Newswise — Those who gathered on Thursday, Oct. 27, for the grand opening of the Blavatnik Harvard Life Lab Longwood were there not just to admire a new state-of-the art research facility but to celebrate the promise of biomedical science to transform health and well-being for all.
The 10,000-square-foot space houses wet and dry labs and includes offices and collaborative workspaces designed to nurture nascent biotechnology and life science enterprises. Available for lease to early-stage, high-potential biotech and life sciences start-ups founded by Harvard students, alumni, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty, the lab can accommodate up to 12 companies.
The Life Lab is a centerpiece of the Harvard Medical School Therapeutics Initiative, which aims to help HMS researchers transform their most promising fundamental biological discoveries into high-impact medicines faster, more efficiently, and more affordably. The initiative is a sweeping effort to advance therapeutics research, accelerate translation of discoveries into medicines, and train the inventors of future medicines.
“It’s a thrill to see this essential component of our Therapeutics Initiative come to fruition,” said HMS Dean George Q. Daley. “The Boston biomedical ecosystem represents the greatest basic and translational life sciences cluster in the world, and Harvard Medical School is a major reason. The work conducted in the Blavatnik Life Lab will accelerate the process of transforming our community’s fundamental scientific discoveries into therapies that impact patients, advancing our mission to improve health and well-being for all people.”
The new lab will operate as a sibling lab to the Harvard Business School’s Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab in Allston as part of Harvard University’s ecosystem of Innovation Labs. This collaboration will help cement a partnership between HMS and HBS focused on life science innovation, as the two schools work to provide business and scientific support to companies at both facilities.
“Progressing a medicine toward approval will almost universally require creating or working with a company,” said Mark Namchuk, executive director of therapeutics translation and professor of the practice in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. “With the addition of the Life Lab we can provide members of the Harvard community infrastructure and expertise in both therapeutics R&D and company creation to help launch companies that can deliver impactful medicines.”
The lab is one of the key elements supported by a 2018 gift from the Blavatnik Family Foundation that provided $200 million to accelerate the pace of therapeutic discovery and support initiatives aimed at solving some of humanity’s most acute biomedical challenges.
“I’m proud to support this multidisciplinary initiative and help drive the discovery and application of new therapeutics throughout the Harvard medical community,” said Len Blavatnik, founder and chairman of Access Industries and head of the Blavatnik Family Foundation, who was on campus for the lab opening event. “The Life Lab will also connect scientists with business mentorship through Harvard Business School, further benefiting the life science ecosystem.”
Critical resources
The Blavatnik Life Lab’s location on the medical school campus allows resident start-ups convenient access to several of the School’s research core facilities, which offer highly specialized services, equipment, and staff to help move research forward.
For example, the newly established Drug Discovery Sciences Core provides deep expertise in the science of therapeutics discovery, testing, and execution, and in the specifics of project management for the kind of complex operations involved in life science based start-ups. The core is adjacent to the Blavatnik Life Lab and offers support both to tenant companies and the broader HMS research community.
The Blavatnik Life Lab will also serve as a training ground for HMS postdoctoral research fellows interested in therapeutic drug development, Namchuk said, noting that there will be no academic research conducted in the Blavatnik Life Lab and that HMS itself will not be commercializing drugs.
The open house was the first opportunity for community members to see the new wet lab facilities at the heart of the lab. Scientists in the start-ups benefit from an integrated infrastructure and governance provided by leaders of the Therapeutics Initiative and the Blavatnik Life Lab, as well as their partners at LabCentral.
“Our goal is to help new companies succeed and grow,” said Timothy Jarrett, associate director of operations for LabCentral, who led a tour of the facilities.
Start-ups will have access to research tools and infrastructure and an opportunity to sharpen their business skills while they conduct crucial early experiments in a flexible, affordable space, Jarrett said. A company can start small by renting a single research bench month-to-month without having to make a large capital investment, he added.
Medicines of tomorrow
The event showcased the breadth and depth of work taking place on the therapeutic discovery front both at HMS and across the Harvard innovation ecosystem.
Presenters included recipients of Q-FASTR grants and Blavatnik Therapeutics Challenge Awards, as well as founders of companies that have taken space in the lab. The program also featured discussions with regulatory science fellows who discussed the challenges of meeting regulatory requirements to bring a drug to market globally.
Among the first tenants of the new space is the company intrECate Biotherapeutics, founded by Ulrich von Andrian, the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Professor of Immunopathology in the Department of Immunology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. The company is developing a technology that uses cellular markers to precision-guide drugs to specific tissues in the body, a process von Andrian likens to a “GPS for drugs.”
When medicines travel through the body’s blood vessels, it is similar to a car traveling through a tunnel.
