Artzi will work closely with the Wyss Founding Director Don Ingber and the Wyss executive and senior leadership teams in shaping the strategic direction of the Institute
By Alexandra Jirstrand
(BOSTON) – The Wyss Institute at Harvard University, its Board of Directors, and Executive Leadership are pleased to announce that Natalie Artzi, Ph.D., has been appointed to a newly created position as Associate Institute Director of the Wyss Institute.
In her new role, Artzi will work closely with the Wyss Founding Director Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., and the Wyss executive and senior leadership teams in shaping the strategic direction of the Institute and advancing its multifaceted research and translation efforts. She will be responsible for taking a leadership role in community building, crafting new research and development areas, cultivating partnerships with industry and philanthropic organizations, and facilitating multi-investigator efforts to secure large-scale research grants. Artzi was appointed as an Associate Faculty member at the Wyss Institute in May 2022 and then promoted to a Core Faculty member in August 2024. This month she was also appointed as the Hansjörg Wyss Associate Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute. Artzi’s promotions reflect her impressive scientific contributions, her exceptional commitment to the Institute’s mission, and the deep engagement and collaborations she has initiated within its technology development community.
“We are thrilled to welcome Natalie Artzi into this new leadership role at the Wyss Institute. Her appointment as Associate Institute Director is a testament to her remarkable dedication to our mission and her ability to catalyze innovation through collaboration. Her vision, passion for science, and deep engagement with our community position her to have a profound impact on shaping the future of the Institute. I’m excited to collaborate with Natalie to build on the Wyss’ legacy of innovation and further extend the reach of the transformational technologies we create to improve the lives of patients globally and the life of our planet,” said Ingber, who is the Founding Director of the Wyss Institute as well as the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital and the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
[Natalie Artzi’s] appointment as Associate Institute Director is a testament to her remarkable dedication to our mission and her ability to catalyze innovation through collaboration. Her vision, passion for science, and deep engagement with our community position her to have a profound impact on shaping the future of the Institute.
“It’s an incredible honor to step into this new role at the Wyss Institute, an environment where collaboration and innovation thrive,” said Artzi. “Since joining the Institute, I have been incredibly inspired by the passion and ingenuity of its community and the remarkable scale of innovation they have achieved since the Institute’s founding. I look forward to deepening our strategic partnerships, fostering new areas of research and development, as well as collaborating with Don Ingber, the leadership team, and the entire Wyss community to advance technologies that improve human health on a global scale.”
Artzi leads a world-class research program centered on the development of tissue- and cell-responsive nanostructures that aim to transform disease tracking and treatment, including some of the most aggressive cancers. Her work advances targeted drug delivery and immune engagement to combat cancer, infectious and brain diseases, as well as autoimmune disorders. A pioneer of structural nanomedicines—engineered constructs that organize therapeutic components into well-defined deliverable architectures—her lab designs precisely engineered therapeutic constructs to enhance targeting, efficacy, and safety. Innovations from her group include polymeric and lipid structural nanomedicines for gene and immune therapy, sustained-release systems, microneedle patches for transdermal delivery and diagnosis, and tissue-responsive adhesive hydrogels for surgical use.
Since 2024, Artzi has been the lead investigator on a project funded by ARPA-H that advances a novel Duplex RNA therapeutic developed by Ingber’s group in combination with her lab’s innovative drug delivery systems to broadly boost anti-tumor and -pathogen immunity in a range of patient settings. In addition to Artzi’s drug delivery expertise, the project also leverages the DNA nanotechnology expertise of Wyss Core Faculty member William Shih, Ph.D., as well as the breakthrough RNA synthesis capabilities of the Wyss startup EnPlusOne. She is also collaborating with Wyss Senior Director of Translational R&D, James Gorman, M.D., Ph.D., to engineer a nanoparticle-based drug carrier approach to be used in combination with the Wyss Brain Targeting Program’s newly discovered brain shuttles to facilitate drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier to treat brain diseases. Artzi’s group also has been working with teams of Wyss Core Faculty members David Walt, Ph.D., and James Collins, Ph.D., to develop microneedle-enabled ultra-senstive diagnostic methods to detect Lyme disease infections in skin.
In Artzi’s new role as Wyss Institute Associate Director, she will help other faculty members and staff initiate new multi-investigator collaborations and obtain funding to build their efforts. She has already jumped into the fray and has been working with the Institute’s Strategic Engagement team to support fundraising activities across the Institute. She also initiated and manages a faculty research seminar series featuring Wyss faculty and external researchers as speakers, which has helped to bind the community more closely together.