The pharmaceutical industry is under growing pressure from patent expirations of major drugs, cost-constrained health care systems, and a demanding regulatory environment. A focus for the industry is to tackle these challenges while increasing the output and quality of cost-effective, new medicines without incurring unsustainable R&D cost. Through new technology and new approaches there is an aspiration to make such improvements while also bringing ever-improved therapeutics to patients faster. In this conference, we will lay out many of the challenges the industry is facing and explore potential solutions coming from academic research and startup endeavors, from early discovery to clinical studies and beyond.
Karl Koster is the Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations. MIT Corporate Relations includes the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and MIT Startup Exchange.
In that capacity, Koster and his staff work with the leadership of MIT and senior corporate executives to design and implement strategies for fostering corporate partnerships with the Institute. Koster and his team have also worked to identify and design a number of major international programs for MIT, which have been characterized by the establishment of strong, programmatic linkages among universities, industry, and governments. Most recently these efforts have been extended to engage the surrounding innovation ecosystem, including its vibrant startup and small company community, into MIT's global corporate and university networks.
Koster is also the Director of Alliance Management in the Office of Strategic Alliances and Technology Transfer (OSATT). OSATT was launched in Fall 2019 as part of a plan to reinvent MIT’s research administration infrastructure. OSATT develops agreements that facilitate MIT projects, programs and consortia with industrial, nonprofit, and international sponsors, partners and collaborators.
He is past chairman of the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP), an organization that seeks to enhance the value of collaborative partnerships between universities and corporations.
He graduated from Brown University with a BA in geology and economics, and received an MS from MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to returning to MIT, Koster worked as a management consultant in Europe, Latin America, and the United States on projects for private and public sector organizations.
Dr. Peter Lohse joined the Office of Corporate Relations (OCR) in October 2018 as Program Director.
Lohse comes to OCR with deep and broad knowledge and expertise in the pharma, biotech, and other life sciences-driven industries including agro, nutrition, chemical, and consumer products. As a scientist and entrepreneur, he has an extensive background developing business and managing partnerships with large corporations, early-stage companies, academia, and non-profit organizations. Most recently, Lohse was V.P, Operations and Business Development for InnovaTID Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge. Before that, he was a Strategy Consultant for Eutropics Pharmaceuticals, an emerging biotech company in Cambridge.
Prior to this, Dr. Lohse was Director, Scientific Operations & Innovation Program Director for Eli-Lilly’s open innovation platform, InnoCentive, Inc. in Waltham. Earlier in his career, he held positions with increasing responsibility at ArQule of Woburn, Phylos in Lexington, and Novartis Pharma in Switzerland.
Lohse earned his M.S., Chemistry & Applied Sciences and his Ph.D., Organic Chemistry at Federal institute of Technology (ETH) in Switzerland. He earned his M.B.A., Strategy, Finance, Marketing as a Sloan Fellow at MIT. He also held the position Research Fellow, Molecular Biology at Harvard Medical School - Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (with Professor J. Szostak, Nobel Prize 2009), This was a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship -- In vitro selection of functional RNAs.
Bernard Munos is a Senior Fellow at FasterCures, a center of the Milken Institute, and the founder of the InnoThink Center for Research in Biomedical Innovation, a consultancy that helps biomedical research organizations become better innovators. Before that, he served as an advisor for corporate strategy at Eli Lilly, where he focused on disruptive innovation and the radical redesign of R&D. Several of Munos’ research papers — published in Nature and Science — have helped stimulate a broad rethinking of the pharmaceutical business model by industry, investors, policymakers, regulators and patient advocates. His work has been profiled by Forbes magazine, and the popular industry publication FiercePharma has named him one of the 25 most influential people in biopharma. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine’s Drug Forum; a member of the Advisory Board of Science Translational Medicine; a non-executive Director of Glenmark Pharmaceuticals; a Board member or Advisor to a dozen other companies or publicly-financed research organizations; and a former member of the Advisory Council of the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Translational Sciences (NCATS). He received his MBA from Stanford University, and holds other graduate degrees in animal science and agricultural economics from the Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food and Environmental Sciences and the University of California, Davis. He blogs about biomedical innovation on the Forbes website.
