Speed and Foresight in Drug Discovery: Accelerating and De-risking Innovation in Healthcare
In response to new business models, accelerated timelines, and unforeseen market dynamics, healthcare companies are seeking to innovate rapidly and effectively to meet new challenges. A key criterion for success is the adoption of cutting-edge tools that derisk and accelerate the drug development process. Investment in these tools pays dividends across a company's pipeline.
2024 MIT Health Science Forum will delve into MIT's cutting-edge drug development tools, including automation, digitization, and the application of artificial intelligence.
Alongside these increasingly embedded toolsets is an equally critical capability: the establishment of cross-institutional, mutually beneficial collaborations to pool expertise and capabilities. Experts in external innovation and alliance management will share their insights on building and leveraging these key relationships.
Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
Rebekah Miller joined the Office of Corporate Relations team as a Program Director in March 2022. Rebekah brings to the OCR expertise in the life sciences and chemical industries as well as in applications including sensors, consumer electronics, semiconductors and renewable energy.
Prior to joining the OCR, Rebekah worked for over a decade at Merck KGaA, most recently as a Global Key Account Manager in the Semiconductor division. Rebekah also served as Head of Business and Technology Development for the Semiconductor Specialty Accounts, during which time she led strategic planning and technology roadmapping.
While at Merck KGaA, Miller established a strong track record in industry-university partnerships, corporate entrepreneurship, and innovation management, with experience in roles spanning Technology Scouting, Alliance Management, and New Business Development. Early in her career, she led early phase R&D projects as a member of the Boston Concept Lab, which focused on technology transfer from academia.
Miller earned her B.A. in Chemistry and Biology from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. in Chemistry, with a Designated Emphasis in Nanoscale Science and Engineering, from the University of California, Berkeley. She first joined MIT as a postdoctoral associate in the Bioengineering and Material Science Departments.
Professor, MIT Department of Chemistry
Bradley L. Pentelute is a Professor of Chemistry at MIT. He is also an Associate Member, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, an Extramural Member of the MIT Koch Cancer Institute, and Member, Center for Environmental Health Sciences at MIT. The Pentelute group aims to invent new chemistry for the efficient and selective modification of proteins, to ‘hijack’ these biological machines for efficient drug delivery into cells, and to create new machines to rapidly and efficiently manufacture peptides and proteins.
Prof. Pentelute has been awarded the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry (2018), Bristol Myers Squibb Award in Organic Chemistry (2017), Amgen Young Scientist Award (2016), Novartis Award in Organic Chemistry (2016), Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2015), NSF CAREER Award (2014), Sontag Distinguished Scientist Award (2013), Young Chemical Biologist Award, International Chemical Biology Society (2013), Deshpande Innovation Grant (2013), and the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award (2013).
He received his undergraduate degree in Psychology and Chemistry from the University of Southern California, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Chicago with Prof. Steve Kent. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. R. John Collier at Harvard Medical School, Microbiology.
We're facing a challenge in the world of chemistry: our lack of data is slowing down how we can use clever computer programs, known as machine learning, to create powerful new medicines. In this piece, I'll walk you through what we're doing to solve this problem by creating data highways from millions of small molecules, peptides, and small proteins. We are now able to use machine learning to discover and create new functional molecules quickly. Sometimes, these computer-designed molecules are even better than what we can make ourselves! Our next step is to create an infinite loop where we automatically design, build, and test potential new medicines.
Doctoral Candidate, Prof. Laurie Boyer’s Research Group
John Day is a graduate student with Prof. Laurie Boyer’s research group, where he uses high-throughput super-resolution microscopy to study the uptake of macromolecular therapeutics in human cells. John graduated from University of Washington in Seattle with a degree in biochemistry. His research at the University of Washington resulted in the development of open microfluidic technologies for cell culture applications.
