(compbio.mit.edu). His research includes disease circuitry, genetics, genomics, epigenomics, coding genes,non-coding RNAs, regulatory genomics, and comparative genomics, applied to Alzheimer's Disease, Obesity, Schizophrenia, Cardiac Disorders, Cancer, and Immune Disorders, and multiple other disorders. He has led several large-scale genomics projects, including the Roadmap Epigenomics project, the ENCODE project, the Genotype Tissue-Expression (GTEx) project, and comparative genomics projects in mammals, flies, and yeasts. He received the US Presidential Early Career Awardin Science and Engineering (PECASE) by US President Barack Obama, the Mendel Medal for Outstanding Achievements inScience, the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, the Boston Patent Law Association award,theNSF CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Technology Review TR35 recognition, the AIT Niki Award, and the Sprowls award for the best Ph.D. thesis in computer science at MIT. He has authored over 325 journal publications, cited more than 190,000 times. He has obtained more than 20 multi-year grants from the NIH, and his trainees hold faculty positions at Stanford, Harvard, CMU, McGill, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and other top universities. He lived in Greece and France before moving to the US, and he studied and conducted research at MIT, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and the Cold Spring Harbor Lab. For more info, see: compbio.mit.edu
Generative AI is fundamentally reshaping the understanding of biology, medicine, and therapeutics, elevating AI from an analytical tool to a true partner in discovery. Kellis presents work on building foundational AI models that span chemistry, protein structure, gene function, patient states, and therapeutic interventions, moving toward an integrated agentic-AI platform for precision medicine. In the domain of protein structure and function, he introduces ProCyon, a multimodal foundation model that unifies protein sequences, molecular functions, disease associations, therapeutic mechanisms, and structural information. This model enables zero-shot phenotype annotation, drug-binding prediction, and functional interpretation of disease variants, opening the door to annotating the dark proteome and guiding therapeutic targeting. In the field of chemical space modeling, Kellis describes the embedding of molecular structures integrated with global patent databases, drug-target interaction knowledge, and protein function, resulting in a chemically and functionally interpretable drug landscape. This framework supports the generation of novel molecules, functional annotation of the chemical space using co-embedded drug patents, and the discovery of structure-function relationships to advance drug development. For patient trajectory modeling, he presents a latent embedding of patient states derived from multimodal data, including omics, clinical records, imaging, and treatment histories, that enables improved diagnostics, detection of misdiagnosed cases through cross-modal consistency, and the design of personalized interventions tailored to individual trajectories relative to previously treated populations. In the area of personalized therapeutics, Kellis highlights work connecting molecular, cellular, and patient-level phenotypes to predict therapeutic responses and uncover mechanistic disease subtypes. This is achieved through foundational models that integrate molecular function, single-cell expression, protein structure-function data, and chemical information, resulting in AI-driven tools capable of generating causally grounded therapeutic recommendations at the patient-specific level. Finally, he presents Mantis, an AI-powered, human-directed visual data science workbench that allows researchers to explore and interrogate latent embedding landscapes across proteins, chemicals, patients, and therapies. Mantis provides interactive and interpretable visualizations and agentic workflows, where human intuition guides AI actions, revealing latent patterns and advancing the next generation of generative models for biomedicine. Together, these efforts are driving a new paradigm in AI-enabled science, uniting mechanistic interpretability, predictive power, and human-centered discovery to transform biomedical research and precision therapeutics.
David H. Koch Professor of Science, MIT Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering, MIT Director, MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine Director, KI Clinical Investigator Program
Michael B. Yaffe is the David H. Koch Professor of Science and Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at MIT, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2000. He is also an attending surgeon and intensivist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center where he specializes in injury and surgical oncology. He has been the Director of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine since its inception. Yaffe earned his MD-PhD degree from Case Western Reserve University. He then completed a residency in General Surgery at University Hospitals of Cleveland and New England Deaconess Hospital, and a fellowship in Surgical Critical Care, Trauma and Burns at Harvard Medical School's Harvard-Longwood Critical Care Program. He was a post-doctoral fellow with Lewis Cantley in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School where he was supported by a Physician-Scientist Fellowship from the HHMI, and a Physician-Scientist Award from the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. Yaffe is the Scientific Editor-in-Chief of Science Signaling and a member of the Editorial Boards of Molecular & Cellular Proteomics and Cell Cycle. In 2021, Professor Yaffe was elected to the Association of American Physicians and was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. He is a decorated veteran of the war in Afghanistan and retired as a Colonel from the U.S. Army Reserve Medical Corps in 2021. Yaffe is a co-founder of Consensus Pharmaceuticals, the DNA Repair Company, On-Q-ity, and Merrimack Pharmaceuticals. He is also a co-founder and a member of the scientific advisory board of Applied Biomath and Thrombo-Therapeutics, and a clinical advisor to Cardiff Oncology.
