Launch of MIT HEALS
Good morning! I’m Sally Kornbluth, President of MIT – and I’m delighted to welcome you to the launch of the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative – or, simply, “MIT HEALS.”
I'll have more to say about MIT HEALS in a moment.
But first: It’s my honor to introduce a very special guest this morning. Since she was elected to lead the Commonwealth of Massachusetts just two years ago, Governor Maura Healey has focused on making the state a leader in clean energy, a more affordable place to live and a great place for businesses of all kinds to start, grow and succeed.
Here at MIT, we especially appreciate her personal enthusiasm and advocacy for the state’s interlocking innovation ecosystems – from climate technology and advanced manufacturing to AI and the life sciences.
So we could not be more delighted to have her with us today as we launch MIT HEALS. Please join me in offering a warm MIT welcome to Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey.
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Thank you, Governor Healey. I so appreciate your remarks. Let me start my remarks with some essential thank-yous.
First: In reading through today’s program, I expect we all had the same experience: Holy Toledo! The line-up is spectacular. The caliber of the speakers. The boldness of their thinking. The scale of their accomplishments. The range of frontier subjects being covered…it's just astounding. Like a fantasy football team… if biologists played football.
So I want to start by thanking the incredible team that persuaded all these brilliant people to bend their calendars to make this day possible. A special shout-out to our Dean of Science Nergis Mavalvala, to Dean of Engineering and Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer Anantha Chandrakasan. to the entire Faculty Program Planning Committee, co-chaired by Professors Amy Keating and Katharina Ribbeck, and especially to Marsha Warren and the events team, who orchestrated every detail.
We are all in your debt for creating this extraordinary day.
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And of course, I want to thank all of our speakers – from inside and outside MIT – for offering us this 14-course intellectual banquet.
The talent assembled here – from those who’ll speak, to every one of you – has produced some truly towering accomplishments. But also – and, I believe, more importantly – you represent a deep well of creative potential…for even greater impact.
Which brings me to the insights that inspired MIT HEALS.
Since I still have fairly fresh eyes on the wonders of this multi-institutional community, let me start with a little perspective.
I started my career as a cancer biologist. My husband, Danny Lew, also leads a research group focused on pure curiosity-driven science.
We both had long, happy careers at another fine university. But I will never forget the expression on Danny's face, the day I mentioned that I might interview for the president’s job…at MIT. MIT! He was thrilled – we both were – to think we might join a place with such a wall-to-wall appreciation for fundamental science.
As you can imagine, when we got here: Like kids in a candy store!
But pretty quickly, you realize: Wait, it’s not a candy store – it’s a candy factory! Not only MIT, but the whole biotech ecosystem, from Kendall Square to the Seaport, to the legendary hospitals, and to the countless corporations, start-ups, universities, venture capitalists, incubators and philanthropists across the region.
You see it any time you meet a clinician or a faculty member: They’re exploring techniques or technologies right at the frontier of their fields – and then they casually tell you that they’ve also started a company. Or two, or more!
As a source of new knowledge, of new tools and new cures, and of the innovators and the innovations that will shape the future of biomedicine and health care, there is just no place like it.
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And today, I want to talk with you about how we can make it even better. That’s the ambition behind MIT HEALS.
Our goal with MIT HEALS is to help inspire, accelerate and deliver solutions, at scale, to some of society’s most urgent and intractable health challenges.
With that goal in mind, and with expert guidance and leadership from many of you here today – including Anantha, Nergis, and many other faculty leaders – we’ve identified three priority areas where we have a vital opportunity to make a difference.
In shorthand, the three priorities are talent, collaborations and bridges.
First: Talent. The caliber of talent in this room today is the caliber of talent this ecosystem needs every day, forever! If we want the “biotech capital of the world” to spawn the next biotech revolution too, we can’t take this concentration of talent for granted. But nothing attracts talent like talent. So a crucial part of MIT HEALS will be finding ways to support, mentor, connect and foster community for the very best minds, at every stage of their careers.
The second MIT HEALS priority is to spark new cross-cutting collaborations between individuals, both within MIT, and with allies in the hospitals and industry.
To encourage faculty to pursue high-risk, high-impact ideas, we’re going to provide substantial MIT funding. Why? Certainly because daring, unproven ideas can often be the most transformative. But also because federal dollars are not only shrinking, federal funding decisions seem to get more cautious all the time.
(Many of you know this frustration firsthand! To get a grant now, they prefer if you’ve basically finished most of what you’re “proposing” to do!)
I also want to emphasize that this internal funding will support not only translation, but also deep, fundamental, curiosity-driven research. For people outside academia, it’s easy to see the value of translation – the cures that make it to the bedside. Yet for some outside of the scientific community, it can be a mystery why we care so much about basic research. But it’s fundamental curiosity that has driven the discovery of so much of what we know and now take for granted in the life sciences.
And even for those focused on translation – you can’t translate nothing!
Think of any of today’s cutting-edge approaches: Immunotherapy. AIDS therapy. The mRNA vaccines. The new sickle-cell cure, thanks to CRISPR. All of them sprang from a robust pipeline of breakthrough knowledge.
So we’re investing enthusiastically to keep that pipeline running strong.
And of course, in terms of translation, we’re eager to empower MIT’s unique community at the juncture of engineering and bioscience – in an era powered by incredible new tools.
