Two MIT students, every with a robust entrepreneurial drive, have acquired 2024 Kavanaugh Fellowship awards, advancing their quest to show pioneering analysis into worthwhile industrial enterprises.
The Kavanaugh Translational Fellows Program offers students coaching to steer organizations that may convey their analysis to market. PhD candidates Grant Knappe and Arjav Shah are this yr’s recipients. Knappe is creating a drug supply platform for an rising class of medicines referred to as nucleic acid therapeutics. Shah is utilizing hydrogel microparticles to scrub up water polluted by heavy metals and different contaminants.
Knappe and Shah will start their fellowship with years of entrepreneurial experience below their belts. They’ve developed and refined their enterprise plans via MIT’s innovation ecosystem, together with the Sandbox, the Legatum Heart, the Enterprise Mentoring Service, the Nationwide Science Basis’s I-Corps Program, and Blueprint by The Engine. Now, the yearlong Kavanaugh Fellowship will give the students time to focus solely on testing their enterprise plans and exercising decision-making abilities — essential to startup success — with the steering of MIT mentors.
“It’s a testomony to the help and path they’ve acquired from the MIT group that their entrepreneurial aspirations have developed and matured over time,” says Michael J. Cima, program director for the Kavanaugh program and the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering within the Division of Supplies Science and Engineering.
Based in 2016, the Kavanaugh program was instrumental in serving to previous fellows launch a number of sturdy startups, together with low-carbon cement producer Elegant Programs and SiTration, which is utilizing a brand new sort of filtration membrane to extract essential supplies akin to lithium.
A safer method to ship breakthrough medicines
Nucleic acid therapeutics, together with mRNA and CRISPR, are disrupting at this time’s medical panorama because of their promise of focusing on illness remedy in accordance with genetic blueprints. However the first strategies of delivering these molecules to the physique used viruses as their transport, elevating patient safety concerns.
“People have found out the best way to engineer sure viruses present in nature to ship particular cargoes [for disease treatment],” says Knappe. “However as a result of they appear to be viruses, the human immune system sees them as a hazard sign and creates an immune response that may be dangerous to sufferers.”
Given the protection profile problems with viral supply, researchers turned to non-viral applied sciences that use lipid nanoparticle know-how, a combination of various lipid-like supplies, assembled into particles to guard the mRNA therapeutic from getting degraded earlier than it reaches a cell of curiosity. “As a result of they don’t appear to be viruses there, the immune system usually tolerates them,” provides Knappe.
Current information present lipid nanoparticles can now goal the lung, opening the potential for novel therapies of lethal cancers and different ailments.
Knappe’s work in MIT’s Bathe BioNanoLab targeted on constructing such a non-viral supply platform primarily based on a distinct know-how: nucleic acid nanoparticles, which mix the engaging parts of each viral and non-viral methods. Knappe will spend his Kavanaugh Fellowship yr creating proof-of-concept information for his drug supply methodology and constructing the group and funding wanted to commercialize the know-how.
A PhD candidate within the Division of Chemical Engineering (ChemE), Knappe was initially drawn to MIT due to its mental openness. “You may work with any school member in different departments. I wasn’t restricted to the chemical engineering school,” says Knappe, whose supervisor, Professor Mark Bathe, is within the Division of Organic Engineering.
Knappe, who’s from New Jersey, welcomes the challenges that may are available his Kavanaugh yr, together with the necessity to pinpoint the best story that may persuade enterprise capitalists and different funders to wager on his know-how. Attracting expertise can be prime of thoughts. “How do you persuade actually proficient people who have a whole lot of alternatives to work on what you’re employed on? Constructing the primary group goes to be essential,” he says. The community Knappe has been constructing in his years at MIT is paying dividends now.
Focusing on “perpetually chemical compounds” in water
That community contains Shah. The 2 fellows met once they labored on the MIT Science Coverage Assessment, a student-run journal involved with the intersection of science, know-how, and coverage. Knappe and Shah didn’t compete straight academically however used their biweekly espresso walks as a welcome sounding board. Naturally, they have been happy once they came upon that they had each been chosen for the Kavanaugh Fellowship. To date, they’ve been too busy to have fun over a beer.
“We’re good collaborators with analysis, as properly,” says Shah. “Now we’re happening this entrepreneurial journey collectively. It’s been thrilling.”
Shah is a PhD candidate in ChemE’s Chemical Engineering Follow program. He obtained within the world crucial for cleaner water at a younger age. His hometown of Surat is the guts of India’s textile business. “Rising up, it wasn’t laborious to see the dye-colored water flowing into your rivers and streams,” Shah says. “Taking part in a task in fostering constructive change in water remedy fills me with a profound sense of goal.”
