Harvard Life Lab Opening @Allston ! Congrats!

Picture Credit: Inhibiting Sclerostin May Prevent Osteoporosis- from Innovations-Report.com

On Thursday, Harvard University will open a 15,000-square-foot life science lab in Allston named after Steve Pagliuca, and executive at Bain Capital and co-owner of the Boston Celtics. The Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab will be the home to 20 startup ventures founded and run by Harvard faculty, alumni, students, and postdocs. “The fully equipped wet lab environment, collaborative co-working space, and educational resources will support high-potential biotech, pharma, and other life sciences-related ventures that have at least one Harvard founder. Teams were evaluated on a number of criteria including their science, stage of development, potential for impact, and ability to be a strong community member,” Harvard explained.

 Profile of Steve Pagliuca’s new lab – And a nice infographic on the Harvard Innovation Lab

Mayor Marty Walsh will attend the opening this Thursday at 3 p.m. at 125 Western Ave., right next to the Harvard Innovation Lab, which opened in 2011, and the Harvard Launch Lab, an incubator that opened in 2014. Other attendees include Steve and Judy Pagliuca as well as Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria and Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust. The new lab will be operated by Cambridge-based Lab Central.

The first 17 of those were revealed by the university a couple weeks ago, and they include drug and vaccine developers as well as DNA sequencing companies.

Akous – College, HBS, Blavatnik Fellow

Akouos is developing novel therapies and delivery systems to prevent hearing loss and restore hearing in genetically defined patient populations.

Aldatu Biosciences – GSAS, HSPH

Aldatu’s lead product is a low-cost HIV drug resistance genotyping test designed to guide clinical decision-making in resource-limited healthcare settings.

Beacon Genomics – HMS

Beacon Genomics is an early-stage startup company focused on enabling safe and effective therapeutic applications of genome editing nucleases by defining and optimizing genome-wide specificity.

BiomaRx – HMS

An oncology-focused startup, BiomaRX is focused on developing the first non-invasive early stage pancreatic cancer diagnostic.

change:WATER Labs, Inc. – College

change:WATER Labs is developing solutions to drastically minimize the increasing volumes of off-grid residential, commercial and industrial wastewater, leveraging a super-hydrophilic polymer that passively eliminates 85-99% of waste volumes onsite. Our first product will be a portable, evaporative toilet for homes with no power or plumbing, specifically in refugee camps and low-income communities in developing countries.

DayZero Diagnostics – GSAS

DayZero is developing a rapid diagnostic for identifying drug-resistant pathogens in clinical samples. It uses next-generation genome sequencing and data-driven algorithms to rapidly identify pathogen species and predict drug resistance, in hours rather than in days (the current culture-based standard), so physicians can quickly prescribe the most effective antibiotic.

Gel4Med – SEAS

Gel4Med is focused on improving the outcomes in regenerative medicine through the design and engineering of smart biomaterials that instruct and harness the innate capacity of the body to heal.

GRO Biosciences (GRObio) – Wyss Institute/HMS

Using our microbes with an expanded genetic code, GRO Biosciences makes therapeutic proteins with new stabilizing bonds to enable inexpensive microbial fermentation, fast production times, and long serum half-life.

Nix – HBS, SEAS, Blavatnik Fellow

Nix is developing a single-use consumer diagnostic platform that ad¬dresses the white space between the biosensor market and activity trackers, with an initial focus on hydration for athletes, soldiers, and laborers.

PathoVax – HMS

PathoVax is transforming the multi-billion HPV vaccine market with RGVax to target all cancer-causing HPVs neglected by current offerings.

Piper Therapeutics – College, HBS

Piper Therapeutics is focused on using small molecules to modify immune system signaling, preventing tumors from acquiring macrophages.

Riparian Pharmaceuticals – College, SEAS

Riparian is discovering therapeutics to promote vascular health and treat the leading causes of human mortality. Its unique approach of modulating biology within the blood vessel wall aims to add a new therapeutic dimension to cardiovascular, diabetic, and kidney diseases.

Suono Bio – HMS

Suono Bio is developing technology that enables ultra-rapid delivery of therapeutics across biologic tissues, such as the gastrointestinal (GI) tract.

UnNamed – HMS

UnNamed’s technologies enable living cells to sense and respond to chemicals. This is done by engineering proteins to become dependent on binding to a target molecule, allowing for the generation of novel biosensors that can be used for optimizing bioproduction of useful chemicals, environmental toxin detection, or drug discovery.

