We have the good fortune of calling these industry, medical and scientific leaders our trusted advisors and colleagues, working alongside our team to realize the potential of synthetic biology to do more for patients.
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Dr. James J. Collins is the Henri Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. He is also a Core Founding Faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research group works in synthetic biology and systems biology, with a particular focus on using network biology approaches to study antibiotic action, bacterial defense mechanisms, and the emergence of resistance. Professor Collins’ patented technologies have been licensed by over 25 biotech, pharma and medical devices companies, and he has helped to launched a number of companies, including Sample6 Technologies, Synlogic and EnBiotix. He has received numerous awards and honors, including a Rhodes Scholarship, a MacArthur “Genius” Award, an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, as well as several teaching awards. Professor Collins is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, as well as a charter fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
Dr. Timothy Lu is an Associate Professor leading the Synthetic Biology Group in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT. He is a core member of the MIT Synthetic Biology Center. Professor Lu’s research at MIT focuses on engineering integrated memory and computational circuits in living cells using analog and digital principles, applying synthetic biology to tackle important medical and industrial problems, and building living biomaterials that integrate biotic and abiotic functionalities. He is a recipient of the NIH New Innovator Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and the Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar in Aging Award, among others.
Dr. Lesser is a board certified infectious disease specialist in Boston, Massachusetts. She is currently licensed to practice medicine in Massachusetts. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine (Microbiology and Molecular Genetics) at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The Lesser lab is interested in understanding how bacterial pathogens manipulate host cell processes to promote their own survival and replication during the course of an infection. In particular, their efforts focus on determining how bacterial factors injected via type 3 protein delivery systems into the host cell cytosol act to disarm host innate immune responses, including the induction of pro-inflammatory cytokine production, pyroptosis and autophagy. Their studies focus on virulence factors from Gram-negative enteric pathogens that cause gastrointestinal diseases including Shigella, Salmonella, Yersinia and enteropathogenic E. coli. They have developed multiple innovative technologies to address these questions including an innovative bottom-up approach to study single, potentially functionally redundant effectors as well as yeast functional genomic and proteomic approaches to identify conserved eukaryotic signaling pathways targeted by the virulence proteins.
More recently, the Lesser lab has begun to exploit findings garnered from their mechanistic based studies to develop bacterial strains engineered to deliver proteins of therapeutic value rather than virulence proteins into host cells. Current efforts with this system are aimed at developing a viral-free protein delivery system for cellular reprogramming; for example, the conversion of fibroblasts into induced pluripotent stem cells. In addition, they have begun to develop commensal bacteria that act suppress inflammation by blocking the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines with the goal of utilizing these bacteria to develop a new targeted treatment for inflammatory bowel disease.
Dr. Kristala Prather is the Arthur D. Little Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. She received an SB degree from MIT in 1994 and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked in BioProcess Research and Development at the Merck Research Labs prior to joining the faculty of MIT. Her research interests are centered on the design and assembly of recombinant microorganisms for the production of small molecules, with additional efforts in novel bioprocess design approaches. Prather is the recipient of an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, a Technology Review “TR35” Young Innovator Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator Award, and most recently, the Charles Thom Award of the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology. Additional honors include selection as the Van Ness Lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2014-2015). Prather has been recognized for excellence in teaching with numerous awards including appointment as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow (2014), the highest honor given for undergraduate teaching at MIT.
Dr. Christopher Voigt is a Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, Co-Director of the Synthetic Biology Center, and Co-Founder of the MIT-Broad Foundry. His lab focuses on pushing genetic engineering to the scale and complexity of designing genomes from the bottom-up. They have developed genetically-encoded sensors and circuits and have used these to control multiple pathways and cellular functions. This has been applied to the optimization of chemical and materials production and to the discovery of novel pharmaceuticals. He holds joint appointments at the Broad Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), and University of California – San Francisco (UCSF). He received his BSE in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan (1998) and PhD in Biophysics and Biochemistry from Caltech (2002). He serves on the science advisory boards of DSM, Bolt Threads, Pivot Bio, SynLogic, Amyris Biotechnologies, Cambrian Genomics, and Zymergen. He has been honored with a National Security Science & Engineering Faculty Fellowship (NSSEFF), Sloan Fellow, Pew Fellow, Packard Fellow, NSF Career Award, Vaughan Lecturer, and MIT TR35. He has prepared reports and briefings on synthetic biology for the National Academies of Science, National Science Foundation, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Congress. He founded the journal ACS Synthetic Biology and serves as the Editor-in-Chief and co-founded the SEED conference series.
Dr. Paul Miller is chief scientific officer at Artizan Biosciences Inc. a privately held Connecticut-based biotechnology company developing a platform for identifying and targeting pathogenic intestinal bacteria, with a focus on inflammatory bowel disease and potential applications in autoimmune diseases, obesity, skin, lung and CNS diseases. From 2014 until 2019 he served as CSO at Synlogic. Previously, Paul was the vice president of infection biology at AstraZeneca, where he was responsible for the early discovery portfolio and strategy while also leading several external collaborations. Prior to Astra-Zeneca, Paul was the chief scientific officer for antibacterial research at Pfizer, leading discovery teams that produced eight drug development candidates, provided critical research support for several successful marketed antibiotics including Zithromax and Zyvox, and also successfully advanced a novel oxazolidinone (sutezolid) for tuberculosis into Phase II studies. A microbial geneticist by training, Paul began his professional career at the Warner-Lambert Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he integrated modern molecular-genetic approaches into a traditional antibacterial drug discovery program and established novel target discovery projects. His work there led to new insights into the mechanisms by which bacteria sense and respond to antibiotics and other environmental agents. Paul received his Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the Albany Medical College, and conducted post-doctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health. He has also served as a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Microbial Threats.