Innovations in Drug Discovery and Manufacturing
The biopharma industry has been continuously growing and progressing with digital transformation since the breakout of unexpected infectious diseases, which led to the pandemic.
Join us at the 2023 MIT Korea Conference, the first in-person regional conference focused on life science in Seoul, organized by the Korea Pharmaceutical and Bio-Pharma Manufacturers Association (KPBMA) and MIT ILP.
The conference will bring you closer to the MIT ecosystem and allow you to explore global trends in MIT’s innovative Drug Discovery and Manufacturing research and experiments from leading MIT faculty and MIT-connected startups.
Jewan John Bae comes to MIT Corporate Relations with more than 20 years of experience in the specialty chemicals and construction industries. He facilitates fruitful relationships between MIT and the industry, engaging with executive level managers to understand their business challenges and match them with resources within the MIT innovation ecosystem to help meet their business objectives.
Bae’s areas of expertise include new product commercialization stage gate process, portfolio management & resource planning, and strategic planning. He has held various business leadership positions at W.R. Grace & Co., the manufacturer of high-performance specialty chemicals and materials, including Director of Strategic Planning & Process, Director of Sales in the Americas, and Global Strategic Marketing Director. Bae is a recipient of the US Army Commendation Medal in 1986.
Dr. Taegyun Moon joined Corporation Relations in October 2021 as Program Director. Moon will be working in the Life Science group.
Dr. Moon left his current position as Chief Strategy Officer at Aspen Imaging Healthcare in Plano, TX. In his role at Aspen, he has led new business development and, among other accomplishments, launched a new product through his partnership with Samsung. With some authorized overlap with Aspen, Moon also led strategy and business development for NeuroNexus Technologies (a University of Michigan spinoff) in Ann Arbor. Before that, he spent more than five years with Samsung Economic Research institute in Seoul as a Principal Research Analyst focusing on medical devices, pharma, and the digital health industries. Other positions held include Consultant at Boston Consulting Group (Seoul), Associate at McKinsey & Company (Seoul), CEO Jingfugong Food Inc. (Qingdao, China), and Research Assistant in the Neural Engineering Lab at the University of Michigan.
Moon earned his B.S. and M.S. both in Mechanical Engineering at the Korea University in Seoul, and his Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He speaks Korean (native) and Chinese in addition to English.
Termeer Professor, Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES) at MIT Professor, MIT Department of Biological Engineering Professor, Wyss Institute at Harvard Professor, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
James Collins is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and professor of biological engineering at MIT, as well as a Member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences & Technology Faculty. He is also a core founding faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Collins is one of the founders of the field of synthetic biology, and his patented technologies have been licensed by over 25 biotech, pharma, and medical devices companies. He has helped to launch a number of companies, including Synlogic (NASDAQ: SYBX), EnBiotix, Sample6 Technologies, and Senti Biosciences, and has received numerous awards and honors, including a Rhodes Scholarship, a MacArthur "Genius" Award, an NIH Director's Pioneer Award, the Sanofi - Institut Pasteur Award, as well as several teaching awards. Collins is an elected member of all three national academies - the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine - as well as the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and the World Academy of Sciences.
In this talk, we highlight the Antibiotics-AI Project, which is a multi-disciplinary, innovative research program that is leveraging MIT's world-leading strengths in artificial intelligence, bioengineering, and the life sciences to discover and design novel classes of antibiotics. The Antibiotics-AI Project is focused on developing, integrating, and implementing deep learning models, and chemogenomic screening approaches: (1) to predict novel antibiotics from expansive chemical libraries (1.5 billion molecules) with diverse properties, (2) to design de novo novel antibiotics based on learned structural and functional properties of existing and newly discovered antibiotics, and (3) to identify, using white-box machine learning models, the molecular mechanisms underlying the newly discovered and/or designed antibiotics. These deep-learning approaches will utilize multi-scale computation to embrace and harness the complexity of biology and chemistry to discover, design and develop new classes of antibiotics, up through preclinical studies. The platform has been designed so that it can be utilized and applied in a rapid fashion to emerging and re-emerging bacterial pathogens, including multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) bacteria.
