Dean’s Report FY23

The apex of the snail-shaped cochlea, our hearing organ, with its dense vascular network (green) is shown here. The hair cells (magenta), which detect sound, are innervated by the primary auditory neurons, whose cell bodies and axons are also in magenta.
The apex of the snail-shaped cochlea, our hearing organ, with its dense vascular network (green) is shown here. The hair cells (magenta), which detect sound, are innervated by the primary auditory neurons, whose cell bodies and axons are also in magenta.

Members of the Harvard Medical School research community have been expanding the boundaries of scientific knowledge for more than 240 years. Among the many discoveries made this year, researchers identified that inflammatory proteins found in the innate immune system may be at the root of a range of neurodegenerative conditions, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Cancer immunotherapy success may hinge on the presence of cancer-combatting neutrophils. Face blindness may be more prevalent than previously thought. And age-related accumulation of abdominal fat is associated with lower muscle density, which can lead to less effective muscle function and, in turn, a greater risk of falls.

Support for research and faculty development is of paramount importance. In addition to dedicating School resources to subsidize our research enterprise, HMS has increased investments in its research core facilities, which serve multiple laboratories and raise the productivity of every scientist across our community.

Over the past six years, HMS has invested over $65 million into its cores. Annual support has risen from approximately $3 million to more than $12 million, representing roughly a fourfold annual increase.

A gene-editing therapy for sickle cell anemia and other inherited blood diseases is nearing FDA approval based on work by pediatric hematologist oncologist Stuart Orkin.
A gene-editing therapy for sickle cell anemia and other inherited blood diseases is nearing FDA approval based on work by pediatric hematologist oncologist Stuart Orkin.


The Foundry Award Program provides funding and resources for core facilities and technology development. Projects supported in 2023 included nanobody services available through the Center for Macromolecular Interactions core, a technology project to develop methods for ultra-high-throughput RNA sequencing, and new instruments in the three HMS light microscopy core facilities and the BioPolymers Facility Next Gen Sequencing core.

HMS has also prioritized internally managed research funding programs that raise philanthropic dollars centrally but distribute resources across our community. These include the Bertarelli Rare Cancers Fund, Ludwig Center at Harvard, and Dean’s Innovation Awards, among others. The existence of these support systems has promoted research collaborations on the Quad and alliances between scientists at HMS and our affiliated hospitals and research institutes. These central funds leverage the interests of many philanthropists who want to invest across the vast HMS community as opposed to a single program or affiliate.

Another area of faculty support is our new translational infrastructure. The HMS Therapeutics Initiative, which aims to accelerate the pace at which our fundamental, curiosity-driven science affects individual health and well-being, has seen a dramatic return on our initial investments.

The School has an opportunity — and an imperative — to use its extraordinary resources to capture the wide-lens view of humanity’s needs.

Q-FASTR, the Quadrangle Fund for Advancing and Seeding Translational Research, has touched every basic science department at HMS, with 48 percent of Quad-based faculty having applied for funding. Roughly $11.5 million has been invested in these projects, which have yielded over $160 million in follow-on funding. Of the 2023 Q-FASTR development grants, 80 percent support collaborative projects, with co-principal investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Mississippi State University, and Harvard University.

The Blavatnik Therapeutics Challenge Awards, available to both Quad-based researchers and affiliate faculty, accelerate the development of therapeutics across HMS, ushering translational projects toward clinical and commercial impact. Five outstanding new projects have been selected this year, driving momentum toward a suite of HMS-originated treatments with life-enhancing, even lifesaving, potential.

Seven companies — four of them founded by Quad faculty — are now up and running in the Blavatnik Harvard Life Lab Longwood, an incubator laboratory space that celebrated its grand opening in October 2022 and has reached 57 percent occupancy one year later. The Blavatnik Life Lab model is so promising that HMS recently hosted a delegation from Taiwan that is interested in emulating it there.

Executive Director of Therapeutics Translation Mark Namchuk and his team have completed the first round of staffing for our new Drug Discovery Sciences Core, which will work in concert with HMS senior therapeutics scientists to identify and move basic science insights toward therapeutics impact. In the last three years, the drug discovery core and our senior therapeutic scientists have together supported nearly one-third of projects funded by the Therapeutics Initiative either through Q-FASTR, the Blavatnik Therapeutics Challenge Awards, or the Therapeutics Translator at HMS.

Indeed, this past year has been all about integrating therapeutics discovery into our community’s work. Our objective is to equip exceptional laboratory investigators with the tools and resources needed to conduct basic science and translational science in parallel, thereby increasing the potential for fundamental discoveries to be extended into the clinic.

One standout success story of our Therapeutics Initiative is our $30 million collaboration with AbbVie, which represents a consortium of 18 investigators from seven different institutions across five focus areas. This multipronged joint effort between HMS and AbbVie scientists aims to advance our fundamental knowledge of infectious disease, while simultaneously developing novel antiviral therapies.

Organized urgently in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the AbbVie collaboration has matured into a model for leveraging academic and industrial expertise to bring new insights to bear on disease while developing new treatments. The collaboration has been highly productive and has advanced a compound into clinical development; additional projects are approaching a request for authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to administer an investigational drug or biological product to humans.

HMS has begun injecting computational proficiencies throughout our campus as an important prerequisite to the widespread adoption of AI. To support data science and computational needs, the Center for Computational Biomedicine has collaborated on 27 projects involving more than 30 faculty members across seven Quad-based basic science departments.

Additionally, the center has helped to develop and make available tools and technologies that streamline and facilitate the analysis of biomedical research. For example, a collaboration with HMS Research Computing is providing access to AlphaFold and ColabFold, which are new tools for predicting protein structures. The center also serves as a centralized resource for computational, bioinformatics, and statistical education for graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and research staff across the School.

Caroline Palavicino-Maggio is advancing her landmark research on the neural underpinnings of female aggression as an HMS assistant professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital.
Caroline Palavicino-Maggiois advancing her landmark research on the neural underpinnings of female aggression as an HMS assistant professor of psychiatry at McLeanHospital.

In September 2022, Harvard celebrated the new Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence with a scientific symposium. Themes encompassed the institute’s goals and vision as a place that will foster new ideas and novel collaborations from newly forged interdisciplinary studies and a diverse, emerging group of scholars.

This spring, the institute announced its inaugural class of associate faculty. Included in this group was HMS Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics Marinka Zitnik, who seeks to better understand the basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems by developing machine learning methods that incorporate geometry, graph structure, and symmetry, and are grounded in domain knowledge.

Additionally, computational neuroscientist Kanaka Rajan, a leader in using AI and machine learning to study the brain, joined Harvard as a founding Kempner Institute faculty member and an HMS faculty member in neurobiology.

The School has an opportunity — and an imperative — to use its extraordinary resources to capture the wide-lens view of humanity’s needs, and to meet those needs by defining how AI will be integrated into medical education, research, and clinical practice most productively and ethically. With Department of Biomedical Informatics Chair Zak Kohane being appointed editor-in-chief of the new journal NEJM AI, HMS is poised to become a prominent leader in the AI space.