Tricia Dinkel comes to Corporate Relations with several years of experience in the innovation ecosystem and managing relationships with startups and corporates. Tricia previously worked as Director of Navigate (NECEC’s flagship innovation program) at the Northeast Clean Energy Council (NECEC) in Boston where she led all operations and partnership development for 400+ startups, 65+ innovation partners, and 200+ investors & corporates in North America and Europe. Prior to that role, Tricia held positions with increasing responsibility in program management at NECEC. Before that, her experience included Director of Data Analytics and Sustainability Reporting Manager at WegoWise Inc. in Boston, Associate Director at the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation in Cambridge, Senior Sustainability Coordinator at A Better City in Boston, and Assistant Director at The Green Alliance in Portsmouth, NH.
Tricia earned her B.A., in Environmental Studies/Natural Resource Policy at the University of Colorado, and her M.A., in Environmental Science Education at the University of New Hampshire. She served on the NECEC Diversity & Inclusion Committee and as a member of the USGBC (U.S. Green Building Council), Massachusetts Chapter.
Business Development and Strategy, METiS
Kate Rosneris a strategic professional in biotech business development, currently serving on the Business Development and Strategy team at METiS Therapeutics, a company leveraging artificial intelligence to develop next-generation nanoparticle delivery systems. In her role, Kate manages external partnerships for METiS’ extrahepatic-targeting LNPs.She holds a degree in Neuroscience from Duke University and is passionate about advancing novel technologies that address unmet needs in medicine. Kate prioritizes working at the intersection of science and business to drive growth for early-stage biotech companies.
Program Manager for Pharma Partnerships, Empatica
David Crowley is a Program Manager at Empatica. David is part of the Pharma Partnerships team whose function is to advise industry partners on the deployment of wearable technologies and digital biomarkers in clinical research and trials. Empatica provides over 300 different digital measures from its wearable devices and David supports companies with their decision-making process to identify which measures and supporting technologies are most suitable for inclusion in their studies. David has over 10 years' experience working in the Life Sciences space having started his career as a pharmacist and subsequently transitioning into commercial/program management roles to support pharmaceutical companies and their efforts to bring innovative treatments and therapies to patients worldwide.
Head of Public Engagement, Cellino
Willie T. Reaves Jr. is a cognized leader in public engagement, communications, and business strategy, shaping conversations at the intersection of biotechnology, policy, and patient access. As Head of Public Engagement at Cellino, he leads external communications, public relations, and stakeholder engagement, shaping public narratives to advance regenerative medicine. Previously, Willie was Chief Business Strategy Innovation Officer at the Biotechnology InnovationOrganization (BIO), where he led global B2B partnering and oversaw BIO Business Solutions, the largest cost-savings program for the life sciences industry, generating $625 million in annual revenue across North America. His team also developed a B2B partnering software platform now used in more than 75 countries to drive industry collaboration and investment. A sought-after speaker on regenerative medicine and patient access, Willie has delivered keynote addresses at CPHI Middle East and other global industry events, and his insights have been featured in CNN and Science Magazine. Beyond his industry leadership, Willie has run a successful technology consulting firm and served in executive roles within national non-profits. He is a National Leadership Council member at the Society for Science, supporting efforts to expand scientific literacy, STEM education, and research access.
