The MLSC’s Massachusetts Next Generation Initiative (MassNextGen), a five-year, $2 million commitment to foster greater gender parity in the next generation of life science entrepreneurs, funded five companies in the fourth round of the program. Each entrepreneur will receive individual grants of $87,500 and access to a network of executive coaches for a year to refine their business strategies and help increase the effectiveness of efforts to raise capital.
For this funding year, the MLSC and the program’s industry sponsors contributed $437,500 in funding for awards. Since inception, including this year’s awards, the MLSC has deployed more than $1.4 million in funding for women entrepreneurs through MassNextGen with an executive coaching network providing 200-plus hours of coaching.
Increasing the number of successful entrepreneurs is in the best interest of the entire life science industry and as such, this initiative is a public-private partnership between the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Sanofi, King Street Properties, Johnson and Johnson Innovation, Mintz, and the initiative’s initial corporate sponsor, Takeda.
Now with 21 companies in its portfolio, MassNextGen continues toward its goal of shifting the paradigm to build a diverse ecosystem with equal representation. As MassNextGen Entrepreneurs and their respective teams work toward new innovative therapeutics and products for patients, MLSC funding and executive coaching mentorship have proven invaluable for these women entrepreneurs in building their teams and progressing forward with new opportunities. Five companies have raised a Seed or Series A financing round. In total, MassNextGen companies have raised $31 million in follow on funding.
In 2021, Phage Pro, received $3 million in funding through a The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant and an NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award (R21). This follows an initial Phase I SBIR grant awarded to PhagePro, a Boston-based biotechnology company pioneering the use of bacteriophages to prevent bacterial infections and reduce antibiotic resistance in the most vulnerable communities around the world. The funding from the SBIR grant will help the company enhance its ProphaLytic-Vc (PVC), an orally dosed bacteriophage preparation specifically targeted towards epidemic strains of cholera. Phage Pro’s CEO and Co-Founder, Mimi Yen, was a 2019 MassNextGen awardee.
2020 awardee New Equilibrium Biosciences, a biotech that develops medicines targeting intrinsically disordered proteins, a challenging class of targets implicated in cancers and neurodegenerative disorders. Under the leadership of its CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Virginia Burger, the company raised a $10 million seed round through RA Capital and are now growing their interdisciplinary team, accelerating their drug discovery programs, and expanding their computational-experimental platform. They more recently were awarded the Servier Spark Award. This award provides New Equilibrium access to the world-class facilities at LabCentral by covering the operating costs of a researcher for one year and, additionally, is opening a dialogue between New Equilibrium and researchers at Servier around their shared interests in creating new medicines for patients with high unmet need.
In December 2020, the MLSC was proud to collaborate with Boston University's Office of Research on a virtual event sharing insights from MassNextGen awardees on their journeys as entrepreneurs. MassNextGen participants included Elizabeth O'Day, CEO and Founder of Olaris, MiMi Yen, CEO and Founder of Phage Pro, and Virginia Burger, CEO and Co-Founder of New Equilibrium Biosciences.
It is essential that our life sciences ecosystem values and embraces a diverse workforce. It is not only about equal representation, it is about the strong business case, the bottom line, and ensuring the next big breakthroughs to save lives and improve patient outcomes. That’s why here in Massachusetts, we know that the strongest life sciences sector is a diverse one.
In November 2020, the MLSC provided a $50,000 grant to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to underwrite the Massachusetts Life Sciences Virtual Summit for students from Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) to learn about life sciences academic and career pathways available in Massachusetts. During the two-day summit, the MLSC announced an expansion of its Internship Challenge to include students from HBCUs.
In January 2021, the MLSC partnered with UNCF on the Ernest E. Just Initiative, which will create internship opportunities in the Boston-area for a cohort of students enrolled in HBCUs. Beyond a paid internship opportunity, the program will match each student with a professional mentor and ensure students receive guidance, training, and a welcoming community of peers and leaders. Above all, students will gain valuable experience and a network of professionals to pave a path for a fulfilling career in the life sciences.
Massachusetts will welcome the first cohort of 25 to 30 students, with five being funded through the MLSC’s Internship Challenge, for a 10-week internship during the summer of 2022. Partners across the industry, including Thermo Fisher, Vertex, Boston Children’s Hospital, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Cerevel Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics, LabCentral, and more have jumped on board, eager to foster a more inclusive and diverse ecosystem.
