Healthcare Reimagined and Re-Engineered
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.
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.
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.
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.
Co-Founder, Metis Tx
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CEO & Co-Founder, Nine Diagnostics