That will cover both challenges that seem intractable today and advances that offer a pathway towards more innovation, cheaper and faster innovation, as well as a shift from incremental to exponential innovation.
School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering Director, Center for Gynepathology Research (CGR) Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow MIT Department of Biological Engineering
Linda Griffith is a Biological Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Professor Griffith joined MIT as a postdoctoral associate. She was appointed assistant professor of health sciences and technology and chemical engineering (1991-93), assistant professor of chemical engineering (1993-96), associate professor of chemical engineering without tenure (1996), and was tenured in 1998, and full professor in 2002.
She is director of the new Director, Center for Gynepathology Research (CGR) launched in the fall of 2009 and centered in the MIT School of Engineering with the aim of bringing new frontiers of engineering to bear on understanding the basic biology, physiology, and pathophysiology of the female reproductive tract, in collaboration with biologists and clinicians. CGR also includes research efforts focused on developing new technologies for diagnosis and treatment of these diseases, and fosters liaisons with industry.
Griffith received a bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech. in 1982 and a Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, both in chemical engineering. Following a postdoc with Robert Langer and Joseph Vacand at MIT and Children's Hospital, she joined the faculty at MIT in 1991, teaching at MIT and Harvard Medical School. Griffith conducts research in the field of biornaterials and devices for tissue and organ regeneration. Her research combines molecular design and synthesis of biornaterials as well as design and synthesis of macroscopic 3-D devices for therapeutic and in vitro use. Several of her patents are in commercial development. More than 30 masters students, doctoral students, and postdoctoral associates have completed training under her supervision or co-supervision. Griffith is a co-founder of Therics, Inc. and has served as consultant or scientific advisory board member for Advanced Tissue Sciences, AstraZeneca, Biohybrid Technologies, Corning, Cytotherapeuctics (Stem Cells, Inc.), DuPont, Schroeder Ventures, Therics, The Whitaker Foundation, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Illinois Institute of Technology Pritzker Institute of Medical Engineering. Her work has been featured on several television documentary shows including Scientific American Frontiers hosted by Alan Alda. Her awards include the Popular Science Brilliant 10 award, NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, MIT Class of '60 Teaching Innovation Award, along with named lectures at academic institutions and societies. She is a Fellow in the Cambridge-MIT Institute. She has served as co-chair of the Materials Research Society Annual Spring Meeting, the Keystone Tissue Engineering Meeting, and the joint NSF-NIH Workshop on Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Training and Education, and is a member of the Advisory Council for the National Institute for Dental and Cramofacial Research at NIH.
“Mice are not little people” – a refrain becoming louder as the strengths and weaknesses of animal models of human disease become more apparent. At the same time, three emerging approaches are headed toward integration: powerful systems biology analysis of cell-cell and intracellular signaling networks in patient-derived samples; 3D tissue engineered models of human organ systems, often made from stem cells; and micro-fluidic and meso-fluidic devices that enable living systems to be sustained, perturbed and analyzed for weeks in culture. This talk will highlight the integration of these rapidly moving fields to understand difficult clinical problems, with an emphasis on translating academic discoveries into practical use. Technical challenges in modeling complex diseases with “organs on chips” approaches include the need for relatively large tissue masses and organ-organ cross talk to capture systemic effects, as well as new ways of thinking about scaling to capture multiple different functionalities from drug clearance to cytokine signaling crosstalk. Examples in gynecology , metabolic diseases and other chronic inflammatory conditions will be highlighted.
J. Christopher Love is Professor of Chemical Engineering and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. He is also an Associate Member of the Broad Institute, and an Associate Member at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. Love earned a BS in chemistry from the University of Virginia and a PhD in physical chemistry at Harvard University under the supervision of George Whitesides. Following completion of his doctoral studies, he extended his research into immunology at Harvard Medical School with Hidde Ploegh from 2004-2005, and at the Immune Disease Institute from 2005-2007. Dr. Love has been named a W.M. Keck Distinguished Young Scholar for Medical Research (2009), a Dana Scholar for Human Immunology (2009), and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. Prof. Love served as a Distinguished Engineer in Residence at Biogen from 2015-2016. He has co-authored more than 100 manuscripts and is an inventor on multiple patents.