UrSure Inc. – HKS

An HIV prevention company, UrSure Inc. boosts boost adherence to the HIV preventive medication, PrEP, by making patient and physician friendly urine tests that allow doctors to monitor patient compliance to the medication.

Vaxess Technologies, Inc.  HBS, SEAS, HKS, HLS

Vaxess is using silk to create the next generation of vaccines that combine high temperature stability with novel delivery formats such as oral films and sustained release microneedles.

XGenomes – HMS

XGenomes is developing groundbreaking DNA sequencing technologies, with the goal of accelerating the path towards personalized medicine

Is DNA Storage Going to Lead to Mind Implantation?

Picture credit: NHGRI- https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/

Last fall, IAI spent a term at the Harvard Graduate Extension School studying bioinformatics which is a cross-disciplinary area uniting computational biology and large scale data analysis. The revolution in applying computational power to biology accelerated with the Human Genome Project when the cost of sequencing the human genome was $1 billion but today, it costs just over a thousand dollars to sequence an entire genome, which is approximately three billion letters, and the price will continue to drop as the technology advances. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) supports the databases that contain trillions of sequences.  A genome consists of all of the DNA contained in a cell’s nucleus. DNA is composed of four chemical building blocks or “bases” (for simplicity, abbreviated G, A, T, and C), with the biological information encoded within DNA determined by the order of those bases. Diploid organisms, like humans and all other mammals, contain duplicate copies of almost all of their DNA (i.e., pairs of chromosomes; with one chromosome of each pair inherited from each parent).

Andy Extance at Nature chronicled how this DNA storage race spring from cocktail napkins in 2011 to monthly breakthroughs this past summer. At the European Bioinformation Institute, a brainstorming session at a Hamburg Germany conference in February 2011 focused on how to afford to store the reams of genome sequences and other data the world was throwing at these engineers. The lead researcher and “his EBI colleague Ewan Birney took the idea back to their labs, and two years later announced that they had successfully used DNA to encode five files, including Shakespeare’s sonnets and a snippet of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech¹. By then, biologist George Church and his team at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had unveiled an independent demonstration of DNA encoding². But at 739 kilobytes (kB), the EBI files comprised the largest DNA archive ever produced — until July 2016, when researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington claimed a leap to 200 megabytes (MB).” The MIT Technology Review applauded the breakthrough here.

Microsoft is touting its capabilities in this area -but its program is very dependent upon a University of Washington computer science lab and some early stage partners. Pre-IPO firm Twist Bioscience lays out the case for finding an alternative to the magnetic data storage dilemma (and it is a Microsoft partner):

Most of the world’s data is stored using media that won’t last for more than several decades, even in the optimal conditions of freezing temperatures and total darkness [1]. One study showed that data on a hard drive running for four years shows an attrition rate of 22%—hardly stellar performance. Meanwhile, the amount of digital data in the world is doubling every two years, and our ability to store all that data is not keeping pace. According to a recent study by EMC, by 2020 we will only be able to store 15% of our digital data, whereas in 2013 we could store 33%.

The ability to encode digital information in strands of DNA is a major advancement in archival technology because DNA molecules are not susceptible to the most dire limitations of traditional digital storage media: limited lifespan, permanent/standard format and low data density. There is enormous enthusiasm among venture capital funds about DNA storage and the money is flowing into emerging memory technologies, DNA storage and computing, hardware accelerators for machine learning, and system software for new architectures.

Picture credit: MSFT / University of Washington

IDC predicts that the worldwide total of stored digital data will hit 16 trillion gigabytes next year, most of it housed in huge data centers. The University of Washington’s Strauss estimates that a shoebox worth of DNA could hold the equivalent of roughly 100 giant data centers.

Well, for MSFT, it’s all about the possibilities   – ah, yes, the ultimate operating system: can’t disconnect, price is your life, they get paid for the feeds, and you cannot refuse automatic system “upgrades”, even if they are as bad as Windows 10 ! IAI worries that these DNA Storage advances will not be equally shared among the population and that there could be people like Ray Kurzweil who implant new memories into their brain as their bodies survive as vessels on pig-grown replacement parts. For me, I believe in the sanctity of the soul…

Picture Credit: TodayIAmBlessed.com