We want to give these faculty members the confidence to collaborate freely with colleagues from across disciplines – from AI, policy and economics, to the humanities and design. We want them to take on the hardest problems. And to pursue their biggest ideas.
We see great potential for producing practical, scalable solutions in a wide variety of fields, such as:
- AI and Life Science
- Low-Cost Diagnostics
- Neuroscience and Mental Health
- Environmental Life Science
- Food and Agriculture
- Future of Public Health and Healthcare
- Women’s Health
Third and finally: MIT HEALS will prioritize building bridges between institutions, developing even stronger, more effective relationships with the region’s world-class hospitals, and the biotech and pharma industries.
A number of our faculty have established very fruitful research programs with hospitals across the Charles. The work of Regina Barzilay and J-Clinic are standout examples.
But we want to make it much easier to make these relationships spring up and flourish. We want them to be in reach for everyone – so that each PI doesn’t have to reinvent the process and re-navigate the same barriers around data sharing, computing power and more.
At the same time, while MIT has always had a distinctive openness to working with industry,
we believe there’s much more we can do to connect our researchers with the full power of this ecosystem, from biotech to pharma.
I can speak from my own experience, working on the basic science of a particular drug-resistant breast cancer. We published a paper in Science Translational Medicine – and I even patented our findings. But it felt impossible to take it any farther, because we didn’t have an ecosystem to plug into.
Here, we definitely have the ecosystem. And MIT HEALS will help to very deliberately improve and deepen those connections too.
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Overall, MIT HEALS is an opportunity to make our work – as individuals and institutions – collectively add up to more than the sum of our parts. And I believe this effort could not be more timely or more important.
A key next step will be selecting a faculty member to serve as director – and a team of faculty from across the Institute are conducting that search right now.
In each of the areas I described – talent, collaborations between individuals, and bridges between institutions – we feel action is imperative.
And it gives me great pleasure to let you know that MIT HEALS has already attracted major support from several sources.
For instance, in the area of talent: An important aspect of MIT HEALS is supporting our graduate students to explore new directions in life science, particularly interdisciplinary research. I'm pleased that MIT will be able to provide new internal support for an initial cohort of graduate fellows for MIT HEALS.
And we’re delighted that the founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, Noubar Afeyan – one of our long-time collaborators, a member of the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, and a former MIT Course X PhD student himself – has committed to support additional graduate fellowships as part of MIT HEALS.
Thank you, Noubar!
In that same spirit, of supporting great talent – and as another key part of MIT HEALS – we will launch the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative Fellows Program, a world-class program for postdoctoral scholars. This highly competitive program will give fellows the freedom to explore some of the most pressing issues in human health. Fellows will receive a four-year, fully funded appointment at MIT and benefit from faculty mentorship as well as participation in community events focused on careers in academia, industry, and entrepreneurship.
We are delighted to announce a gift from the Biswas Family Foundation to establish the inaugural cohort of postdoctoral fellows. The Biswas Fellows will conduct cross-cutting research in areas such as AI/computation and health, low-cost diagnostics, nano-scale therapeutics, neuroscience, women’s health and curiosity-driven life sciences.
Thank you so much, to the Biswas Family Foundation!
As an example of sparking new collaborations, I’m also thrilled to announce another integral piece of MIT HEALS, the new Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub. It was established through a catalytic gift from the Charles H. Hood Foundation, a leader in supporting groundbreaking and innovative pediatric research.
Led by Professor Elazer Edelman – the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science and a world-renowned cardiologist – the Hub will bridge the translational gap for innovators in pediatrics.
Currently, the major market incentives are for medical innovations intended for adults. As one example: children are often treated with medical devices and therapies that don’t meet their needs, because they’re simply scaled-down versions of the adult models.
The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub aims to overcome such persistent barriers to bringing life-saving technologies to market by leveraging MIT’s state-of-the-art technological expertise and a robust network of healthcare stakeholders across the country. It will also strengthen collaborations with many hospitals, including with an important partner in Boston Children’s Hospital.
Huge thanks to the Hood Foundation!
And finally, I’m very excited to share that one of the flagship components of MIT HEALS will be a collaboration framework between MIT and Mass General Brigham. It will bring together these two world-class research institutions to advance technology and clinical research for transformative changes in patient care. Through the MIT-MGB Seed Program, we will seek philanthropic funding to establish seed grants for joint research projects led by MIT and MGB researchers in mutual areas of interest.
I am very pleased to announce that Analog Devices will help launch the MIT-MGB Seed Program with gifts to both MIT and MGB to establish the Analog Devices, Inc. Fund for Health and Life Sciences. This visionary gift, which has been described by Analog CEO Vince Roche as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity,” will help accelerate the adoption of critical sensing, digital, and AI technologies in clinical settings. And the new framework overall will be a model for how we can all work together more effectively in the future.
Thank you, MGB and Analog Devices!
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As you can see, we have high hopes for MIT HEALS – and the momentum is already building to make those aspirations real.
And before I close, I want to particularly call out the Dean of Engineering and Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer Anantha Chandrakasan who has had the vision and drive to bring to bring this initiative to life.
So thank you again, Anantha.
And to all of you: I’m so grateful to have you join us in this important moment, for this outstanding program!
We look forward to engaging with all of you, as we work together to seek new knowledge and bold new solutions to real problems in human health, in fields from cancer to climate change.
Thank you!