Rick Pierce is the CEO and Co-founder of Decoy Therapeutics, Inc., founded in 2020. He is a serial biotech entrepreneur with over 20 years of senior leadership and operating experience, co-founding and building successful biotech companies. Including senior management and turn-around advisory roles at several public biotech start-ups that are listed on the NASDAQ, New York Stock, and Toronto Stock Exchange. At Javelin Pharmaceuticals (NYSE:JAV), he was VP of IR and Business Development while the company raised $183M, went public, and got a non-opioid pain drug Dyloject™ approved globally before being taken over by Hospira, now Pfizer. After Javelin, he was President of US and International Operations at SemBioSys Genetics (TSE: SBS). He further served as a strategic advisor to Canada-based Cangene (TSX:CNJ), sold to Emergent BioSolutions for $222M. He advised Spring Bank Pharmaceuticals management and board of directors during and after its IPO on NASDAQ. Prior to his career in biotech, Rick worked for investment banks Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers and was an advisor to well-known biotech companies. He is currently a Mentor at Mass Bio, an Advisor to the Canadian Consulate of Boston/Cambridge’s Healthcare and Technology Accelerator, and a Board member of the Canadian Entrepreneurs of New England, where he is Chairman of the Life Sciences Leadership Council. Mr. Pierce has a proven track record in attracting capital, forging transformative strategic global alliances in biotech and pharmaceuticals, and working with investors to create successful outcomes for public and private healthcare companies.
Karl Ruping is CEO and co-founder (with Jasdave Chahal and Christian Mandl) of Tiba Biotech, an MIT and Whitehead Institute venture focused on mRNA vaccines and therapeutics. He began his career as a patent attorney, specializing in international patent litigation and intellectual property licensing for both emerging ventures and global clients. Karl’s technical expertise includes bioinformatics, molecular modelling and large-scale computing.
Karl studied economics at Colby College, computer science at Temple University, and was a Research Fellow at MIT’s School of Engineering. He holds a juris doctorate from Boston University, after which he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Tokyo’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology. Today he is a member of the International Advisory Committee of Harvard’s Asia Center, and is an advisor to a number of MIT-related startups and student-led programs.
Ashish Kulkarni is a successful innovator who has applied his expertise in chemical engineering and materials science to deliver breakthrough products and platforms in various industries. He has been researching how mature organizations can develop an innovation ecosystem to tap into the unique characteristics of start-up companies. Serving as Chairman & CEO of Kebotix, Kulkarni is committed to adopting AI/ML tools in the Chemicals & Pharmaceutical industry. He has held executive positions at companies such as GAF Materials Corporation, Avantor, Inc., and Celanese, where he developed new innovation strategies and infrastructure to drive growth. He also has experience in global engineering and has held several patents and published articles in refereed journals. He serves on the board of directors for several companies, including Evercloak Materials, ConnectM, and Ghost Robotics.
Bayan Takizawa, is a cofounder and Chief Business Officer at CONTINUUS Pharmaceuticals, where he leads business development and strategy activities. Dr. Takizawa has helped the CONTINUUS team raise over $100M through financing rounds, grants, and contracts with multiple commercial partners and government agencies.
Before joining CONTINUUS, Bayan was a consultant at The Chartis Group, a leading advisory firm that provides strategic and operational support for hospitals and healthcare systems. Prior to Chartis, Bayan worked at Actin Biomed, a healthcare investment firm, and Yale New Haven Hospital as a General Surgery and Urology resident. Bayan has an M.D. from Yale, an M.S. in Engineering Systems and M.B.A. from MIT, and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Cornell. He has multiple publications in peer-reviewed journals, and is an active member of the Massachusetts life sciences community.
Ben was previously CEO/Co-founder of Firecracker, an adaptive learning platform acquired by Wolters Kluwer (Euronext: WKL). Prior to Firecracker’s acquisition, 1 out of every 2 US medical students used Firecracker at some point during medical school. Before Firecracker, he was CEO/Founder of Firefly Health, an online support community for patients and caregivers that grew to 40,000+ members before it was sold to a Co-Founder of Facebook. Before Firefly, Ben was Executive Director of the Foundation for International Medical Relief of Children (FIMRC), a nonprofit that provides free health care to millions of underprivileged children worldwide and coordinates clinical rotations and volunteerism for 700+ healthcare professionals and students annually. Ben studied Biology and Health Policy at Harvard College. In the lab, he focused on assessing the protective effect of small molecules such as Topiramate on neonatal hypoxia. Outside the lab, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Health Policy Review and President of the Harvard Health Policy Society.