Professor Love is co-founder of OneCyte Biotechnologies, HoneyComb Biotechnologies, and Sunflower Therapeutics. He serves as an advisor to SQZ Biotechnologies, Repligen, QuantrumCyte, and other companies.
Recombinant biopharmaceuticals and vaccines represent a significant class of therapeutics and preventions. While the industry has established efficient platformed processes for the production of monoclonal antibodies at multi-ton scales, the improved precision of therapeutic indications and expanding molecular designs (such as bispecific antibodies, nanobodies, and others) add new challenges for the timely and cost-effective production of emerging therapeutic concepts. This talk will present an integrated approach to biomanufacturing that combines automated end-to-end production and purification along with a fast and engineering-friendly alternative host to enable a flexible platform for next-generation manufacturing. Examples in both biopharmaceuticals and vaccines will be presented.
Program Director, MIT Startup Exchange
Dr. Rebecca Xiong joined Corporate Relations as Program Director, Startup Exchange in October 2018.
Dr. Xiong comes to Corporate Relations with more than 15 years of experience in the MIT Startup Ecosystem, having co-founded and worked at multiple MIT startups. Most recently, as Co-founder and Chief Scientist at SocMetrics, she leads product management, data science, and machine learning for SocMetric’s personalization and marketing campaign products. Before SocMetrics, Xiong co-founded Going.com. Going.com connected people via local events to enhance their offline social life, and through Rebecca’s leadership grew to 1M members, tens of millions of monthly pageviews, and finally its acquisition by AOL. Before these two entrepreneurial endeavors, Xiong held positions as Product Marketing Manager (DataPower, acquired by IBM), Senior Program Manager (Performaworks, acquired by Workscape), and Team Lead (Akamai Technologies). She also has research experience at Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
Dr. Xiong earned her B.S. in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Media Lab at MIT with her thesis “Visualizing Information Spaces to Enhance Social Interaction." She was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellowship Recipient. She holds multiple patents and is very involved in the community, as the Lead Organizer of the Cambridge Parent Summit.
MIT Startup Exchange actively promotes collaboration and partnerships between MIT-connected startups and industry. Qualified startups are those founded and/or led by MIT faculty, staff, or alumni, or are based on MIT-licensed technology. Industry participants are principally members of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP).
MIT Startup Exchange is a community of over 1,800 MIT-connected startups with roots across MIT departments, labs and centers; it hosts a robust schedule of startup workshops and showcases, and facilitates networking and introductions between startups and corporate executives.
STEX25 is a startup accelerator within MIT Startup Exchange, featuring 25 “industry ready” startups that have proven to be exceptional with early use cases, clients, demos, or partnerships, and are poised for significant growth. STEX25 startups receive promotion, travel, and advisory support, and are prioritized for meetings with ILP’s 230 member companies.
MIT Startup Exchange and ILP are integrated programs of MIT Corporate Relations.
Gregory Ryslik is a statistician, data scientist, and artificial intelligence researcher with experience building and leading data initiatives in companies ranging across the biotech, autotech, healthtech, and fintech domains. Prior to Celsius Therapeutics, he was vice president of data science at Mindstrong Health, a healthcare company transforming mental health treatment through measurement science and artificial intelligence. Previously, Ryslik was the senior director and head of data science at Faraday Future, an electric vehicle startup in Los Angeles as well as the leader of the service data science group at Tesla Motors in Palo Alto. Earlier in his career, he performed machine learning research and nonclinical biostatistics research at Genentech.
Concurrently, Ryslik holds an adjunct assistant professor position at Pennsylvania State University and has lectured on statistics for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Stanford University Continuing Studies. He is also a fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society, as well as a member of the American Academy of Actuaries. His research has been published in journals ranging from Nature to BMC Bioinformatics and has led to several software packages on mutational clustering.
Ryslik holds a PhD from Yale University in biostatistics, where he researched oncogenic mutation clustering embedded within protein structure. He also holds a master’s degree in statistics from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree in mathematics, computer science, and finance from Rutgers University.