Life sciences is an ever-evolving industry that continues to push the landscape in how we treat diseases, develop new modalities, and redefine the careers created within this ecosystem. One such career path, data science, has emerged as one of the fastest growing industries. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects there will be an increase of nearly 28 percent in employment through 2026, resulting in more than 50,000 new data science jobs.
Beyond the demand, the scope of work these scientists conduct is nothing short of critical in the fight to improve patient care. This includes Hieu (Hugh) Nguyen, a Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins. He is working as a Data Science intern at Perthera through a placement via the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center’s (MLSC) Data Science Internship Program. The MLSC program aims to increase the availability of data science talent in the life sciences by providing opportunities that introduce interns to real-world advanced data analytics and data science applications.
At Perthera, a leading oncology bioinformatics company located in Holliston, Hugh is part of a team that aims to help physicians make better treatment plan decisions for cancer patients, using the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and data. Through Perthera’s innovative Precision Oncology Platform, their technology and team analyze a patient’s medical and treatment history, along with their multi-omic molecular data, to generate precisely ranked personalized treatment options, best suited for the patient’s specific cancer. Through numerous publications, their platform has been clinically proven to improve patient outcomes.
"As part of the computational biology team, I work to enhance the algorithms and optimize the reports, including an opportunity to develop an innovative feature within the Perthera Report,” said Hugh. “I can apply what I learned and researched in school to real-world evidence (RWE) and provide actual impact and support to patients.”
The Perthera Precision Oncology Platform, which includes Hugh’s work, compiles comprehensive patient information, coupled with an extensive review from scientific and medical experts from across the country on their cloud-based Molecular Tumor Board. The culmination is a comprehensive, individualized patient report that precisely ranks on and off label therapies and clinical trials, helping to advance the physician’s decision making. From there, Perthera tracks the patient’s end-to-end journey, capturing outcomes, and delivering that data back to physicians, for use in their clinical assessments and research, while enhancing Perthera’s AI technology to benefit patients worldwide.
“Our company is built on this computational engine, which features AI, machine learning, and over 50,000 heuristic rules and algorithms,” said Gary Gregory, who serves as CEO of Perthera. “Hugh’s function and focus was in that RWE analysis. The results of his work helped to considerably advance our AI efforts and capabilities. We were elated by his contributions, which far exceeded our expectations for an internship.”
The MLSC piloted the Data Science Internship Program in 2020 as an expansion of its Internship Challenge, which has sponsored internships for thousands of college students since 2009. These programs, as well as a high school internship program, embody the Center’s belief in the power of experiential learning to cultivate a workforce pipeline. The program was designed to respond to the rapidly increasing demand for data science talent by expanding the pool of prospective employees who have practical experience and enabling individuals with data science skills to explore life sciences careers in Massachusetts.
“The MLSC and its internship program are instrumental in bringing the ecosystem forward, and that is one of the many reasons Massachusetts is cutting-edge for companies like ours,” said Gary. “The opportunity to expand this program to include someone like Hugh, with his advanced level of knowledge, experience, and educational insights has been phenomenal. I commend the MLSC for making this move. From my vantage, it allows us to readily embrace strong talent, and it has served our company exceptionally well.”
The role of data sciences in life science innovation has evolved rapidly and has the potential to catalyze discoveries at unprecedented rates. Investment in generating well-annotated datasets and training data scientists for life science research is required to sustain Massachusetts’s global leadership position in life science research and development. The MLSC launched its Bits to Bytes program in 2018 to provide grants for scientific projects that generate and analyze large datasets to answer pressing life sciences questions, and to attract and train data scientists in the Commonwealth. This past year, the Center awarded nearly $4.5 million across six projects through Bits to Bytes.
Funding from the Bits to Bytes program has been able to support various projects including one focused on imaging limitations in hemorrhagic stroke treatment, an area Dr. Matthew J. Gounis, who serves as Professor at the UMass Medical School Department of Radiology and is the Director of New England Center for Stroke Research, has more than 20 years of experience in. Dr. Gounis is collaborating with Sudbury, Massachusetts-based Gentuity, LLC to create a large imaging database and develop artificial intelligence (AI) processing methodologies, which they believe will catalyze new discoveries to improve the current understanding and treatment of brain aneurysms. Their work received a $750,000 grant through the Bits to Bytes program in 2019.