Shah’s work, broadly, is to scrub poisonous chemical compounds referred to as micropollutants from water in an environment friendly and sustainable method. “It’s humanly not possible to show a blind eye to our water issues,” he says, which will be categorized as accessibility, availability, and high quality. Water issues are world and complicated, not simply due to the technological challenges but in addition sociopolitical ones, he provides.
Manufactured chemical compounds referred to as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or “perpetually chemical compounds,” are in the news nowadays. PFAS, which go into making nonstick cookware and waterproof clothes, are simply one among greater than 10,000 such rising contaminants which have leached into water streams. “These are extraordinarily tough to take away utilizing present methods due to their chemical range and low concentrations,” Shah says. “The concentrations are akin to dropping an aspirin pill in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.” However no much less poisonous for that.
Within the lab at MIT, Shah is working with Devashish Gokhale, a fellow PhD pupil, and Patrick S. Doyle, the Robert T. Haslam (1911) Professor of Chemical Engineering, to commercialize an innovative microparticle technology, hydroGel, to take away these micropollutants in an efficient, facile, and sustainable method. Hydrogels are a broad class of polymer supplies that may maintain giant portions of water.
“Our supplies are like Boba beads. We are attempting to save lots of the world with our Boba beads,” says Shah with amusing. “And we’ve functionalized these particles with tunable chemistries to focus on totally different micropollutants in a single unit operation.”
As a consequence of its outsized environmental affect, industrial water is the primary software Shah is focusing on. At the moment, wastewater remedy emits more than 3 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, which is greater than the transport business’s emissions, for instance. The present state-of-the-art for eradicating micropollutants within the business is to make use of activated carbon filters. “[This technology] comes from coal, so it’s unsustainable,” Shah says. And the activated carbon filters are laborious to reuse. “Our particles are reusable, theoretically infinitely.”
“I’m very excited to have the ability to benefit from the mentorship we’ve from the Kavanaugh group to take this know-how to its subsequent inflection level, in order that we’re able to exit available in the market and begin making a big impact,” he says.
A dream group
Shah and Knappe have grow to be adept at navigating the array of help and mentorship alternatives MIT has to supply. Shah labored with a small group of seasoned professionals within the water house from the MIT Enterprise Mentoring Service. “They’ve helped us each step of the way in which as we take into consideration commercializing the know-how,” he says.
Shah labored with MIT Sandbox, which supplies a seed grant to assist discover the best product-market match. He’s additionally a fellow with the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, which focuses on entrepreneurship in world development markets.
“We’re exploring the potential for this know-how and its software in a whole lot of totally different markets, together with India. As a result of that’s near my coronary heart,” Shah says. “The Legatum group has been distinctive, the place you may have these extraordinarily laborious conversations, confront your self with these fears, after which speak it out with the group of fellows.”
The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Meals Programs Lab, or J-WAFS, has been an integral a part of Shah’s journey with analysis and commercialization help via its Options Grant and a journey award to the Stockholm World Water Week in August 2023.
Knappe has additionally taken benefit of many innovation packages, together with MIT’s Blueprint by the Engine, which helps researchers discover industrial alternatives of their work, plus packages outdoors of MIT however with robust on-campus ties akin to Nucleate Activator and Frequency Bio.
It was throughout one among these packages that he was impressed by two postdocs working in Bathe’s lab and spinning out biotech startups from their analysis, Floris Engelhardt and James Banal. Engelhardt helped spearhead Kano Therapeutics, and Banal launched Cache DNA.
“I used to be passively absorbing and watching every thing that they have been going via and what they have been enthusiastic about and challenged with. I nonetheless speak to them fairly often to at the present time,” Knappe says. “It’s been actually nice to have them as continuous mentors, all through my PhD and as I transition out of the lab.”
Shah says he’s grateful not just for being chosen for the Kavanaugh Fellowship however to MIT as a group. “MIT has been greater than a dream come true,” he says. He may have the chance to discover a distinct aspect of the establishment as he enters the MBA program at MIT Sloan College of Administration this fall. Shah expects this program, alongside along with his Kavanaugh coaching, will provide the abilities he must scale the enterprise so it could actually make a distinction on this planet.
“I all the time preserve coming again to the query ‘How does what I do matter to the individual on the road?’ This guides me to have a look at the larger image, to contextualize my analysis to fixing vital issues,” Shah says. “So many nice applied sciences are being labored on every day, however solely a minuscule fraction make it to the market.”
Knappe is equally devoted to serving a bigger goal. “With the best infrastructure, between primary elementary science, carried out in academia, funded by authorities, after which translated by corporations, we will make merchandise that would enhance everybody’s life the world over,” he says.
Previous Kavanaugh Fellows are credited with spearheading industrial outfits which have certainly made a distinction. This yr’s fellows are poised to observe their lead. However first they may have that beer collectively to have fun.
