To tackle major diagnostic challenges, the platform will deeply integrate with faculty and technological strengths across the Institute to develop disruptive diagnostic capabilities
By Benjamin Boettner
(BOSTON) — To address the diagnostic challenges of our times and prepare for the future of healthcare, the Wyss Institute is launching its “Diagnostics for Human and Planetary Health” platform. Patients with a plethora of diseases could be treated more effectively now, if they had access to sensitive diagnostic tests. In addition, many diseases cannot be diagnosed early and accurately yet, which hinders the development of therapeutic solutions. Similarly, our planet’s ecological environments, which are deeply interconnected with human health, are in dire need of sustainable solutions that can prevent the decline of wildlife populations and natural habitats and mitigate emerging environmental hazards to human health. Being able to detect those changes and threats with new diagnostic capabilities will open up new opportunities to prevent or respond to them.
At the helm of Diagnostics for Human and Planetary Health is Wyss Core Faculty member David Walt, Ph.D. who explains his motivations to innovate in the field of diagnostics, his vision for the new Wyss platform, and what makes the Wyss an exceptionally fertile ecosystem for both. Walt also established the Wyss Diagnostics Accelerator (DxA) at the Wyss Institute, which we continue to operate as part of this platform, and he is also the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard Medical School (HMS), Professor of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor.
What motivated you as a technology-minded scientist to want to have a deeper and more direct impact on the area of medical diagnostics?
David Walt: I always wanted my inventions to be translated from the laboratory into the real world, but what was truly transformative for me was to see their power to affect so many people. Let me give you an example of a story that deeply influenced my thinking. I heard from a couple with a woman who was predisposed to a genetic disorder that posed a major problem for them having a family. Excluding the relevant mutation in fertilized eggs during an IVF procedure, using preimplantation diagnostics that were based on our genetic analysis technology, allowed them to have a healthy baby and thus really changed the heritage of that family. Also, different accounts from patients suffering from cancer and neurodegenerative disorders that could be better treated and cared for because their disease was caught with the help of our technological achievements helped shape my resolve to bring more diagnostic innovations to where they are needed.
Many of your technology inventions had early diagnostic potential. What did you experience with their translation into products by companies you founded and how does that affect your belief that a shift in diagnostic technology development is long overdue?
Walt: Typically, technologies get launched first and are used in research labs. After some time, people figure out what they are good for. That was the path Illumina took — its products were used for many research projects before it developed into a diagnostics company. Ten years ago, the portion of its revenue coming from diagnostics was probably in the single digits, whereas now it above 50%. From when the foundational technology had been developed in my lab, it took another 15 years until it had its first clinical impact – in the case of Illumina, that was non-invasive prenatal testing and, shortly after that, the detection of cancer genes in blood. Our single-molecule technology commercialized by Quanterix suffered from a similarly long timeline: the first clinical application, testing for a biomarker of Alzheimer’s Disease, was approved only after about 15 years. Plainly put, this means that crucial time is lost for many, many patients.
Where does the Wyss Diagnostic Accelerator (Wyss DxA) that you helped bring to life stand in this context and in relation to the newly formed Diagnostics for Human and Planetary Health platform?
Walt: With the Wyss DxA, we are flipping the trajectory from technology invention to concrete diagnostics applications on its head by starting with a clinical indication and trying to match it with a technology that can address that exact unmet need. Practically, the DxA pairs a clinician with unmet diagnostic needs with an expert technology development team that works toward solving that very need through close collaboration along a much-compressed timeline. Our regularly held Diagnostics Grand Rounds have proven to be very valuable for initiating those interactions and forging those collaborations. The DxA, successfully steered by Rushdy Ahmad, will continue to operate as it has. This said, I think the DxA will benefit from our broader platform approach that leverages the power of technologies emerging across the Wyss Institute because, as new technologies with diagnostic potential become available, there will be more of them that can address specific clinical needs. Likewise, the DxA’s clinical network will keep the platform on alert for additional needs. It’s a win-win situation.
How do you envision the new Diagnostics for Human and Planetary Health platform could move the field of diagnostics forward on a broad technological front?
Walt: The platform is close to the Wyss’ founding principles, which is to use bioengineering to solve grand challenges; with this platform, we will pursue technologies for next-generation diagnostics. I envision the platform to be agnostic with respect to specific applications and to be as important for sensing signals in our environment as it is in our bodies. We plan to bring together all the incredible technologies that are being developed at the Institute to purposefully create overarching technology platforms that can be readily and flexibly leveraged to address multiple clinical or environmental problems and contribute to all Grand Challenges that the Institute is focusing on.
An integrated diagnostics platform has the potential to create a confluence of new insights into human and environmental health by leveraging advanced techniques from our biomarker discovery, DNA nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology, biosensor, and microsystems engineering teams and others, as well as harnessing our big data and AI capabilities. The faculty and researchers in other platforms can also help us figure out where major technological challenges for developing powerful future diagnostics lie. I believe the Wyss is uniquely positioned to significantly push the envelope of diagnostics, not only because it is a technological powerhouse but also because it has created a dense and effective environment within a highly entrepreneurial ecosystem to translate those technologies into the real world.
Just as with human patients, our planet is also in dire need of better diagnostics. Ecological diagnostics is a rapidly developing research area assessing the health of ecosystems and identifying existing or emerging problems. What enables the Wyss Institute to tackle some of these pressing challenges?
Walt: Compared to clinical diagnostics, the use of sophisticated and highly sensitive technologies in detecting ecological problems is less developed. In the “One Health” approach, the health of humans, animals, plants and the wider environment are closely linked and interdependent; so also is finding ways to assess these interdependencies and diagnose imbalances, which will be vital for creating a more sustainable future. The Wyss’ strengths across our Synthetic Biology, Molecular Robotics, Biomarker Discovery, molecular sensor and other platforms, paired with our computational capabilities, gives us a unique edge to develop ecological diagnostics solutions and understand these broader networks. Technically speaking, we can access all types of human samples — blood, urine, saliva — to analyze their contents to report a diagnostic result. We should be able to use very similar approaches to analyze sea and fresh water, air, soil or other samples. In the future, diagnostic technologies developed under this platform could be used to investigate both human brain chemistry and migrating fish populations. I see significant opportunities for this new platform to work together with the Wyss’ Sustainable Futures Grand Challenge area led by Pamela Silver to identify and tackle some of these high-value problems and to aim for impact on the world we live in.
In developing the Diagnostics for Human and Planetary Health platform at the Wyss Institute, Walt will be closely working with Thomas Schaus, M.D., Ph.D., a member of the Institute’s Advanced Technology Team, and Gretchen Fougere, Ph.D., the Wyss’ Senior Director Business Development-Commercialization. Schaus is an experienced researcher and entrepreneur with clinical insights. He led a number of DNA-nanotechnology-driven projects as a former Senior Scientist in the group of Wyss Core Faculty member Peng Yin, Ph.D., and then the Staff Lead at the Wyss’ Molecular Robotics Initiative. In 2022, he became a Scientific Co-Founder and the Head of Research at the Wyss-launched 3EO Health, a diagnostics company that earned the first FDA authorization for a low-cost, over-the-counter (OTC) molecular diagnostic. Inspired by the new diagnostic platform’s vision and potential, he recently rejoined the Wyss Institute to help develop and commercialize expanded, high-quality testing. Fougere will be the Business Development lead of the new platform to which she brings decades of success leading strategy and program development, advanced R&D, and large-scale funding and commercialization in academia and industry. She has led teams in advanced product development and innovation in several commercial sectors and currently focuses on the translation of cutting-edge technologies into new healthcare products, such as medical devices and diagnostics.