Award enables unprecedented instrument capabilities at the Institute, facilitating collaborative research across many areas of human and environmental health
By Benjamin Boettner
(BOSTON) — The Wyss Institute at Harvard University has received an award from the Massachusetts Life Science Center (MLSC), enabling it to host a next-generation metabolomics and lipidomics analytical platform. The platform will allow its researchers to creatively pursue new approaches to biomarker and drug discovery across multiple health challenges the Institute is focusing on, as well as advance environmental solutions.
Having chosen the Wyss Institute as the venue for this year’s award ceremony held on July 9, the MLSC’s leadership joined industry, academic, and legislative leaders to announce $19.7M in funding to support 23 projects. This support aims to expand cutting-edge research infrastructure and next-generation therapeutics delivery technologies, accelerate artificial intelligence and data science, and help move promising discoveries closer to patients in need, and is part of a concerted effort to strengthen Massachusetts’ life science ecosystem.
“We are proud and extremely excited to receive this support from MLSC, as it enables us to take a significant step forward in advancing multiple research programs at the Wyss Institute, enter into new collaborations, and support the greater Massachusetts life sciences ecosystem we are a part of,” said Wyss Research Core Scientist Alexander Pauer, who, together with Robert Rasmussen, Ph.D., Wyss Senior Director of Research Operations and Wyss Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., Principal Investigator on the award, drafted the Wyss’ proposal. “The platform is designed to investigate changes in metabolites and lipids that occur with disease and other challenges to human physiology, as well as drug therapies in much greater depth than we and researchers beyond the Wyss could before.”
We are proud and extremely excited to receive this support from MLSC, as it enables us to take a significant step forward in advancing multiple research programs at the Wyss Institute, enter into new collaborations, and support the greater Massachusetts life sciences ecosystem we are a part of.
For a year, the Wyss Institute has evaluated the performance and robustness of a highly specialized and capable instrument, known as the Waters Xevo MRT Mass Spectrometer within its Scientific Instrumentation Program. As a result, the cutting-edge instrument was advanced by Waters in collaboration with Wyss researchers to allow the analysis of a broad spectrum of chemically diverse metabolites and lipids across a wide range of abundances in clinical and biological samples. “Among the current multi-omics approaches, we have had this kind of power in proteomics and transcriptomics analysis, but not yet for really deep dives into metabolomes and lipidomes,” explained Pauer. “Now, with the MLSC award, the instrument becomes a permanent part of the Wyss infrastructure.”
The Wyss’ proposal was backed by several Institute groups, including those led by Wyss Faculty members Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., Michael Levin, Ph.D., Christopher Chen, M.D., Ph.D., David Walt, Ph.D., and James Collins, Ph.D., as well as the Wentworth Institute of Technology as an external partner. In addition, Pauer and Rasmussen worked with biotech companies spun out of Harvard University to incorporate industry needs, which advance solutions for human and planetary health, including Wyss startups Breaking (plastic degradation), Emulate (Organ Chips), and DoriNano (drug delivery), as well as Kephera Diagnostics (infectious disease diagnostics) and Foghorn Therapeutics (chromatin precision medicines).
This MLSC award will reinforce the Wyss’ tradition of translating groundbreaking ideas into discoveries that can address complex challenges and improve human and environmental health in ways not possible with conventional forms of support.
“This MLSC award will reinforce the Wyss’ tradition of translating groundbreaking ideas into discoveries that can address complex challenges and improve human and environmental health in ways not possible with conventional forms of support,” said Ingber, who also is Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “We are extremely honored to have been able to host the MLSC as we celebrated their continued commitment to advancing life sciences innovation across the Commonwealth.”