A Year in Review: 2024

Highlights from the Wyss’ fifteenth year

By Jessica Leff

In 2024, the Wyss community turned our new “house” at 201 Brookline Avenue into a “home,” filling the space with fun memories, innovative technologies, and our dedication to making a positive impact. We celebrated many milestones, from the completion of the inaugural Wyss Mentorship cohort to the first successful organ transplant from a pig donor, where the modified kidney was prepared by Wyss startup eGenesis. Through it all, we’ve remained committed to solving seemingly “impossible” challenges in healthcare and sustainability. Join us as we recap some of the highlights of 2024.

Commercialization successes

Fifteen years after our founding, the Wyss has not wavered in our belief that breakthrough discoveries can’t change the world if they don’t leave the lab. Our distinct technology translation model harnesses the creative freedom of academia to generate a pipeline of new ideas and potential breakthrough technologies that we de-risk to the point where they’re ready to be commercialized by existing companies or Wyss-enabled startups.

Six Wyss-developed technologies were licensed through Harvard’s Office of Technology Development this year. Wyss startups, including Ropirio Therapeutics, which is developing lymphatic medicines, and Breaking, which is genetically modifying microbes to break down plastic, made splashes with their launch announcements.

Our technology development pipeline remained alive and well, with fifteen new Validation Projects announced earlier this year. These teams receive dedicated funding, business development support, and other resources to advance their technologies toward commercialization. The projects address a wide variety of critical problems, from sensing “forever chemical” contamination to diagnosing COPD to treating skin diseases.

Confronting Grand Challenges

At the Wyss, we approach problems differently, through deep collaborations across disciplines which leads to novel ideas that turn into disruptive innovations. After fifteen years, we have a proven track record of success, and we’re poised to address Grand Challenges in the areas of Sustainable Futures, Infectious Disease Control, Women’s Health Innovation, Cancer Solutions, Brain Health, and Healthy Aging.

We hosted multiple events to foster collaboration and build community with individuals and organizations that are similarly committed to addressing these challenges. In March, we co-hosted an event with Collaborative Fund that featured a keynote from Nike’s former Chief Sustainability Officer and opportunities to enjoy sustainable alternative meats from Wyss startup Tender Food. In June, the Wyss Diagnostics Accelerator held an Infectious Disease Symposium focused on pandemic preparedness, global health, antimicrobial resistance, and effective diagnostics for under-resourced countries.  In September, our Women’s Health Symposium brought together like-minded investors, clinicians, advocates, researchers, and philanthropists working to close the gender health gap.

Ambitious projects are bringing together Wyss members from different faculty labs and areas of expertise to tackle these challenges. With support from ARPA-H, a multidisciplinary team led by Wyss Faculty (Natalie Artzi, Donald Ingber, and William Shih) and staff (Kenneth Carlson) aims to advance a novel RNA immunotherapy platform that could be used to treat patients with various types of cancer. Our efforts in Brain Health span from collaborating with industry to find “brain shuttles” to get drugs across the blood-brain barrier to assembling a team comprising members of three faculty labs to discover better drug candidates to treat bipolar disorder. Ichor, which is making old cells young again, became an Institute Project, and three aging-related projects led by three different faculty members received Validation Project funding.

Most-read stories

In 2024, we published over 65 stories detailing our researchers’ groundbreaking scientific achievements. Wyss community members authored over 151 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including three in Science and five in Nature. Our most-read news stories included the following:

Top media coverage

Several major news outlets covered Wyss work in 2024.

Wyss researchers in collaboration with Kraft Heinz engineered an enzyme that can convert sugar to fiber in the gut. This technology captured the attention of The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Drug Discovery News.

In September, Wyss Postdoctoral Fellow Elizabeth Hann was quoted in a story in The Scientist examining how single-celled organisms could aid in sustainability efforts. At the end of October, an international coalition of researchers, including Hann and other Wyss scientists, published a paper about their newly-discovered strain of cyanobacteria that grows rapidly in the presence of CO₂ and sinks in water, making it a candidate for carbon sequestration projects and bioproduction. This work was covered by Popular Mechanics and Technology Networks.

Multiple Institute Projects, which are considerably de-risked and ripe for commercialization, were featured in the news. The Boston Business Journal covered Ichor and 3DPrint.com covered ReConstruct.

Community highlights

Our team of passionate, courageous innovators are at the heart of everything we accomplish. So, no year in review could be complete without highlighting our community.