“All you can see is the tunnel. Without additional information, you don’t know if you are traveling under a body of water, beneath a city, or through a mountain,” von Andrian explained.
As a graduate student in the 1980s, von Andrian wondered how blood cells know where to go inside these seemingly unmarked tunnels of the body’s circulatory system. He discovered that endothelial cells that form the inner lining of blood vessels in each tissue have unique markers that serve as orientation posts telling the blood cells where they are in the body.
If drugs can be configured to seek out and bind to specific tissue markers on endothelial cells, a medicine could have a much better chance of reaching its intended destination and doing its job.
Another advantage of this approach is that by targeting specific tissues and spending time attached to them, the drug delivery system could have time to deploy its payload locally, instead of washing out through the liver or the kidneys, where the barriers to drug diffusion are far more permeable.
The company is just getting out of the gates, von Andrian said, and hasn’t received any funding from investors yet.
“When you’re first getting started with a new company in Boston, one of the biggest challenges is just finding lab space,” von Andrian said.
While he has been working on the science behind the company since he was a graduate student, von Andrian said, the technology necessary to translate those discoveries into an actual therapy has become available only in the past five years.
That makes the Blavatnik Life Lab a great fit for a project like this, because it is embedded within the rich scientific culture and infrastructure, including a large variety of core facilities, of the medical school, von Andrian said.
“When you are working on biology that requires a lot of cutting-edge technology for the experiments, buying all of that equipment and establishing the necessary in-house expertise up front could be very costly and time-consuming,” he said.
New pathways
Other presenters noted that the Blavatnik Life Lab facilities were an exciting addition to the resources available at HMS to help those interested in therapeutic development meet the unique challenges of moving from a biological insight to the development of a useful drug, something that has not traditionally been a strong suit of academia.
Andrew Dates, a student in the therapeutics graduate program who works in the lab of Stephen Blacklow in the HMS Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, presented a poster describing his work to understand how a class of cell receptors bind with their targets on different organs and tissues, a classic basic biology problem. However, Dates said, he has looked at this question as a potential area of drug development from the very start.
“It’s a whole class of receptors responsible for a very diverse set of biological functions, from hearing to growing enamel on teeth,” Dates said. “Right now, we’re not really sure how the cells get activated to do their work, but if we can unlock that knowledge, it might give us the ability to improve health across a whole variety of illnesses.”
Multidisciplinary approach
Other presenters emphasized the importance of diverse, multidisciplinary ways of thinking.
Ricky Cordova, Leerink Innovation Fellow at the Harvard HealthTech Fellowship, and Nancy Anoruo, HMS instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, associate director of innovation at UMass Chan Medical School, and a Leerink Innovation Fellow at the Harvard HealthTech Fellowship, presented their work on Madernity, a digital therapeutic tool designed to fill the vast unmet need for physical therapy to prevent and treat pelvic floor dysfunction. The tool, which uses AI to guide exercises, is currently working its way toward FDA approval.
Cordova and Anoruo highlighted the importance of one of the key tenets of design thinking, an emphasis on the importance of first identifying a need in the community, rather than trying to find a use for a technology or tool.
They didn’t set out on the fellowship looking to create a digital therapeutic or to treat pelvic floor dysfunction, but kept hearing about the shortage of therapists to treat people with the condition from those they spoke to as part of their needs-assessment research.
“We were looking at the needs first,” Anoruo said. “The most important question we can ask is, how can we help?”
Cordova said he was excited about the potential for the Blavatnik Life Lab.
“It’s a space that’s buzzing with energy,” Cordova said. “It’s perfect for anyone looking to get something off the ground.”
That combination of a search for solutions to pressing problems and a sense of optimism that there are exciting new tools and discoveries to help deliver better health and well-being in previously unimagined ways were common themes at the event.
Many presenters and visitors expressed hope in the transformational power of new or emerging scientific approaches such as machine learning, gene engineering, and synthetic biology to transform health care and ameliorate suffering, and said they were excited by the passion people in the community showed for making that vision a reality.
Pamela Silver, the Elliott T. and Onie H. Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, is working with Jeffrey Way, HMS lecturer on systems biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and a staff scientist at the Wyss Institute, on the start-up company and new Blavatnik Life Lab tenant General Biologics, a synthetic biology company exploring the use of rational design to create novel drugs for therapeutic areas with high unmet needs.
Silver is also the founder of the Synthetic Biology Hive at HMS, which promotes the use of biology to solve some of the most pressing problems of the 21st century.
“The beauty is that after 50 years of molecular biology,” Silver said, “we’re at a point where now we can start to apply it to solve real-world problems.”
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