Kevin O'Handley is a cofounder and VP of Business Development at Javelin Biotech. His responsibilities include corporate strategy and execution for financing, sales & marketing, and general corporate activities. Prior to Javelin, O'Handley worked with the MIT Venture Mentoring Services office in the Innovation Corps program (I-Corps). He previously co-founded Ferro Solutions, an MIT spin-out that developed wireless power systems for use in medical devices and research systems. Ferro Solutions secured over $10 million in government grants from NIH and DoD. O'Handley earned his MBA from the Wharton School of Business and his BA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Atray Dixit cofounded Coral after finishing his graduate work in 2018 with a mission of understanding and reducing variability in therapeutic response for all patients. In his role, he works with a diverse team and key external stakeholders in the healthcare system. Coral’s team of five based is based in San Francisco and has received funding from 8VC, Y Combinator, and an NIH SBIR grant.
In Aviv Regev’s lab at the Broad Institute, Dixit focused on developing novel methods for high throughput genetic screening. In 2016, he led a team to develop Perturb-seq, a technology which allows genetically encoded perturbations (like CRISPR edits) to be screened using single cell RNA-seq. He also developed new methods to enable large combinatorial screens called Shuffle-seq. He translated the big data skills learned through these projects during a brief externship at Apple’s Applied Machine Learning division.
Dixit received a BSE in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University in 2012 and his PhD in health sciences and technology from MIT in 2018.
Andrew A. Radin is cofounder and Chief Executive Officer of twoXAR, a company dedicated to transforming how large biological datasets are harnessed to accelerate the identification and validation of new medicines. Radin developed the company's proprietary algorithm and leads product development. Prior to co-founding twoXAR, Radin held Chief Technology Officer roles at several early stage companies where he managed teams as large as a hundred technologists distributed around the world. Radin studied biomedical informatics in Stanford University's SCPD graduate program and holds an MS and BS in computer science from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Anne Kim is cofounder and CEO of Secure AI Labs, which is based on her Media Lab graduate work at MIT with Professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland of the Human Dynamics Group. Secure AI offers a federated learning and blockchain solution for accessing siloed data from genomic and clinical trial data to corporate databases. Kim's experience in computer science and molecular biology include genome-wide association studies, natural language processing for EHR, machine learning, and cyberbiosecurity work with the EFF, ACLU, and DEFCON. She sees accessibility to healthcare as a right, and believes that the interface between biology, healthcare policy, and technology is a promising way to achieve that mission.
Before cofounding Legit, Matthew Osman was the youngest Vice President at a $1 billion structured credit hedge fund in London, where he specialized in credit strategies and tax structuring. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2015 and has a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from the University of Oxford.
An operating system for R&D powered by AI Legit uses Natural Language Processing to interpret free text descriptions of a product, idea, or technology and then compares that description against 100 million pieces of technical literature, internal documentation, and customer requests. Legit is able to provide quantitative feedback on how differentiated products are from what already exists and how closely they align with market needs. Through this approach, Legit increases R&D efficiency, creates timely close-loop communication between R&D and customers, and allows for unprecedented real-time transparency into R&D spend and efforts.
Siping "Spin" Wang is the Cofounder and CEO of TetraScience, a Boston-based cloud technology company that provides a Data Integration Platform for Life Sciences R&D Labs. He earned an MS in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, where he was awarded the Lockheed Martin Energy Fellowship. He also holds a BS in applied physics and electrical engineering from Cornell University. In 2017, Wang was selected to Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 in Science. He is currently on the board of Pistoia Alliance, a global life science pre-competitive collaboration organization.
AI/ML - Celsius Therapeutics: AI & single cell genomics for autoimmune & immune oncology therapy - Javelin Biotech: Complex in vitro models & AI to optimize lead selection - Coral Genomics: Scalable functional human genomics for drug development - twoXAR: Pharmaceutical company utilizing AI for drug discovery - Secure AI Labs: AI security & data privacy to accelerate life science analytics - Legit: AI-powered research assistant for life sciences - TetraScience: Streamlined R&D lab workflows with data integration
Dr. Meijie Tang attended MIT in 1990 to study and conduct research in materials science and graduated with a PhD from MIT in 1995. Before MIT, she studied physics in Tsinghua University, Beijing China. After she left MIT, she joined the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for a long career. She was first a postdoc, then a staff scientist, and later became a multidisciplinary project manager. Tang co-founded Nirmidas Biotech, Inc. in late 2013 and has been the CEO and President since then. She currently oversees the company’s strategic development, early business development, and research and development directions. Under her leadership, Nirmidas has raised VC funding, launched novel diagnostics and imaging instrument and consumable products with over million dollar revenues by selling products for research use and clinical applications. Tang is a Stanford StartX accelerator alumni and is an active member of the JLabs incubator community.
