Dean’s Report FY24
Harvard Medical School is a magnet that brings people together to recharge urgency around areas of escalating concern in medicine and the life sciences. Here, hope is born from novelty, and reward arises from calculated risk. Our ability to bring collective resources to bear on seemingly intractable problems is unparalleled.
One such problem is the global threat of antibiotic resistance, and this year HMS was awarded more than $100 million in funding from ARPA-H, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, to lead a 25-institution consortium in tackling this slow-moving pandemic.
Headed by Johan Paulsson, professor of systems biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, the academia- and industry-spanning team is working to develop novel microscopy, microfluidics devices, single-cell assays, and machine-learning tools that allow researchers to rapidly and accurately identify individual bacteria and understand their behavior. The group hopes the work will lead to more effective diagnosis and treatment of life-threatening bacterial infections.
Being entrusted with leadership of this project speaks to our School’s prodigious resources, collaborative energy, and ability to assemble some of the world’s greatest minds. This convening power extends to many other recent endeavors focused on fundamental research, clinical care, and health care delivery both locally and globally.
One example is the newly established Gene Lay Institute of Immunology and Inflammation, which is sparking interdisciplinary dialogue across Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and HMS to comprehend the protean role of inflammation in diseases that affect millions of people.
The Paul Farmer Collaborative — an alliance between HMS and the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda — is catalyzing the development of sustainable health systems that improve care delivery to underserved populations around the world.
The Office for Research Initiatives and Global Programs added South Korea to the countries where we have signed collaborative agreements with institutions in research and education.
Collaboration closer to home enabled another year of remarkable basic and clinical discoveries at the School.
A team led by Steven McCarroll, the Dorothy and Milton Flier Professor of Biomedical Science and Genetics, and Sabina Berretta, HMS associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital, found a shared biological basis for cognitive impairment in schizophrenia and aging.
Our neurobiologists — including David Ginty, the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor of Neurobiology and head of the Department of Neurobiology; Lauren Orefice, HMS assistant professor of genetics at Mass General; and April Levin, HMS assistant professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital — continued to advance the forefront of our understanding of the mechanisms of touch.
Arjun Manrai, assistant professor of biomedical informatics, and colleagues expanded their scrutiny of race-based clinical algorithms to estimate the effects on patients of race-neutral lung function testing.
The quality of the School’s science both invites and is strengthened by collaborations with biotechnology, pharmaceutical, robotics, and AI companies.
The quality of the School’s science both invites and is strengthened by collaborations with biotechnology, pharmaceutical, robotics, and AI companies. Many of these connections are spearheaded by the Therapeutics Initiative at HMS, which breaks down silos between academia and industry to create unique learning opportunities and accelerate the translation of brilliant ideas into new therapies.
The Blavatnik Harvard Life Lab Longwood is now operating at 70 percent capacity, which is a normal steady state for regional incubators. The majority of companies there were founded by Quad faculty members. Skylark Bio — the company developing a gene therapy for hearing loss that originated in the lab of David Corey, the Bertarelli Professor of Translational Medical Science — has been so successful that it is graduating out of the Blavatnik Life Lab and into custom lab space.
Artificial intelligence presents an inflection point in history, and we are expanding its potential to drive discovery. The latest AI-related research across the HMS community spans efforts to illuminate basic biology and the mechanisms of disease, identify new drugs and drug targets, and enhance clinical care and health equity.
The trio of Steven Gygi, professor of cell biology; Wade Harper, the Bert and Natalie Vallee Professor of Molecular Pathology and head of the Department of Cell Biology; and Edward Huttlin, instructor in cell biology, pressed forward with the BioPlex project, an ambitious effort to profile all human protein-protein interactions. An exciting outcome of this work, made possible by the AI tool AlphaFold, was achieving a structural view of the entire human interactome.
Other faculty members are developing or applying AI tools to cross new thresholds in fundamental science and reveal paths toward better disease risk analysis, outcomes forecasting, treatments, and overall care.
Our community’s accomplishments consistently earn recognition from the world’s most prestigious institutions. Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics at HMS and Mass General, received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with collaborator Victor Ambros of UMass Chan Medical School for their discovery of microRNAs. The identification of this class of tiny RNA molecules revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that proved essential for multicellular organisms, including humans.
Joel Habener, HMS professor of medicine and director of the Laboratory of Molecular Endocrinology at Mass General, won the 2024 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for his discovery of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), a molecule that has become the basis for therapies that have transformed the treatment of diabetes and obesity. Habener shared the prize with Svetlana Mojsov of Rockefeller University and Lotte Bjerre Knudsen of Novo Nordisk.
Gregory Petsko, HMS professor of neurology at Brigham and Women’s, received the National Medal of Science for advancing our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases.
Five faculty members were named new Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. Five others were elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 10 to the National Academy of Medicine, and six to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Seven were named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight researchers in our community received NIH High-Risk, High-Reward Research program grants. An impressive nine research and clinical fellows and two assistant professors received awards from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, along with the trainees’ faculty sponsors.
Opportunities to speak at HMS draw in additional scientific luminaries, who in turn energize our community. The Dunham Lectures resumed this spring with keynote speaker Jennifer Doudna. Doudna, who conducted research in an HMS lab as a PhD student before sharing the Nobel Prize for her discoveries related to CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, packed our Joseph B. Martin Conference Center for two days running.
We also continue to invest deeply in our community’s science and scholarship. In academic year 2024–25 we are underwriting 13 projects through the Quadrangle Fund for Advancing and Seeding Translational Research (Q-FASTR). Spanning six Quad departments and two affiliated hospitals, these take a variety of approaches in their quests to conquer illness, such as striving to develop an antiviral effective against all coronaviruses, an antisense oligonucleotide to treat leukemia, and a gene editor for certain inherited muscle diseases.
The Blavatnik Therapeutics Challenge Awards, available to Quad and affiliate faculty who aim to accelerate the development of HMS discoveries into clinical therapies, were bestowed on three exceptional proposals. They represent efforts to develop a therapy for fragile X syndrome, modulate epinephrine and norepinephrine receptors in the brain to treat Parkinson’s disease, and prepare an IV oxygen therapy for a first-in-human clinical trial.
HMS also supported 10 projects related to our core facilities and technology development through the Foundry Award Program. These range from upgrades to a nuclear magnetic resonance instrument and microbe-imaging microscopes to new capabilities in metabolomic and lipidomic profiling, super-resolution light microscopy, next-generation genome sequencing, and single-cell studies.
The Center for Computational Biomedicine, launched in 2020 to create a shared resource for data and computational expertise across the Quad, began transitioning into a research core after reevaluation of its scope and service areas. The focus of the new Core for Computational Biomedicine remains squarely on the Quad, assisting investigators in implementing innovative research solutions and supporting AI-enabled projects. This important work will be conducted in close partnership with HMS IT, which has made strategic investments in research computing and mobilized support as the School emerges as a leader in AI and machine learning.