MIT recruiting engineers for biomedical research

Research-Technology Management, July-August, 2008 by Peter Gwynne

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose graduates created a surge of new technology companies in the 1960s, has taken on a new entrepreneurial challenge: bringing together medical researchers and engineers in an effort to improve the diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of cancer. In the process, the university is developing a new form of collaboration in research that the entire field of biomedicine might profitably exploit.

The process involves converting MIT's 34-year-old Center for Cancer Research into a new organization that will take a genuinely multidisciplinary approach to combating the disease. Named the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, it aims to obtain results by housing researchers from a wide variety of engineering, physical science, and life science disciplines under the same roof. In doing so, the Institute holds lessons for the industrial pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical sectors as they explore new means of diagnosing and treating diseases.

Barry Greene, president and chief operating officer of biotechnology company Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, a corporate partner of the Koch Institute, outlines the organization's basic goal. "MIT," he says, "is trying to harness the power of the world's best scientists and to integrate them with the world's best engineers to try to combat cancer." Tyler Jacks, director of the Koch Institute develops that thought. "Eliminating cancer will require the integrated application of the best science and technology," he says. "The Koch Institute will be at the vanguard of this new revolution in cancer research."

Formed with $100 million from MIT alumnus David H. Koch and grants from several foundations, the institute numbers two Nobel laureates and 14 members of the National Academy of Sciences on its faculty. But "[t]he real power," the Institute's prospectus states, "is in having cancer biologists that are expert in the disease, working on trying to understand the disease at a molecular level, interacting closely with engineering faculty with an interest in solving cancer-related problems."

Management Innovation

Robert Urban, the institute's executive director, expands on that point. "This is the type of organizational innovation required to get your head around the difficult challenges of making next-generation cancer therapeutics and diagnostics," he says. "Making that happen requires an interdisciplinary approach. But it's harder and harder to find ways to do that. We've decided to build an oasis--a place where people can thrive together--and hope that interaction will happen by proximity rather than by accident." The purpose-built facility that will provide the oasis is planned to open in December 2010.

The emphasis on ensuring that researchers from various disciplines stay together represents a new opportunity. MIT's original Center for Cancer Research had space only for traditional cancer researchers. If they needed insights from colleagues in other disciplines, they had to stroll across the campus to visit those individuals. "We thought that distance didn't matter," Urban continues. "That may be true as far as managing the back end is concerned. But on the creative front end, it's more important to be able to run down the hall and find someone with a very different perspective from yours."

That idea is hardly new. Studies by MIT emeritus professor Thomas Allen more than a quarter century ago showed that close proximity can stimulate multidisciplinary creativity. However, Urban says, "The ability to get the folks together required a new facility. That was made possible by David Koch."

The concept is illustrated by the variety of research studies already under way at the Koch Institute. Projects include the development of new imaging technologies that can detect cancer cells earlier; the application of nanotechnology to drug therapies and delivery methods; efforts to understand the wiring diagrams of cancer cells; methods of engineering implantable devices to monitor and treat cancers; and the creation of "artificial physiology" that senses progress of cancers inside the body and, if necessary, delivers drugs automatically. Members of the institute include chemical engineers, electrical engineers, materials scientists, mechanical engineers, and tissue engineers, as well as the biologists and oncologists who traditionally undertake cancer research.

Translation by Accident or Design

It is the presence of engineers on-site that will differentiate the new institute from the old cancer center from which it emerged--and which exemplifies the lesson that the institute holds for the corporate sector. "Commercial translation by accident doesn't work fast enough in the modern marketplace," Urban says.

The Koch Institute plans to combine the best of both biological and engineering approaches. "The ability to imagine new questions that are based on deep knowledge of the underlying biology will be leveraged with the ability to design new tools and approaches that are engineered with the best available technologies," Urban explains. "Each of our core research areas seeks to utilize this cross-disciplinary problem-solving approach."