Life science investors, biotech professionals, pioneering scientists and industry leaders attended the inaugural Scripps Research Technology Summit in September 2024 to learn about efforts that encourage entrepreneurship and guide technologies toward practical applications. The summit also explored how scientists are working closely with industry partners to tackle critical gaps in healthcare and enhance the well-being of communities, particularly in the areas of neuroscience, oncology, protein engineering, vaccine development, climate science and more.
The summit featured several institute faculty members who presented their cutting-edge research. Among them was Andrew Ward, PhD, a professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, who shared the floor with David Kaufman, MD, PhD, a partner of the healthcare venture firm Third Rock Ventures. During their panel, Ward and Kaufman discussed collaborative efforts to commercialize work on vaccine and antibody designs. They also highlighted how Scripps Research partnerships can accelerate breakthrough discoveries and bring new technologies to market.
“My group focuses on structure-based vaccine and antibody design across an increasing range of targets; it started in HIV and influenza and has since expanded to just about anything we can put in our machines,” Ward said during the talk. “I had sort of outgrown what we could do in the lab in terms of resources, personnel and scope…so much of my initial relationship with David revolved around what more we could achieve.”
“Scripps Research has been incredible to work with,” Kaufman added. “This is an environment where faculty are encouraged to have these kinds of relationships, and postdocs and staff scientists are also encouraged to explore these relationships in a way that’s ethical and creates opportunities for learning.”
In the following panel, Xin Jin, PhD, an associate neuroscience professor, spoke with Jeffrey Kelly, PhD, the Lita Annenberg Hazen Professor of Chemistry, whose lab developed the drug tafamidis to treat transthyretin amyloidosis and cardiomyopathy. They discussed transformative therapies and technologies for neurodegenerative diseases, mainly around the need for foundational research.
“Drug development is a team sport,” said Kelly at the panel. “There are no transformative drugs without incredible research efforts, and they take a long time…the research that can set up a first-in-class medicine can sometimes take 20 years—as it did in my case—but when you start a company, you really have to be in the development phase.”
“Some of my early training was actually done at Scripps Research when I was a summer intern in Benjamin Cravatt’s lab, and that planted a seed to be acutely aware of what technology is available and how to capitalize on it to potentially impact human health,” noted Jin. “Thinking back over the past 10 years, there are technologies we have now that we didn’t before, including CRISPR, the single-cell genomics assay, high-content imaging tools, and all the way to ChatGPT. How do we integrate and maximalize capitalization on such technology so it leads to something new?”
During another session, Christian Diercks, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, spoke about his directed evolution platform to accelerate the development of enzyme therapeutics. Used in protein engineering, directed evolution is a laborious technique used to alter or augment the function of enzymes and proteins. Nevertheless, Diercks said, the technique has widespread commercial application.
“This market is growing and suffering from relying on bacterial enzymes in the clinic,” he pointed out. “Bacteria enzyme therapies suffer from antidrug antibodies—so immune responses—but also from toxicities. However, we can take an enzyme that doesn’t have antidrug antibodies, so no immunogenicity and no toxicity, and we can evolve the function to replace those therapies.”
Ahmed Badran, PhD, also an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, took the stage to delve into how his lab is improving the efficiency of the enzyme rubisco—Earth’s most abundant protein that’s responsible for capturing carbon dioxide in photosynthetic organisms. Although rubisco is slow and prone to mistakes, boosting its efficiency could potentially capture hundreds of megatons of CO2 annually through engineered plants.
“Here in my lab at Scripps Research, we’ve developed a number of technologies that allow us to not only understand why this enzyme does what it does, but also to potentially improve its activity,” said Badran.
His lab is now exploring commercialization opportunities—both through microbial production of engineered rubisco and by engineering improved rubisco in plants—with potential applications in agriculture, bioproduction and climate change mitigation.
On the topic of neurodegenerative diseases, Keren Lasker, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, highlighted that one of the most pressing healthcare challenges is an escalating number of dementia patients. Symptom severity, she noted, is correlated to the formation of toxic protein aggregates in neurons. Lasker explained her novel method to detect and degrade toxic protein aggregates, which are clusters of misfolded proteins that can disrupt normal cell function. Oftentimes, these aggregates cannot be broken down during autophagy—a natural process in which cells degrade and recycle unnecessary components.
“Aggregates are usually very solid, and that might be one of the reasons that autophagy is unable to deal with them,” said Lasker. “Using our technology, we can change the biophysics of the aggregate material and allow for degradation to happen.”
During his presentation on cancer, Peng Wu, PhD, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, shared insight about his work to improve immunotherapy by targeting sugar molecules on the surface of tumor cells. Current cancer therapies that utilize the immune system to fight tumors don’t always work. However, Wu and his team discovered that tumor cells have high levels of a sugar molecule called sialic acid, which is vital to the mammalian immune system. Sialic acid, Wu’s team found, creates a barrier to immune cells, preventing them from attacking the tumor.
“The development of cancer immunotherapy based on immune checkpoint blockade has revolutionized how cancers can be treated—however, the majority of patients don’t respond to such treatment,” said Wu. “We’ve developed two complementary technologies that enable us to block this resistance.”
The first technology removes the sialic acid barrier, and the second breaks down immune-suppressing proteins on tumor cells. Wu mentioned that his team hopes to start a company to evaluate a new cancer treatment protein they created using a specially designed enzyme.
Following the speaker sessions, summit attendees joined a strategic partnering event where they met one-on-one with Scripps Research scientists to further explore how to turn breakthrough discoveries into market-ready technologies by working together.
“It’s been inspiring to see the impact of our work and the potential for collaboration,” concluded Meenakshy Iyer, PhD, the senior director of the Office of Technology Development.
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