BME Seminar Series - Douglas Lauffenburger, MIT
Friday,
March 8, 2019
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Humanizing Therapeutics Discovery & Development
Douglas A Lauffenburger
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Biological Engineering
The therapeutics discovery/development pipeline involves multiple stages for progress from idea
to approved treatment, and has become highly expensive over the past decades mainly due to the
large proportion of potential drugs that fail in costly clinical trial stages. A chief reason for
failure in clinical trials following promising findings in preclinical studies is that results in
preclinical animal model studies do not generally translate strongly to similar results in human
patients due to the incomplete correspondence of animal biology, physiology, and pathology in
comparison to that in humans. Alongside this scientific issue, there exists a level of societal
concern about the most appropriate use of animal experimentation. The therapeutics
discovery/development field has been attempting to address the challenge of ‘humanizing’ the
pipeline along multiple avenues of research endeavor – prominently including efforts to
construct human tissue and organ surrogates outside the body, using stem cell and ‘organ-on-
chip’ platform technologies, and machine learning computational modeling approaches to bridge
the preclinical-to-clinical divide either with human genomic data or with modeling of animal
experiment data. In this presentation I will outline various approaches to addressing this
therapeutics discovery/development challenge, and their current stage of prospect.
Douglas A Lauffenburger
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Biological Engineering
The therapeutics discovery/development pipeline involves multiple stages for progress from idea
to approved treatment, and has become highly expensive over the past decades mainly due to the
large proportion of potential drugs that fail in costly clinical trial stages. A chief reason for
failure in clinical trials following promising findings in preclinical studies is that results in
preclinical animal model studies do not generally translate strongly to similar results in human
patients due to the incomplete correspondence of animal biology, physiology, and pathology in
comparison to that in humans. Alongside this scientific issue, there exists a level of societal
concern about the most appropriate use of animal experimentation. The therapeutics
discovery/development field has been attempting to address the challenge of ‘humanizing’ the
pipeline along multiple avenues of research endeavor – prominently including efforts to
construct human tissue and organ surrogates outside the body, using stem cell and ‘organ-on-
chip’ platform technologies, and machine learning computational modeling approaches to bridge
the preclinical-to-clinical divide either with human genomic data or with modeling of animal
experiment data. In this presentation I will outline various approaches to addressing this
therapeutics discovery/development challenge, and their current stage of prospect.
Douglas A. Lauffenburger is Ford Professor of Bioengineering and (founding)
Head of the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT. His major research
interests are in cell engineering: the fusion of engineering with molecular cell
biology, with central focus on systems biology approaches to complex
pathophysiology in application to drug discovery and development.
Lauffenburger has co-authored a monograph entitled Receptors: Models for
Binding, Trafficking & Signaling, published by Oxford University Press in 1993;
he also co-edited the book entitled Systems Biomedicine: Concepts and
Perspectives, published by Elsevier in 2010. More than 100 doctoral students
and postdoctoral associates have undertaken research education under his
supervision.
Prof. Lauffenburger has served as a consultant or scientific advisory
board member for numerous biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and
his awards include the Galletti Award from AIMBE, the Coburn Award and
Walker Award from AIChE, and the Distinguished Lecture Award and Shu Chien
Career Achievement Award from BMES. He is a member of the National
Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and
has served as President of the Biomedical Engineering Society, Chair of the
College of Fellows of American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering, on
the Advisory Council for NIGMS, and as a co-author of the 2009 NRC report on A
New Biology for the 21 st Century.
Head of the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT. His major research
interests are in cell engineering: the fusion of engineering with molecular cell
biology, with central focus on systems biology approaches to complex
pathophysiology in application to drug discovery and development.
Lauffenburger has co-authored a monograph entitled Receptors: Models for
Binding, Trafficking & Signaling, published by Oxford University Press in 1993;
he also co-edited the book entitled Systems Biomedicine: Concepts and
Perspectives, published by Elsevier in 2010. More than 100 doctoral students
and postdoctoral associates have undertaken research education under his
supervision.
Prof. Lauffenburger has served as a consultant or scientific advisory
board member for numerous biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and
his awards include the Galletti Award from AIMBE, the Coburn Award and
Walker Award from AIChE, and the Distinguished Lecture Award and Shu Chien
Career Achievement Award from BMES. He is a member of the National
Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and
has served as President of the Biomedical Engineering Society, Chair of the
College of Fellows of American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering, on
the Advisory Council for NIGMS, and as a co-author of the 2009 NRC report on A
New Biology for the 21 st Century.
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