Dear members of the Harvard Medical School community,

I am delighted to announce the formal launch of the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science, to be known as HiTS, a collaborative endeavor with the ambitious goal of enhancing and eventually leading efforts to reinvent the ways in which we discover and evaluate therapeutic drugs and devices. HiTS will be headed by Peter Sorger, the Otto Krayer Professor in Systems Pharmacology at HMS. Peter reports directly to me in this capacity.

Peter, who is also a visiting professor of biological engineering at MIT, obtained his AB from Harvard College (Class of 1983), PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge University and trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Harold Varmus at UCSF. As a research scientist and educator Peter has been a leader in systems biology with a particular focus on pathways that control life and death decisions in human cancers. His research involves both experimental and computational biology, and he has pioneered approaches to modeling signal transduction at a single-cell level. Peter was cofounder of the Cambridge-based systems biology biotech company Merrimack Pharmaceuticals and of Glencoe Software, and is an adviser to multiple public and private technology companies. In 2011, he authored a definitive report on systems pharmacology for the National Institutes of Health.

Therapeutics has been at the forefront of my priorities as dean. Over the last few years I have been keenly aware of the crisis in the pharmaceutical pipeline, how the vast investments required by traditional pharmaceutical development are not yielding needed therapies and how a deep solution to this problem will require that new concepts and models be developed within the academy. HMS is extremely well positioned to convene key entities, imagine new solutions and marshal the necessary talent and resources to address this issue—one of biomedicine’s greatest challenges.

The program will include both new research and education programs, all of which will be enhanced by important collaborations among HMS and other Harvard schools, HMS-affiliated hospitals and research institutes, the US Food and Drug Administration, the pharmaceutical industry and other Boston-area universities.

There will be four primary components of HiTS:

· The Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology is a new research facility in the Armenise building partly made possible by a recent $5 million capital grant from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. First announced as an idea in 2011, the lab is a multidisciplinary program exploring how drugs work in complex systems that will open this year with Peter serving as director. Tim Mitchison, the Hasib Sabbagh Professor of Systems Biology at HMS, will be deputy director.

· The Therapeutics Technology Cluster, TTC, will enhance existing core facilities and build new ones needed to create and test next-generation therapeutic agents including molecules and materials designed for function rather than structure. Stephen Blacklow, head of the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at HMS, will direct this effort. Caroline Shamu, director of the HMS Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology (ICCB), will act as assistant director.

· The Program in Regulatory Science is an education and research program focusing on the science needed to more effectively test and evaluate new medicines. The program aims to develop tools for predicting drug efficacy and toxicity in preclinical experiments and clinical trials. It will also develop new curricula for regulatory science to be available to multiple constituencies. A director will be named.

· A Therapeutics Graduate Program will award a certificate in therapeutics, initially to doctoral students in biological science within the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Division of Medical Sciences. Students in the program undertake internships either in industry, the clinic or a regulatory agency under the leadership of David Golan, HMS dean for graduate education. Together with the extensive educational efforts in therapeutic science under Harvard Catalyst leadership, we will have an extraordinary program in this area.

Many other members of our community are giving shape to this program. Joining Peter in leadership, alongside Blacklow and Golan, is Laura Maliszewski, as executive director of HiTS. Marc Kirschner, chair of the HMS Department of Systems Biology and the John Franklin Enders University Professor of Systems Biology, has supported this from the beginning, and will continue to serve as senior scientific advisor.

Establishing a new program requires a great leader, and I am proud of the work that Peter and his colleagues have done to define the nature and scope of HiTS. This is among our most ambitious efforts, and I believe that HMS is one of the few places in the world with the broad cross-disciplinary expertise to succeed in this area.

Please join me in congratulating Peter and his colleagues on the launch of this important new program.