Lavi Erisson, a physician-scientist-entrepreneur, is the co-founder and CEO of Gensaic, a redosable,non-viral, gene delivery company that pioneers a new class of gene delivery called genetically-encoded nanoparticles (GeNPs). Lavi was previously Chief Medical and Head of Business Development at Iterative Health, another MIT spinout, where he led clinical development to successful clearance of its flagship product, Skout (TM), and signed R&D collaborations with Eli-Lilly, Pfizer and Janssen. Earlier in his career, Lavi held various leadership roles at Teva pharmaceuticals, clinically translating over 10 novel assets from lead candidates through first-in-patient, and investing over $300M through Teva's corporate venture group. Lavi is a passionate global health advocate, volunteering as a physician in refugee camps along the border of Thailand and Myanmar, as well as advising Israel's ministry for foreign trade on bi-national R&D funds. Lavi received his Medical Degree and Public-Policy degree, Summa Cum Laude, from Tel-Aviv University. He later earned an MBA from MIT Sloan, where he was a Sloan Fellow.
Ho-Jun completed his Medical Engineering/Medical Physics Ph. D. in the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, working on robotic technologies for automated patch clamp recordings in vivo. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign respectively. Now he works on novel treatment strategies for Alzheimer’s disease, working between the labs of Professor Li-Huei Tsai and Professor Ed Boyden, as a postdoctoral scholar.
Dr. Crowell is an expert in developing and optimizing processes for producing recombinant proteins in yeast, including strain design, perfusion fermentation, straight-through chromatography, and tangential flow filtration. She received her doctoral degree in Chemical Engineering from MIT, where she developed an automated, small-scale biomanufacturing platform for the rapid, end-to-end production of high-quality biologics. Laura received her Master’s in Chemical Engineering Practice from MIT and her Bachelor’s in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Tufts University.
Ivan Cenci holds a M.Sc. double degree in Biomedical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino, and has extensive research experience at University of Oxford and Baylor College of Medicine. Healthcare enthusiast, Ivan leads Operations, Production and Product Development at Empatica following previous experiences in Data Science in the field of medical devices and algorithms.
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.
Case studies highlight methods for molecular discovery and development of small molecule pharmaceuticals, starting with multistep continuous organic synthesis (flow chemistry) in modular units for pharmacy on-demand applications. Integration of computer computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP), automation, robotics, and process analytic tools enables automatic synthesis planning and execution on a modular platform configured by a robot. The platform’s modularity, robotic reconfigurability, and flexibility for synthesis are demonstrated with CASP-proposed and human-refined multistep syntheses of exemplary small molecule pharmaceuticals, including an optimization case study of yield and throughput. The final example demonstrates molecular discovery with a robotic 96-well chemical platform performing closed-loop, autonomous chemical discovery by combining generative machine learning models, property prediction, CASP-guided automatic synthesis, and automatic isolation and characterization in an overall feedback loop.
Behzad Mahdavi is SVP of Biopharma Manufacturing & Life Sciences Tools at Ginkgo Bioworks.
New therapeutic modalities built on complex biologics are arriving to the clinic and the market faster than ever. While safe and efficient, these new modalities sometimes lack scalability, making them hard to produce at the costs and rates which would make them truly accessible. In this talk, we describe how you can use the Ginkgo platform to leverage the power of synthetic biology at scale to simultaneously optimize your discovery and manufacturability.
Sang Eun Jee is an application Scientist at XtalPi.
AI can cut down the development timeline and cost for drug discovery by answering two significant questions: What molecules should be made next? And how are the lead molecules modified? This talk will address XtalPi's AI drug discovery technology and integrated platform, and how they solved challenging problems with AI.
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 I will overview our recent efforts in developing the use of affinity-selection mass-spectrometry to rapidly discover high-affinity peptide ligands to protein targets and how we adapted the platform for small molecule drug development via a peptide-based information system. Many targets we work with are manufactured with a protein printer technology that now produces milligrams of folded functional variants in hours. Last, I will discuss our efforts in using deep learning to deliver antisense oligonucleotides into cells.