The time may be ripe for HMS to make a major investment in an organization focused on therapeutic discovery, a team involved in the strategic planning process reported recently. Members said, however, that the intellectual focus of such an organization and its detailed structure require further study.
The team is one of several in the Biomedical Research Advisory Group (BRAG), part of Dean Jeffrey Flier’s strategic initiative. The recently released report says the new therapeutics organization could either be limited to HMS or be a University-wide endeavor.
“We’re not proposing that Harvard Medical School form a drug company,” said Donald Coen, who led the BRAG study group that wrote the report. Rather, “We want to help people doing basic and clinical research at HMS translate their research into therapeutics. We think new technology platforms and organizational structures could make that easier, helping our scientists, for example, get their research to the point where they could partner with drug companies.”
Coen explained that there appear to be opportunities for innovative research in three related areas: therapeutics, chemical biology, and pharmacology. “That means expanding our intellectual endeavors in those areas,” he said.
In a message to faculty on the strategic initiative’s website, Flier says one reason behind his request for the report is the mismatch between what is happening in labs and the practical translation of this lab research. “The explosion in biomedical research, for example, in genetics and cell biology, has led to a tremendous amount of new knowledge, and yet the drug pipeline seems to have remained unchanged or even contracted. The question is, why is this and can academia change the equation?”
“As discussed in the therapeutics white paper, there are many ways in which academics might be able to contribute to the science of therapeutics, such as identifying new targets, developing novel therapeutic modalities, and even through novel systems biologic and bioengineering approaches,” Flier adds.
The report says Harvard has major strengths in basic biology and clinical research and pockets of strength in therapeutically relevant chemistry and certain technology platforms. However, according to the report, there are intellectual areas that are missing or in need of expansion; technology platforms that are not available; and organizational challenges. In particular, there is no central organizing principle and a lack of resources that limits the ability to turn scientific discoveries into therapeutics.
The study group pondered a variety of solutions, including a new department or committee and the contrasting model of a new center or institute. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Though still unsettled, the department/committee model was viewed by most group members as preferable to the center/institute one because the former has appointment power, resources and commitments for new recruits—or both—and it could accelerate development of new junior faculty and new senior leadership.
The group knew the lay of the therapeutics land, given its diverse expertise, Coen said. “The team included people not only from academia but people either currently in, or who have previously been in, a corporate setting. For example, Bill Chin, who is also on the dean’s steering committee for the strategic planning process, is a vice president at Eli Lilly. And Rebecca Ward and Nathanael Gray have worked in industry.”
Still to come are BRAG reports about other priorities, including a study of HMS’s strengths and needs in neuroscience. Michael Greenberg, who led the team that wrote this report, said the goal is to channel Harvard’s existing strengths, given that neuroscience research will increasingly shape medical breakthroughs: “The understanding of the brain has advanced greatly in the last 10 to 20 years, so that it’s now the appropriate time to make that a high priority.”
Other groups, convened by David Altshuler and by Diane Mathis, previously reported on the state of human genetics and immunology/inflammation, respectively.
The new therapeutics report also made note of potentially complementary proposals to establish a vaccine institute at Harvard and an institute to oversee parallel clinical trials of drugs and novel therapies in humans and mouse models.
The therapeutics report is accessible from the strategic planning website.
