About Us

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The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University seeks to transform engineering, medicine and the environment by creating new materials and devices using Nature’s design principles. Developed as an alliance between Harvard and other premier academic and clinical partner institutions, Institute faculty and staff collaborate in high-risk, fundamental research and science-driven technology development. A major focus of the Institute is to translate the technologies developed by its faculty and staff into commercial products and therapies through collaborations with clinical investigators and establishment of corporate alliances.

Mission

The Wyss Institute aims to discover the engineering principles that Nature uses to build living things, and harnesses these insights to create biologically inspired materials and devices that will revolutionize healthcare and create a more sustainable world. In medicine, the Institute is developing innovative materials, devices, and disease reprogramming technologies that emulate how living tissues and organs self-organize, and naturally regulate themselves. Understanding of how living systems build, recycle, and control is also guiding efforts focused on development of entirely new approaches for constructing buildings, converting energy, controlling manufacturing, and improving our environment.

History

The Wyss Institute was seeded in 2005, when the Provost of Harvard University challenged its faculty to envision the future of Bioengineering across the entire university. Typically, bioengineers apply engineering principles to solve medical problems. But we are now beginning to understand enough about how Nature builds, controls and manufactures so that entirely new engineering principles will be discovered. These new engineering strategies will transform medicine as well as non-medical areas never before touched by the biology revolution. Recognizing that we are at a tipping point in the history of science and engineering, the faculty proposed that Harvard form a research Institute focused on discovering Nature's design principles, and on applying these insights to engineer bioinspired materials and devices.

A subset of faculty who had pioneered interdisciplinary collaborations across the Harvard community and with other universities in the Boston/Cambridge region, came together to catalyze the birth of this new institute. Seed funding was provided by the university to form the Harvard Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in January 2008, which resulted in new cross-university collaborations in areas ranging from self-assembling scaffolds for tissue regeneration to programmable robot swarms that build structures and devices autonomously.

In January 2009, Harvard received the largest philanthropic gift in its history - $125 million - from Hansjörg Wyss to make this vision a reality by launching the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Since the gift, faculty from engineering, medicine, biology and the physical sciences have begun to work together in entirely new ways. Unlike many bioengineering efforts, they are not looking to make incremental near-term improvements in biomedical technologies. They have been challenged to carry out high-risk research that will lead to transformative change.

The novelty of the Institute resides in its ability to break down disciplinary barriers by bringing together world-leading researchers, theoreticians and technical staff with clinicians and industrial collaborators, creating an environment that facilitates synergy among these investigators. The Institute supports cross-cutting fundamental research that will produce completely unpredictable breakthroughs and lead to development of enabling technologies in the field of bioinspired engineering and their translation into useful products. These technologies will transform human healthcare as well as industry, manufacturing, and the environment.

If you would like to learn more, please contact us.