High-throughput imaging is one of the primary methods used in drug screening and discovery. Current methods focus on maximizing throughput with a trade-off of reduced image resolution. To address this gap, we developed High-throughput Expansion Microscopy (HiExM), a robust platform that leverages expansion microscopy to achieve nanoscale image resolution. Our method is compatible with standard culture ware, commonly employed immunostaining practices, and existing high-content confocal microscopes, making it widely adoptable. We use HiExM to access information about intracellular localization, organelle morphology, and toxicity of therapeutics that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Director of Strategic Partnerships, Broad Institute
Dr. Kubasek has over 25 years of experience in business development, program leadership, and alliance management in both industry and academia. Since 2018 he has been Director of Strategic Alliances at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Previously, he was Vice President of Business Development and Alliance Management at HiFiBiO, an antibody-based drug discovery and development company, where he led the companies partnering and therapeutic evaluation efforts. He was a Vice President at Merrimack Pharmaceuticals where, in collaboration with Sanofi, he led the company’s anti-Her3 program (seribantumab) through five Phase 1 and four Phase 2 biomarker-driven clinical studies in several cancer indications. In addition, he played a key role in the companies’ financing and business development activities. He joined Praecis Pharmaceuticals as a start-up scientist and held positions of increasing responsibility in the areas of business development and program management and leadership. At Praecis he led programs through the filing of 2 INDs and several Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical studies. In addition, he played a major role in Praecis’ fundraising and partnering activities and contributed to the approval of Plenaxis (abarelix) for the treatment of prostate cancer. He has co-authored 22 publications in leading scientific journals and is a co-inventor on 4 issued patents.
Dr. Kubasek received a B.A. in Biochemistry from the University of California at Davis and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology/Biophysics from the University of Oregon. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Ludwig–Maximilians-Universität München and at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School.
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Associate Director, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) Co-Director, Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) Program Cardiologist, Massachusetts General Hospital
Dr. Collin M. Stultz is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a faculty member in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, a Professor in the Institute of Medical Engineering and Sciences at MIT, a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and an associate member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is also a practicing cardiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Dr. Stultz received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from Harvard University; a PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University; and a MD from Harvard Medical School. He did his internship, residency, and fellowship at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. His scientific contributions have spanned multiple fields including computational chemistry, biophysics, and machine learning for cardiovascular risk stratification. He is a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology and he is a past recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences. Currently, research in his group is focused on the development of machine-learning tools that can guide clinical decision-making.
Head of Strategic Partnerships, Mass General Brigham
As Strategic Innovation Leader at Mass General Brigham, Seema Basu, PhD, directs the strategy for open innovation and strategic research collaborations. She leads a team responsible for enabling strategic corporate alliances and new initiatives, such as the Innovation Fellows Program for career development and collaboration with industry. The team also manages licensing and partnering of IP portfolios from Regenerative Medicine, Ragon Institute of Mass General Center for Global Health, MIT, and Harvard. She represents Mass General Brigham at numerous national and regional organizations.
Seema has more than a decade of deep experience in industry-academic collaborations and IP & licensing at Mass General Brigham and Harvard and a successful laboratory career at Parke-Davis and Albany Medical Center. She earned her PhD from the University of Notre Dame.
Dr. Pramotton specializes in neurological disease models. Her research in Prof. Roger Kamm’s group in the MIT Biological Engineering Department focuses on developing physiologically relevant cellular models of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. Her work aims to dissect the molecular mechanisms underlying the neurodegenerative diseases' pathogenic cascade and study how cellular senescence impacts disease onset and progression. During her PhD at ETH Zurich, Dr. Pramotton focused on the mechanobiology of epithelial collectives.
The Humanizing Drug Development (HDD) consortium focuses on developing an iPSC-derived neurovascular model of neurological diseases to investigate different transporter routes for drug delivery into the brain and for drug screening. Isogenic, self-assembled vascular networks of the blood-brain barrier are interfaced to midbrain organoids carrying familial Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease mutations. These microphysiological systems are key to studying disease development and researching therapeutic possibilities.
Dr. Proestaki specializes in human skin in vitro models. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at MIT working with Prof. Roger D Kamm on developing physiologically relevant 3D human skin cell culture models in microfluidic devices for ADME studies. Her research work aims to understand how such systems can be useful in predicting drug bioavailability or be an alternative to animal studies. Dr. Proestaki received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied the mechanical cues exerted by the extracellular matrix and cell-matrix interactions.
