Artzi’s promotion and Feng’s appointment strengthen the Institute’s efforts in nanomedicine and immunoengineering, as well as modeling of chronic kidney diseases
By Benjamin Boettner
(BOSTON) — Natalie Artzi, Ph.D., joined the ranks of the Wyss Institute’s now 12 Core Faculty members after only two years as an Associate Faculty member. Artzi’s promotion reflects her exceptional commitment to the Institute’s mission and the deep engagements and collaborations she has initiated within its technology development community. The Wyss Institute also warmly welcomes Di Feng, Ph.D., to join its Associate Faculty. Feng is investigating the onset and pathogenesis of chronic kidney disease and hypertension, both prevalent diseases that affect millions of Americans, with a focus on therapeutics development.
Natalie Artzi, Ph.D.
As an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Principal Research Scientist at MIT, Artzi created a highly successful program in tissue- and cell-responsive materials with innovative applications in general and personalized medicine, across a range of unmet medical needs. She also helped found the emerging field of structural nanomedicine and designed nanostructures with controlled architectures for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes. These achievements have rapidly become both instrumental and inspiring for the Wyss Institute’s pursuit of solutions for big problems in health care. In addition, Artzi has recently been appointed Head of Structural Nanomedicine at Mass General Brigham’s Gene and Cell Therapy Institute, which will help catalyze new collaborations between Wyss Institute researchers and hospital clinicians and clinical researchers. Artzi also co-founded BioDevek and Lybra Bio — two startup companies that translate her breakthroughs into next-generation surgical solutions and disease treatments.
“United by the passion for groundbreaking translational research and a shared vision, the Wyss provides unparalleled infrastructure, collaborative synergy, and unwavering support, empowering us to revolutionize treatments for the most challenging diseases,” said Artzi.
During her training at MIT, Artzi demonstrated that the performance of materials in the human body is highly contextual and affected by inflammation and disease. This led her to develop tissue-responsive adhesive materials that sense and respond to chemical and biological cues on tissue surfaces to maximize their performance in different diseases. Later, with her group at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, she expanded this new concept to the development of other biomaterials that exhibit new functionalilties at the macroscale, and then also to the creation of nanostructures that function at the scale of molecules and scales for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes. The exploration of these smart biomaterials in vitro and in vivo significantly improved the understanding of how biomaterials interact with the immune system, creating important guidelines for designing future therapeutics and diagnostics.
Natalie Artzi’s promotion to the Wyss Institute’s Core Faculty is a testament to her drive and passion for collaboration and interdisciplinary translation-focused research and technology development that is at the core of the Wyss Institute.
Leading a high-profile Wyss collaboration, Artzi is the principal investigator of a recently awarded multi-million dollar agreement by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which is the first such agreement between the agency and Harvard University. The project, which is co-led by Wyss Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., is advancing a novel RNA immunotherapeutic in combination with innovative delivery systems to broadly boost anti-tumor and anti-pathogen immunity in a range of patient settings. In one of her other Wyss projects and one of 13 currently funded Wyss Validation Projects, Artzi, together with Ingber and Wyss Senior Director of R&D James Gorman, M.D., Ph.D., is investigating new routes for effectively delivering drug-loaded nanoparticles across the blood-brain barrier by linking them to newly discovered “brain shuttles” emerging from the Wyss’ Brain Targeting Program.
Artzi has received many honors and awards including the 2024 Acta Biomaterialia Silver Medal, 2024 Clemson Award for Applied Research, and a mid-career award from the Society for Biomaterials. She was the inaugural recipient of the Kabiller Rising Star Award in Nanomedicine and is a Fellow of both the American Institute for Medical Engineering (AIMBE) and the Controlled Release Society, reflecting her contributions to those fields.
“Natalie Artzi’s promotion to the Wyss Institute’s Core Faculty is a testament to her drive and passion for collaboration and interdisciplinary translation-focused research and technology development that is at the core of the Wyss Institute. Her addition to our community allows us to expand our efforts in drug delivery and take on the big challenges that stand in the way of better healthcare for all individuals,” said Ingber.
Di Feng, Ph.D.
Feng is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and HMS. Taking a highly multi-disciplinary approach that integrates genetics, cellular, molecular, and biomechanical analysis, Organ Chip technology, and animal models, she is identifying key mechanisms leading to chronic kidney disease (CKD) and hypertension. Her research interests strongly synergize with the Wyss Institute’s core mission of technology development and therapeutic discovery.
Feng studies how certain genetic mutations cause CKD by harming podocytes, the cells that form the barrier of the filtering units of the kidney. She discovered that mutations to the cytoskeleton can render podocytes brittle in the face of the mechanical stresses they experience in the kidney. Feng showed that similar impairments of the cytoskeleton arise from high glucose levels, such as in diabetes. She is investigating cytoskeletal impairment as a common mechanism shared by rare familial kidney diseases and diabetic nephropathy, the most prevalent form of CKD. In addition, Feng is seeking to understand how defects in the cytoskeleton alter salt reabsorption in the kidney. Salt sensitivity, characterized by abnormal salt reabsorption, is estimated to occur in more than 50% of hypertensive individuals, and is associated with substantial decline in health, as well as increased mortality and healthcare costs. For her innovative CKD and hypertension research, Feng was named a STAT Wunderkind in 2019.
Feng was originally drawn to the Wyss Institute five years ago as a Visiting Scientist to integrate Organ Chip technology into her work on CKD, with Ingber as one of her mentors on an NIH Career Development Award. In addition to further advancing human Organ Chip models to elucidate the genetic and acquired conditions leading to CKD, she is leveraging the Institute’s computational drug development program with a focus on developing new drugs that can protect patients with CKD against podocyte dysfunction and glomerular filtration damage. In these efforts, Feng is supported by grants from the Department of Defense.
With Di Feng, we gain an extraordinary expert in the chronic diseases of the kidney and vascular system who complements our existing strengths to enable much needed new solutions for these devastating diseases with their dangerous consequences.
“Through my collaboration with the Wyss Institute, we are opening new horizons in understanding how mechanical stresses interact with cellular defects to mediate the onset and progression of CKD,” said Feng.
At BIDMC, one of the Wyss Institute’s consortium partners, Feng is also the Director of a new Super-Resolution and Multiphoton Imaging Center, established with generous support from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. This imaging center fills important technological gaps in the integration of real-time, super-resolution, and in vivo imaging for the analysis of biological processes in multiple organ systems. These unique capabilities will help Wyss research teams to investigate and validate new therapeutic and diagnostic technologies.
“With Di Feng, we gain an extraordinary expert in the chronic diseases of the kidney and vascular system who complements our existing strengths to enable much-needed new solutions for these devastating diseases with their dangerous consequences,” said Ingber, who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at HMS 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.