Deborah Zanforlin is currently CEO and cofounder of ConquerX. ConquerX is developing a poly-analyte cancer test (PACT) that combines biosensing technology and artificial intelligence to provide simultaneous early diagnosis of esophageal, stomach, pancreatic, liver, colorectal, kidney, and bladder cancer. ConquerX aims to revolutionize early-stage cancer detection, making it affordable and available to all. The technology was ideated by Deborah Zanforlin after she made a key discovery that enabled the development of a new type of blood test to detect cancers in early stages. Born and raised in Recife, Brazil, she understands first-hand basic healthcare needs common in developing countries. The company was founded by Zanforlin, Jakub Chudik, Jorge Sanchez, and To-Nhu Huynh who were selected to participate in the MIT Entrepreneurship Bootcamp in 2015.
Zanforlin currently serves as Global-Entrepreneur-in-residence (GEIR) in the Venture Development Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston. There, she helps students and faculty with their entrepreneurial journeys, assisting with ideation, business plan development, and the first steps to start a company. She is passionate about the development of solutions for early diagnostics and tools that enable precision medicine, especially in developing countries.
Zanforlin has extensive knowledge of biosensing gained through the combination of five years of research in the field of clinically relevant biosensors at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil and almost four years leading ConquerX’s scientific development. During her time in Brazil, she taught biochemistry and molecular biology at the Wyden University in Pernambuco, Brazil. She holds a BS and MSc in biomedicine and biology applied to health from the Federal University of Pernambuco.
Allison Ackerman is CEO of Resolute Bio, a peptide therapeutics company which leverages novel synthetic and computational technologies, developed by Brad Pentelute of MIT and Philip Kim of the University of Toronto, in order to tackle the burden of unmet patient needs in chronic neurologic and metabolic disorders. Prior to Resolute Bio, Ackerman served in a variety of roles in healthcare commercialization and regulatory science as an entrepreneur, consultant, clinical trialist, and CMO. She trained as a physician in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology/Hematology and graduated from Harvard Medical School and Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in chemistry, following Princeton University.
Dale Thomas III earned his PhD in automated continuous drug synthesis, where he spanned both mechanical engineering and chemical engineering at MIT. He also completed his MEngM at MIT and BS at Maine Maritime Academy. In his research, he developed an array of flow chemistry platforms for the advanced synthesis of pharmaceuticals and advanced materials. At Mytide Therapeutics, Thomas is leading a cross-disciplinary team of scientists, and engineers to overcome decades-long bottlenecks in peptide manufacturing. Increasing the speed, purity, and length of peptides promises to increase the rate of drug discovery and access to revolutionary biological treatment with the goal of positively impacting patients lives.
Dr. Nabiha Saklayen is a bio-inspired physicist and entrepreneur developing technologies to redefine how we engineer cells. She made significant scientific contributions to the field of pulsed-laser delivery to cells, with several peer-reviewed publications, patents pending, and grants awarded. Dr. Saklayen launched Cellino as CEO and cofounder with the vision of converging physics, biology, and computation to enable paradigm shifts in regenerative medicine with a world-class team. Cellino is building the next generation of retinal cell-based therapies.
Dr. Saklayen was recognized as a "Pioneer" in MIT Tech Review's 35 Innovators under 35 list for her inventions in laser-based delivery methods and is on the 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 List for Healthcare. She received her BS summa cum laude in physics from Emory University as a Robert Woodruff Scholar, and her PhD in Physics from Harvard University as an HHMI International Fellow.