The Humanizing Drug Development (HDD) Skin consortium focuses on developing a 3D microphysiological skin model for subcutaneous delivery of monoclonal antibodies or other therapeutics. The model consists of a self-assembled and perfusable blood vasculature while a lymphatic vasculature is also included in one integrated microfluidic device. This human skin microvascular model can be used for ADME or immune response studies and it can serve as a tool for predicting drug bioavailability.
Chief Executive Officer, CellChorus
Daniel Meyer is the Chief Executive Officer of CellChorus®, the dynamic single-cell analysis company. CellChorus is commercializing the TIMING™ platform, which merges AI/ML, advanced microscopy, and microscale manufacturing to deliver comprehensive single-cell data on cell movement, contact dynamics, potency, viability, and functional other metrics over time. The TIMING platform enables scientists to design, develop, and deliver novel immune cell-based therapies faster, at lower cost, and with higher rates of success. Mr. Meyer is the former Chief Operating Officer and was a board member of Genospace, which was funded by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate and acquired by HCA Healthcare (NYSE: HCA), the largest private hospital company in the United States and one of the largest oncology clinical care and clinical trial organizations in the United States, having led more than 450 first-in-man clinical trials and has been a clinical trial leader in the majority of approved cancer therapies over the past ten years. Mr. Meyer was also a member of the early-stage healthcare and life sciences investment teams at Arboretum Ventures and PJC.vc, where he focused on investments in life sciences, medical devices, healthcare information technology, and healthcare services. Mr. Meyer holds an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a B.A. from Middlebury College.
Chief Executive Officer, qBraid
Kanav Setia is the co-founder and CEO of qBraid. He earned a PhD in Physics from Dartmouth College in 2020, where he worked on quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry, with a particular focus on fermion-to-qubit encodings. Dr. Setia’s work on the Bravyi-Kitaev Superfast (BKSF) algorithm was the first to apply BKSF to quantum chemistry simulation. Collaborating with IBM, he developed the Generalized Superfast Encoding (GSE) for quantum simulation. This work was the first to show the presence of inherent error-correcting properties within the fermion-to-qubit encodings.
During his Ph.D., Dr. Setia interned at IBM twice, contributing to IBM’s open-source quantum chemistry software, Qiskit-Chemistry, and Google’s OpenFermion. He was a co-author on the initial releases of both. Dr. Setia also holds a B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Astronomy and Planetary Sciences from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology. After graduation, he worked for four years at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in the MEMS division of the Semi-Conductor Laboratory, focusing on the design and development of accelerometers and gyroscopes.
Chief Executive Officer, Vivtex
Dr. Deehan joined Vivtex in December 2022 and is a biotechnology and pharmaceutical professional with 22 years of drug development and commercialization experience. She obtained herPh.D. from the Faculty of Medicine at Glasgow University and subsequently spent eight years in academic research before moving into the biopharma industry in 2001. She has gained expertise in all stages of the drug development cycle from discovery to product commercial launch, across a broad range of therapeutic areas. Her last nine years have been spent in global corporate development roles at Novimmune SA and Nordic Nanovector ASA where she gained a successful track record in business development and deal-making,for product and technology platform transactions, with a range of companies, including Genentech and Shire.
Vice President of Platform Research, DeepCure
Derek Miller serves as the Vice President of Platform Research at DeepCure, where he has contributed for over 5 years. He leads the physics-based machine learning and computational chemistry team, driving innovation in molecular generation using deep learning, structure-based modeling, and protein-ligand interaction mechanics. With a decade of experience as a machine learning lead, Derek has worked across genomics, proteomics, and small molecule-protein binding. He is deeply passionate about pioneering approaches to unlock undruggable protein targets with small molecules.
Senior Director of the Imaging Platform, Institute Scientist, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
Dr. Carpenter is an Institute Scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Her research group develops algorithms and strategies for large-scale experiments involving images. The team’s open-source CellProfiler software is used by thousands of biologists worldwide and their Cell Painting assay has been adopted throughout the pharma industry to accelerate drug discovery. She leads industry-wide consortia such as JUMP-Cell Painting and OASIS.