CEO & Co-Founder, Nine Diagnostics
Dr. Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist, entrepreneur, and innovator leading NineDiagnostics, which pioneers AI-enabled nanosensor technology for cancer diagnostics, high-throughput proteomics, metabolomics, and biomanufacturing analytics. By integrating nanotechnology, AI, and molecular sensing, Nine Diagnostics enables earlier disease detection, real-time treatment monitoring, and precision therapy selection. Its high-throughput profiling platform analyzes proteomic and metabolomic signatures to optimize patient outcomes. The technology is also being developed as a process analytical tool to enhance bioreactor controls and continuous drug manufacturing, improving real-time monitoring and quality control. Under Dr.Nguyen’s leadership, NineDiagnostics has been selected for the American Cancer Society’sBrightEdge Entrepreneurs Program, the Merck Digital Sciences Studio Cohort, and the Novo Nordisk Golden Ticket for LabCentral Residency. He earned his MD-PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and trained in Clinical Pathology at Mount Sinai Hospital and Transfusion Medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock. He is also a Research Fellow at MIT and Director of the MIT Catalyst Scholars Program, mentoring biomedical innovators. He co-founded the American Physician Scientists Association (APSA), Rice Alumni in Medicine, and the MIT COVID-19 Challenge, advancing initiatives at the intersection of science, medicine, and entrepreneurship.
Doctoral Candidate, Connor Coley’s Research Group
Kento is a Chemical Engineering and Computing Ph.D. candidate in the Coley Research Group at MIT. His research focuses on developing 3D generative models for molecular design in an interaction-driven manner. He earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and an M.S. in Data-Enabled Computational Engineering and Sciences from Brown University.
Student research assistant, Bradley Pentelute’s Research Group
Amir Kazeminia is an M.Eng. Student in computer science at MIT, working with Professor Bradley Pentelute to discover novel peptides for targeted therapeutic delivery using deep learning. Amir earned his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Mathematics at MIT, where he researched the application of AI in drug discovery.
Ph.D. Candidate, Patrick Doyle’s Research Group
Arjav Shah is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. He is also an MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Growing up in the heart of India’s largest chemical manufacturing industrial belt, Arjav developed a keen interest in clean water and decarbonizing industries. As an undergraduate, he studied chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. Arjav has been awarded several prestigious fellowships for his research and entrepreneurial endeavors including the Kavanaugh Fellowship, Legatum Fellowship, and the MathWorks Fellowship.
Postdoctoral Associate, Patrick Doyle’s Research Group
Luca Mazzaferro is a polymer scientist and chemical engineer with 8 years of experience working with purification technologies. As a translational postdoctoral researcher at MIT, he is working on commercializing novel hydrogels for industrial purifications in Prof. Doyle's lab. During his Ph.D., he developed new functional membranes for industrial purifications and collaborated closely with ZwitterCo, a growing water filtration startup. During his Ph.D., Luca patented 4 polymeric technologies and worked on two successful launches of hard-tech products in the industrial purification and medical fields. In the past 4-years, he has participated in various technology translation programs including the NSF I-Corps, Nucleate Activator, Tufts 100k Pitch Competition, and the Cleantech Open Accelerator.
CRO, Epicore Biosystems
James Ryan is CRO of Epicore Biosystems, and is also Editor in Chief of the Journal of Business and Artificial Intelligence, and a mentor at the Harvard Innovation Labs. Mr. Ryan has a bachelor's degree from Harvard and a master's degree from Osaka University in Japan. He has spent thirty years building, growing and operating B2B technology startups around the world. As Chief Revenue Officer, Mr. Ryan oversees all aspects of Epicore's sales and marketing efforts globally. He is fluent in Japanese, is a proficient programmer in a half dozen computer languages and has a private pilot's license.
First-year Undergraduate, Manolis Kellis’s Research Group
Saathvik Kannan is a first-year undergraduate student at MIT majoring in Computer Science and Molecular Biology. He is passionate about developing computational platforms towards understanding protein structure and accelerating drug development. In the Kellis Lab (MIT Computational Biology Group), he is building new deep learning models to uncover new insights into drug-protein interactions and creating new ways to design drugs. In the past, Saathvik had developed DrugGen, a graph-based neural network approach for discovering precision medicine inhibitors, and BioPLEX, a platform for predicting protein complex structures and their mutations. Saathvik's work has earned him prestigious accolades, including the Regeneron Young Scientist Award and first place at the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium in Biomedical Sciences. Saathvik has nine first-author publications and one US patent (pending).