Diagnostics, Peptides & Synthetic Bio - Nirmidas Biotech: IR fluorescence science for molecular diagnostics, in vivo imaging, & therapeutics - ConquerX: Multi-biomarker electro-chemical cancer diagnostic - Resolute Bio: Discovery platform optimizing peptide therapeutics - Mytide: Industrializing peptide manufacturing for iterative drug discovery - Cellino: Image-guided, Laser-driven manufacturing of human tissues
Sheryl Greenberg initiates and promotes the interactions and development of relationships between academic and industrial entities to facilitate the transfer of new ideas and technologies between MIT and companies, and has created numerous successful partnerships. By understanding the business, technology, and commercial problems within a company, and understanding the technologies and expertise of MIT researchers, Greenberg identifies appropriate resources and expertise to foster new technology applications and collaborative opportunities.
Prior to MIT, Greenberg created and directed the Office of Technology Transfer at Brandeis University. In the process of managing intellectual property protection, marketing, and licensing, she has promoted the successful commercialization of technologies as diverse as new chemicals and manufacturing, biotechnology, food compositions, software, and medical devices. She facilitated the founding and funding of new companies, as well as creating a profitable technology transfer program. She also facilitated the patenting, marketing, and licensing of Massachusetts General Hospital technologies. In addition to her cellular, biochemical, and genetic research experience in academic and corporate environments, she has also created intellectual property for medical uses. Greenberg has been an independent intellectual property and business development consultant, is a U.S. Patent Agent, and has previously served the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation as Co-Chair of the Islet Research Program Advisory Committee and grant reviewer. She currently also mentors startup companies and facilitates partnering them with large life science and healthcare companies.
Charles E and Susan T Harris Professor of Finance Director, Laboratory for Financial Engineering MIT Sloan School of Management
Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor, a Professor of Finance, and the Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
His current research spans five areas: evolutionary models of investor behavior and adaptive markets, systemic risk and financial regulation, quantitative models of financial markets, financial applications of machine-learning techniques and secure multi-party computation, and healthcare finance. Recent projects include: deriving risk aversion, loss aversion, probability matching, and other behaviors as emergent properties of evolution in stochastic environments; constructing new measures of systemic risk and comparing them across time and systemic events; applying spectral analysis to investment strategies to decompose returns into fundamental frequencies; and developing new statistical tools for predicting clinical trial outcomes, incorporating patient preferences into the drug approval process, and accelerating biomedical innovation via novel financing structures.
Lo has published extensively in academic journals (see http://alo.mit.edu) and his most recent book is Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought. His awards include Batterymarch, Guggenheim, and Sloan Fellowships; the Paul A. Samuelson Award; the Eugene Fama Prize; the IAFE-SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year; the Global Association of Risk Professionals Risk Manager of the Year; the Harry M. Markowitz Award; the Managed Futures Pinnacle Achievement Award; one of TIME’s “100 most influential people in the world”; and awards for teaching excellence from both Wharton and MIT. His book Adaptive Markets has also received a number of awards, listed here. He is a Fellow of Academia Sinica; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Econometric Society; and the Society of Financial Econometrics.
Lo is also a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a member of the New York Federal Reserve Board’s Financial Advisory Roundtable, FINRA’s Economic Advisory Committee, the National Academy of Sciences Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Board of Overseers, and the boards of Roivant Sciences and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Lo holds a BA in economics from Yale University and an AM and PhD in economics from Harvard University.
All investors require some understanding of the potential risk and reward of a given venture before they’re willing to invest, and the less they know about it, the less capital will be available. This is especially true with biomedical assets in which the risks and rewards are equally outsized and hard to evaluate. Therefore, a prerequisite for addressing the so-called “Valley of Death” in early-stage biomedical R&D funding is better risk analytics. In this talk, Prof. Lo will describe his latest research on estimating historical probabilities of success for clinical trials and then applying machine-learning techniques to predict future success rates across a variety of drug/indication pairs. With more accurate assessments of these success probabilities, capital can be deployed more efficiently and at lower cost, thereby bringing greater amounts of capital into the biopharma industry at a time when capital is needed most.
Klavs F. Jensen is the Warren K. Lewis Professor in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a co-director of MIT’s consortium, Machine Learning for Pharmaceutical Discovery and Synthesis, which aims to bring machine learning technology into pharmaceutical discovery and development. From 2007- July 2015, he was the Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering. His research spans thermal-, electro-, and photo-chemistry in batch and flow, kinetics and optimization, automation, and machine learning to develop new methods that accelerate chemical discovery and development. His lab explores new automated reaction systems integrated with online analytics, robotics, optimization, and machine learning algorithms toward autonomous discovery.
