Training Inventors of Future Medicines

From the moment he wrapped up a visit to Bayer’s offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Patrick Loi knew that the work scientists did there was something he had to be a part of.

Loi was in the last year of his PhD program at Harvard, determining his next step. He had been working in a lab at Harvard Medical School developing targeted therapies for different types of tumors, and that day, he heard from scientists at Bayer doing similar work.

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“I immediately connected with some of them on LinkedIn, asking them to keep me in mind if any jobs opened up,” he said.

Not long after, Loi learned of a job opening that felt like the perfect fit. Today, he is a senior scientist in precision medical oncology at Bayer.

Site visits like the pivotal one for Loi are just one example of the opportunities HMS has created for students to connect with professionals working in the life sciences industry and become the best possible inventors of future medicines.

Building bridges between academia and industry, including through education and training programs for students such as Loi, is a core goal of the HMS Therapeutics Initiative, which aims to accelerate the pace at which fundamental science conducted at HMS gets transformed into therapies that improve and save lives.

The journey from molecule to medicine is long, from research and development to optimization and commercialization to considerations such as pricing, how the drug will be administered, the cost to manufacture it, and how to scale to all patients the medicine is indicated for.

And the chances of success are slim. Most academic research projects never result in a drug candidate being tested in humans at all. Those that make it to clinical trials have a 90 percent failure rate. And fewer than 5 percent of projects started within the pharmaceutical industry alone lead to a marketed drug.

Leaders of — and students in — Therapeutics Initiative-driven programs are identifying ways to support basic science discovery, which provides the foundation for all the research that follows it, while removing those barriers that stop an idea from eventually becoming a new medicine.

“Our scientific goal is to ask some critical translational questions early in a project, which we hope will decrease the failure rate when ideas leave the academic arena and move to industry,” said Mark Namchuk, executive director of therapeutics translation at HMS. “In parallel, our hope is that we are training scientists who can integrate high-level drug discovery science from idea to exit.”

Boundless opportunities in a biomedical hub

While earning his PhD from the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Loi trained in the HMS biological and biomedical sciences program in the lab of Karen Cichowski. His work focused on how deregulated cell signaling drives cancer. The experience sparked an interest in therapeutic translation.

Loi applied to and promptly became one of many students to benefit from the HMS Therapeutics Graduate Program (TGP), a certificate program run by the Therapeutics Initiative that provides PhD students with multidisciplinary training related to identifying and developing new diagnostic tools and disease treatments and understanding their societal implications.

Throughout their training, TGP students attend career panel discussions, boot camps, internships, site visits, and more to learn from the more than 100 life sciences companies surrounding the HMS campus. Those include many in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, which some regard as the center of the nation’s biotechnology industry.

“We’re in this red-hot ecosystem,” said Tim Mitchison, the Hasib Sabbagh Professor of Systems Biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and a faculty director for the TGP. “I think it’s the most exciting biomedical ecosystem on the planet by the numbers, and it is very heavy on modern modalities such as cell and gene therapy, where a lot of the future lies.”

Interacting with experts who are immersed in translational research and who understand the full process of taking early discoveries through the development pipeline to create new medicines is invaluable experience, especially when combined with rigorous basic science research at HMS.

“For hundreds of years, we’ve been at the forefront of basic biomedical discoveries,” said David Golan, dean for research initiatives and global programs at HMS and a faculty director for the TGP. “We have been strong in basic science and clinical research.”

“More recently, we have focused on providing substantial resources and opportunity for our basic science faculty, postdocs, trainees, and students to think about the translational aspects of their discoveries, and we have put major effort into translational medicine training,” Golan confirmed.

Many members of the scientific community, including TGP students, harbor hopes of developing new therapeutics that will meet new and unmet needs of patients, even though only a small minority of researchers ultimately fulfill that desire. HMS’ efforts to facilitate greater synergy between academic medicine and industry are in service of bolstering those scientists’ future translational success.