Harvard – Blavatnik Family Foundation

Torn Muscle? Send In The Gut Microbes For Rapid Repair

Posted on March 7, 2023 (March 8, 2023) by Christine Ongsueng

“Our observations indicate that gut microbes drive the production of a class of regulatory T cells that are constantly exiting the gut and act as sentries that sense damage at distant sites in the body and then act as emissaries to repair that damage,” said study senior author Diane Mathis, professor of immunology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. The team cautions that the findings are based on experiments in mice and remain to be replicated in larger animals and in humans. However, the results raise interesting possibilities about harnessing the power of gut microbes to enhance recovery from injury. […]

New Research Points Way to a Reverse Aging. But Don’t Expect a Miracle Drug Anytime Soon

Posted on January 13, 2023 (January 17, 2023) by Christine Ongsueng

“We think the various causes of aging may be addressable with a single treatment to reset the cell,” said Harvard scientist David Sinclair, the paper’s senior author. “So in the future, we could get one treatment — it could be a pill, it could be an injection — to go back 10 years [in cellular life], and then we’ll repeat that process every 10 years.” That kind of miracle drug won’t be developed overnight. The paper’s authors detail experiments with mice that would have to be replicated in humans before Sinclair’s vision could be realized. Scientists would also have to overcome potential safety and regulatory hurdles. But the paper supports what Sinclair, a genetics professor at Harvard’s Blavatnik Institute and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, calls the “information theory of aging” that identifies the epigenome as the primary culprit in the aging process. […]

2022 Most Disruptive MBA Startups: Lime Therapeutics, Harvard Business School

Posted on December 16, 2022 (January 17, 2023) by Christine Ongsueng

The HBS MBA program provided me with so much: a world-class business education; the ability to bounce ideas off professors and other life sciences practitioners in the Harvard community; a world-class student and alumni network full of depth and breadth; and continual inspiration by the people around me. In addition, being in the MBA program qualified me to earn the Harvard Blavatnik Fellowship. This fellowship, now in its ninth cohort, is an incredible one-year program for Harvard MBAs and post-doctoral students seeking to build bold solutions to healthcare and life sciences challenges. It provides a founder’s salary and some company funding, but most importantly, access to a large and diverse network of biotech executives. Intangibly, the fellowship provides the confidence boost required to take chances at an early-stage life sciences startup. […]