“One of the fundamental problems with brain aneurism treatment is we have wonderful technologies being developed, but these device innovations are being hampered by limitations in imaging,” said Dr. Gounis. “If we can accelerate the availability of high-resolution imaging to achieve fuller detail, we can do a better job in efficacy of the treatment and generate better outcomes for patients.”
There is a critical unmet need for high-resolution imaging that is specific to neuro-endovascular treatments. Despite decades of investment in research on brain aneurysms, many questions remain unanswered due, in part, to limitations in blood vessel imaging. The funding provided by the MLSC is contributing to the generation of a large collection of high-resolution neuro-endovascular images. The Bits to Bytes project team also believes the funding of this project will foster ‘big data’ science expertise in Massachusetts, with a focus on life science, imaging technologies and computational medicine and biology.
“There’s been an explosion of important work and research at the cross section of medicine, in particular medical imaging, and data science,” said Dr. Gounis. “I admire what the state is doing to draw more data science talent to the life sciences. Massachusetts has a unique opportunity to take a leadership position in the analysis and application of high-resolution imaging of brain aneurysms, creating new jobs and related expertise in this emerging field.”
Bits to Bytes project teams are comprised of not-for-profit applicants collaborating with at least one for-profit Massachusetts life science company. Dr. Gounis is proud of the translational focus of his lab along with its very active engagement with the industry sector. Collaborating with industry is “absolutely essential” for Dr. Gounis in order to achieve a collective goal of improving patient health.
“We are grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this data-driven, collaborative effort,” said Giovanni J. Ughi, PhD, Director of Advanced Development at Gentuity. “The MLSC’s support will enable us to further realize the great potential our products hold for clinical and societal contribution as well as business success, in accelerating critical discoveries in the endovascular treatment of brain aneurysms, improving patient care and decreasing life threatening complications.”
The MLSC Novel Therapeutics Delivery program fosters the development of novel technologies and techniques for the delivery of existing or innovative therapies by partnering on projects at the intersection of engineering, biology, chemistry, and medicine. Innovative new therapies are dependent on advancements in drug delivery.
However, the availability of such therapies is not accelerating at the rate with which technology is advancing. The program aims to capitalize and incentivize translational projects to address complex challenges in “therapeutic” delivery. Three projects are receiving funding this program year, totaling more than $2 million.
Tufts University School of Engineering Professor and Director of the Nano Lab Sameer Sonkusale received funds through the MLSC’s Novel Therapeutics Delivery program for his work on microneedles, which have the potential to lower the cost and the pain of injections.
The unique design and formulation of the microneedles for drug delivery needs state-of-the-art equipment, which MLSC funds
will support. The equipment will aid in understanding what the body does to the drug and what the drug does to the body.
“The capital equipment will kickstart research and development efforts in innovative drug delivery platforms and support the innovation ecosystems within Tufts and in the state of Massachusetts,” said Professor Sonkusale, who is working with industry partner Anodyne Nanotech on development of the microneedles.
Funding from the Novel Therapeutics Delivery inaugural program year is helping Wyss Institute researchers identify novel transport targets and shuttle compounds to enable more effective delivery of drugs to the brain. Wyss Institute is one of many types of projects the Novel Therapeutics Delivery program is intended to fund and the important fields the work touches. Delivering therapies to the brain is a notoriously difficult process and an incredibly important problem to solve.
The evidence is clear—novel solutions to treat conditions that solely or disproportionately affect women remain lacking and beyond this, gender biology can affect disease presentation. Not understanding and studying these nuances impacts not only patients, but also employers and the healthcare system.
From high blood pressure, to depression, to autoimmune conditions, women are suffering at higher rates from many illnesses and diseases. Furthermore, women have been historically excluded from clinical trials hampering our understanding of any sex-based variation in side effects, while also only further driving general underrepresentation and lack of focus on women’s health.
More than 80 percent of drugs that have been pulled from the market over safety concerns are due to adverse effects specifically in women. It is no surprise then that women are 50-75 percent more likely than men to have an adverse drug reaction across all therapeutic indications. While some progress has been made, from female participation in clinical trials increasing to women’s health in general being better defined, more work remains.