Prof. Jensen is the co-author of ~500 refereed journal publications and the inventor of 63 US patents. He is the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the Royal Society of Chemistry Journal Reaction Chemistry and Engineering. Prof. Jensen is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academy of Inventors, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Machine learning of chemical information is applied to computer aided chemical synthesis - the planning of reaction paths to a given molecular target from purchasable starting materials. The use of robotics with expert user input enable execution of identified reaction paths in an automated modular continuous flow platform. Advances in automated screening and optimization of chemical reactions accelerate translation of laboratory discoveries to manufacturing. Finally, process intensification is illustrated with on-demand synthesis pharmaceuticals in plug-and-play, manually reconfigurable, refrigerator-sized manufacturing platforms.
Director, MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine David H. Koch Professor of Science Director of Clinical Outreach Prof. of Biology and Biological Engineering Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research Senior Associate Member, Broad Institute
Dr. Yaffe is Professor of Biological Engineering and Biology at MIT, and the Director of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine. His laboratory uses a combination of experimental and computational approaches to study cellular responses to injury at the systems level, including tumor cell and innate immune responses to anti-cancer treatment. His work has led to the discovery of new signaling pathways that control tumor cell responses to DNA damage, the identification of new molecular targets that control cell cycle progression for drug development, and the identification of novel anti-cancer combination treatments based on tumor-specific vulnerabilities and time-staggered drug administration. In addition to his MIT position, Dr. Yaffe is also an attending surgeon in the Divisions of Acute Care Surgery, Trauma and Critical Care, and Surgical Oncology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School. He is a founder of Consensus Pharmaceuticals, Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, and ThromboTherapeutics.
Dr. Yaffe received his B.S. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Cornell University in 1981, his Ph.D. degree in Biophysical Chemistry in 1987, and his M.D. in 1989 from Case Western Reserve University.
Protein kinase signaling pathways are high-value targets for drug development efforts in oncology and inflammatory diseases. Many clinically useful drugs that inhibit these pathways function as ATP mimetics that compete for non-covalent binding to the kinase active site. The conserved nature of the ATP-binding pocket, however, often results in a lack of kinase specificity, or leads to low affinity pharmacophores for kinases that have shallow ATP-binding clefts. These difficulties have stimulated interest in developing drugs that target allosteric regulatory sites on kinases, as well as identifying drug combinations that enhance the on-target efficacy of ATP-based inhibitors by co-targeting additional pathways components. A priori identification of druggable allosteric sites on kinases has been challenging, however, as has been elucidating mechanisms of drug synergy that would direct co-targeting efforts. In this talk I will discuss two systems-based combined experimental/computational efforts that address these shortfalls. We have developed comparative coupling analysis as a kinase family-specific method to identify conserved ‘sectors’ within protein kinases that mediate catalysis, substrate specificity, and allosteric regulation. We have found that the allosteric sectors revealed by this method closely map to known sites of allosteric inhibitor binding, suggesting that the method can accurately identify and nominate allosteric sites on kinases for targeting in cases where no current allosteric inhibitors have yet been developed. Next, to identify mechanisms of drug synergy, we developed VISAGE – Volumetric Interrogation of Synergy and Gene Set Enrichment, and used this computational approach to identify disruption of microtubule assembly as a target that specifically synergizes with ATP competitive inhibitors of Plk1 in a cancer-specific manner.
John Roberts has been Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations (Interim) since February 2022. He obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at MIT and returned to the university after a 20-year career in the pharmaceutical industry, joining the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) in 2013. Prior to his return, John worked at small, medium, and large companies, holding positions that allowed him to exploit his passions in synthetic chemistry, project leadership, and alliance management while growing his responsibilities for managing others, ultimately as a department head. As a program director at MIT, John built a portfolio of ILP member companies, mostly in the pharmaceutical industry and headquartered in Japan, connecting them to engagement opportunities in the MIT community. Soon after returning to MIT, John began to lead a group of program directors with a combined portfolio of 60-80 global companies. In his current role, John oversees MIT Corporate Relations which houses ILP and MIT Startup Exchange.