Her PhD is in cell biology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and her postdoc in high-throughput image analysis was at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and MIT’s CSAIL (Computer Sciences/Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). Carpenter has been named an NSF CAREER awardee, and an NIH MIRA awardee, and is listed in Deep Knowledge Analytics’ top-100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Advanced Healthcare.
Cell images contain a vast amount of quantifiable information about the status of the cell: for example, whether it is diseased, whether it is responding to a drug treatment, or whether a pathway has been disrupted by a genetic mutation. We aim to go beyond measuring individual cell phenotypes that biologists already know are relevant to a particular disease. Instead, in a strategy called image-based profiling, often using the Cell Painting assay, we extract hundreds of features of cells from microscopy images. Just like transcriptional profiling, the similarities and differences in the patterns of extracted features reveal connections among diseases, drugs, and genes.
We are harvesting similarities in image-based profiles to identify, at a single-cell level, how diseases, drugs, and genes affect cells, which can uncover small molecules’ mechanism of action, discover gene functions, predict assay outcomes, discover disease-associated phenotypes, identify the functional impact of disease-associated alleles, and find novel therapeutic candidates. This is leading to a growing impact on the pharmaceutical industry as cell morphology becomes a powerful data source for systems biology alongside molecular omics.
Postdoctoral Researcher, Prof. Douglas Lauffenburger’s Group
Dr. Kate Bridges is a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Douglas Lauffenburger’s research group, where she develops computational strategies for translating omics datasets across species to understand mechanisms of host immune response to infectious disease. Prior, Dr. Bridges completed her PhD in biomedical engineering at Yale, where she studied immune cell heterogeneity in tumors and healing wounds from single-cell omics datasets.
Dr. Katarina DiLillo is a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Douglas Lauffenburger’s research group, where her focus is on the computational analysis of multi-modal immune networks in systems biology. She earned her PhD Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, specializing in systems biology and bioinformatics. Her research encompasses a breadth of topics including data-driven mathematical modeling, machine learning, and multi-omics analysis to understand disease mechanisms, discover therapeutic targets, and identify molecular biomarkers for prognosis and treatment.
Doctoral Candidate, Martin Fellow, Prof. Matthew Shoulders Research Group
Julie McDonald is a doctoral candidate in Prof. Matthew Shoulders' group at MIT’s Department of Chemistry. Prior to joining MIT, Julie served as a Research Technician in the Chao Lab at Massachusetts General Brigham, where she investigated the regulation of membrane transporters. Julie earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Wesleyan University, where she researched the thermodynamic characteristics of DNA secondary structures.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Prof. Matthew Shoulders Research Group
Dr. Kathryn Yammine is a recent alumnus of Prof. Matthew Shoulders’ research group. While at MIT, Kathryn was named an MIT Presidential Fellow and an NIH Ruth L Kirschstein F31 Predoctoral Fellow. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Alan Beggs Laboratory, Boston Children’s Hospital Division of Genetics and Genomics.
Doctoral Candidate, NSF Fellow, Prof. Matthew Shoulders Research Group
Anton Barybin is a doctoral candidate in Prof. Matthew Shoulders's group at MIT’s Department of Chemistry, where his research focuses on the directed evolution of biomolecules in mammalian cells. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the University of Kansas, where he developed microchip electrophoresis separation-based sensors to monitor neurochemicals.
Research Scientist, Bradley Pentelute’s Research Group
Charlie Farquhar is a Research Scientist at MIT, working with Professor Bradley Pentelute to discover novel peptides for targeted therapeutic delivery. After receiving their B.S. in Chemistry from Duke University, Charlie worked at RTI International in synthetic cannabinoid research. They did graduate studies at MIT in the Department of Chemistry and have stayed at MIT for post-graduate research.
Co-founder and CEO, Delineate
Emily Nieves is co-founder and CEO of Delineate, an AI copilot for computational pharmacology. Delineate empowers pharma and biotech companies to make faster, evidence-driven decisions, de-risking development across all departments.
Emily is a PhD Candidate in Biological Engineering at MIT where she focuses on the intersection of AI and pharmacology. She has previously worked at large pharmaceutical companies such as AstraZeneca and Pfizer where she built models to assist in answering various questions along the drug development process. Emily is passionate about enabling scientists to make the best evidence-based decisions possible.