MIT recruiting engineers for biomedical research

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

The cross-disciplinary approach is not entirely new. Some start-up biomedical companies have already brought life scientists and engineers together. Take T2 Biosystems, a corporate partner of the Koch Institute that originated in a collaboration among researchers at MIT and the nearby Massachusetts General Hospital. "T2 is an excellent example of cancer researchers with engineers," says CEO John McDonough. "The science behind our new diagnostic detection technology involves chemistry and the use of nanoparticles on the one hand, and on the other, taking medical technology like magnetic resonance imaging and creating medical equipment that will be downsized to a handheld device. Creation of the device coupled with work on nanoparticles represents a great business opportunity."

In similar fashion, biotechnology companies have emphasized multidisciplinary research far more than their older, larger and more traditional pharmaceutical rivals. "Biotechnology integrates various disciplines to work together in a very collaborative way to take risks and create medical breakthroughs," Greene explains. "Alnylam works with some of the world's best academic laboratories; the pharmaceutical industry has not traditionally done that--and it is starved. So to innovate, pharmaceutical companies are forming more collaborations with biotechnology companies and academia."

The lack of promising molecules in their pipelines has long forced pharmaceutical companies to recognize that they can no longer display the "not invented here" syndrome in their research. "Not only do MIT and the Massachusetts General Hospital have a lot of people; they have the smartest people in the world. The amount of innovation there is extraordinary," McDonough says. "It's very difficult for even the largest companies to afford to do the research across the board. They need to keep in touch with advances elsewhere."

Islands of Excellence

Some pharmaceutical corporations have reacted to that requirement by setting up research centers in regions with clusters of strong academic life science departments and biotechnology firms. But for Urban, that is not enough. "Pharmaceutical companies have tried to create little islands of excellence in Cambridge and other cities," he explains. "What we're doing is similar, but it expressly suggests that we have to have different kinds of thinkers. You'll never find that in a drug company."

Given the traditions that underlie large pharmaceutical firms, it seems unlikely that they will be able to adopt new approaches internally in any short time. As Urban sees it, their best bet is to undertake extremely close collaborations with academic organizations such as the Koch Institute. "We're looking to build relationships with our corporate partners that are more sweeping than before," he explains. "We want our industrial partners to have access to our philosophy as well as our researchers."

The effort has provided some initial successes. "We're getting a lot of feedback from the corporate world with explicit expectation that these kinds of organizational designs will be a richer harvest," Urban says.