The MLSC aims to support and incentivize translational project teams who are developing novel solutions in this area of need. The Center launched its Women’s Health initiative in 2020, to turn the tide against the severe lack of organized capital and incentives around a coordinated Women’s Health approach.
This past June, the MLSC was a sponsor of 2021 National Summit on the Health of Women, organized by the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. The Summit convened an engaged multi-stakeholder group of experts across the bioscience ecosystem to share and celebrate recent advancements for the health of women. It promoted impactful discussions on gender equity in medicine to further advance the health of women through innovative translational research.
The MLSC was proud to collaborate with the Connor’s Center for the Summit to showcase the work being done in women’s health in Massachusetts and show the opportunity that exists for women’s health in the Commonwealth. This collaboration also included a $50,000 grant through the First Look Awards to support research performed by faculty and at a Massachusetts not-for-profit research institution that are seeking to research and understand women’s health conditions.
Dr. Sallie Schneider, Director of the Biospecimen Resource and Molecular Analysis Facility at Baystate Medical Center, received the First Look Award funding to support proof of concept work for technology being developed to identify individuals at risk of developing breast cancer and which treatment options will be most effective for individual patients.
The MLSC administers three programs to bolster women’s health. This past fiscal year, these programs awarded $5.3 million to 15 projects.
The Women’s Health program supports collaborative projects that aim to improve the discovery, technical innovation, and/or analysis of datasets to answer pressing life science questions around women’s health.
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The Women’s Health Innovation Grants target innovations that have translational potential, preliminary supporting data, but still require a key set of proof of concept experiments prior to attracting a commercial partner or spinning out into a new company.
The First Look Awards to support early translational research at Massachusetts research institutions that furthers our understanding of sex and gender differences especially for diseases or conditions that affect women exclusively, predominately, or differentially.
In addition to the First Look Award, Dr. Sallie Schneider, hosted three MLSC-sponsored interns, each from a Springfield high school that benefited from MLSC’s STEM Equipment and Professional Development Program, at Baystate’s Pioneer Valley Life Sciences institute (PVLSI). Their internship program, facilitated by the Baystate Springfield Educational Partnership, guided students through the process of answering an assigned research question related to Dr. Schneider’s work on breast cancer. The students learn the various skills and lab processes needed to test the research question. Interns are from the Springfield Renaissance School, Springfield Central High School, and Springfield High School of Science and Technology.
In 2019, Springfield Public Schools partnered with Dr. Schneider to incorporate her research into the district’s 9th grade biology curriculum. The MLSC awarded the school district a $317,000 grant, which included funding for post-docs and graduate students at the Schneider Lab for their time working with teachers. Springfield students participated in analysis of tissues to ask whether breast cells metastasize to the lungs more often or grow larger and whether the population of cells or stroma change following exposure to chemicals. One classroom set of microscopes with digital cameras was provided to each high school that allowed students to observe and analyze the sections stained in the Schneider lab back in their classrooms.
UMass Chan Medical School received $2.8 million from the MLSC for the purchase of an advanced Glacios cryo-electron microscope from Thermo Fisher Scientific. Since its establishment in 2015, the UMass Cryo-EM Core has supported data collection for approximately 30 companies and 100 academic labs, 85 percent of which are from Massachusetts.
Roger J. Davis, PhD, the H. Arthur Smith Chair in Cancer Research and chair and professor of molecular medicine is the principal investigator on the MLSC grant, with support from Celia Schiffer, PhD, the Gladys Smith Martin Chair in Oncology, professor of biochemistry & molecular pharmacology, and director of the Institute for Drug Resistance, and Andrei Korostelev, PhD, professor of RNA therapeutics at UMass Chan. The Cryo-EM Core is being run under the direction of physicist and materials scientist Chen Xu, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular biology, who is internationally recognized for his cryo-EM expertise.
Structural biology is the foundation of a significant portion of biomedical research, opening windows into biology and structure-based drug design. The Cryo-EM Core at
UMass Chan was established in 2015, in part with $5 million in funding from the MLSC, as well as $4 million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The addition of the state-of-the-art Thermo Fisher Scientific Glacios cryo-electron microscope with Falcon 4 detector and the newly developed Selectris filter will allow the facility to meet growing demand and transform biomedical research in Massachusetts.
The funding to the medical school was awarded through the MLSC’s Research Infrastructure program. Additional awardees this past fiscal year included Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Inc, Museum of Science, and the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University.