Angela Koehler is the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research, an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, and an Associate Director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. She is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute and a Member of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine. Her research group aims to discover and develop functional small-molecule probes of targets emerging from patient-based genomics, including targets deemed recalcitrant to small molecule drug discovery efforts, such as transcription factors, RNA-binding proteins or cytokines. Selected probes may be developed into imaging agents, diagnostic tools, or therapeutic leads.
Angela received her B.A. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Reed College in 1997. There she worked under the guidance of Professor Arthur Glasfeld on structural and biochemical studies of proteins that recognize tRNA or DNA. In 2003, she received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University where she worked with Professor Stuart Schreiber to develop novel technologies for identifying and characterizing interactions between proteins and small molecules. Upon graduation, she became an Institute Fellow in the Chemical Biology Program at the Broad Institute and a Group Leader for the NCI Initiative for Chemical Genetics.
At MIT, Angela serves as the Faculty Director of the High-Throughput Sciences Facility in the Swanson Biotechnology Center. She is a co-Director of the MIT Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Program and a member of the Committee on Pre-Health Advising. Angela has served on the Chemists in Cancer Research Executive Advisory Board for AACR. Awards include being named a Genome Technology Young Investigator and a Broad Institute Merkin Fellow as well as the Novartis Lectureship in Chemistry, the Ono Pharma Breakthrough Science Award, the AACR-Bayer Innovation and Discovery Award and the MIT Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching. Angela serves as a consultant or scientific advisory board member to several pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies and has founded several biotechnology companies, including Ligon Discovery, Kronos Bio, and 76Bio.
Insights from genomics and high-throughput systems biology have uncovered thousands of potential gene-disease associations and putative targets for therapeutic intervention. Many of the most exciting potential targets fall into structural or functional classes that have yet to be drugged, including transcription factors and RNA-binding proteins. These proteins are often incompatible with traditional drug design due to the lack of small-molecule binding pockets or conformational plasticity. Our lab has developed screening approaches to identify binders historically recalcitrant targets, or their nearest neighbor protein partners, by screening these targets in pure form or while residing within complexes in cell lysates. Discovery stories focused on transcription factors will be discussed, including a molecule that perturbs the stability of the MYC oncoprotein, leading to attenuation of oncogenic MYC-drive transcription and reduction of tumor volume in MYC-driven tumors.
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.
Here we report a platform for improving the affinity of peptide-based inhibitors of protein-protein interactions using non-canonical amino acids. With this platform—which is inherently selective for high-affinity binders—we realized up to ~100 or ~30-fold gains in affinity for binders to the oncogenic ubiquitin ligase MDM2 or the HIV capsid protein C-terminal domain (C-CA). We demonstrated the utility of the identified compounds as functional PPI inhibitors by rendering them cell permeable via macrocyclization to target MDM2 in cancer cells.
Ford Professor of Economics MIT Department of Economics
Dr. Jonathan Gruber is the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992. He is also the Director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the former President of the American Society of Health Economists. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and the Econometric Society. He has published more than 175 research articles, has edited six research volumes, and is the author of Public Finance and Public Policy, a leading undergraduate text, Health Care Reform, a graphic novel, and Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revived Economic Growth and the American Dream (with Simon Johnson). In 2006 he received the American Society of Health Economists Inaugural Medal for the best health economist in the nation aged 40 and under.
During the 1997-1998 academic year, Dr. Gruber was on leave as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department. From 2003-2006 he was a key architect of Massachusetts’ ambitious health reform effort, and in 2006 became an inaugural member of the Health Connector Board, the main implementing body for that effort. During 2009-2010 he served as a technical consultant to the Obama Administration and worked with both the Administration and Congress to help craft the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In 2011 he was named “One of the Top 25 Most Innovative and Practical Thinkers of Our Time” by Slate Magazine. In both 2006 and 2012 he was rated as one of the top 100 most powerful people in health care in the United States by Modern Healthcare Magazine.
We are entering a new world of very effective, but very expensive, drug treatments for rare disease. How should society think about pricing these treatments? Are there financial models that can help spread the costs and make them more affordable? And what does this suggest for a new role for government-financed Research and Development?