Targeting a Network
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January 2007 INDUSTRIAL LIAISON PROGRAM sm 1 SPINOFF SPOTLIGHT Merrimack Pharmaceuticals 3 LAB NEWS » Finding Yourself, FROM THE EDITORS OF TECHNOLOGY REVIEW Wirelessly » A Faster Chip Recipe » More Tolerant Yeast SPINOFF SPOTLIGHT » A New Stab at the Flu Targeting a Network 4 IN THE LAB A New Spin on Chemistry Merrimack Pharmaceuticals identifies new drug candidates by deciphering complicated interactions in disease processes 5 TECH TRANSFER » Joint Project When a group of MIT researchers founded Merri » Green Genes mack Pharmaceuticals in 2000 to try to discover new » Power Boost cancer drugs, they thought it would be five to seven » Sensing a Market years before they identified even one promising can didate. Today they already have seven anticancer 6 THE LIST drugs under development. $1K Warm-up Awards “The research platform has been so much more productive than we ever expected,” says Robert 7 ILP REPORT Mulroy, president and CEO of the company, which is based in Cambridge, MA. Merrimack calls its research platform Network Biology; the idea is to examine the dynamics of a disease process, studying how proteins interact with MIT TECHNOLOGY INSIDER each other and how biological pathways influence, PUBLISHER say, the growth and development of tumors. “A lot JasON POntIN of molecular biology was looking at one step at a EDITOR time,” Mulroy says. “Biology is actually governed by ERIKA JONIETZ dynamic interactions among components. No one M CONTRIBUTOR NEIL SAVage really in the world was studying the systems dyn COPY EDITOR amics of biology.” LINDA LOWENTHAL But in the late 1990s, as the Human Genome Proj GRAPHIC DESIGNER ect advanced, Peter Sorger, professor of biology and Matthew BOUCHARD biological engineering at MIT, was taking a systems ISTOCKPHOTO.CO IMAGE: EDITORIAL INDEPENDENCE oriented approach. A colleague at Harvard, associ Technology Review, Inc. is a wholly owned and separately incorporated subsidiary of ate professor of chemistry and chemical biology MIT that is editorially independent from the university and its administration, fac Gavin MacBeath, was working along similar lines. ulty, and community. All content of the MIT Technology Insider is the sole responsibility Together they developed methods of printing tiny This type of array has since become common, of the editors. Sponsors have no influence over editorial content, and no employee or spots of proteins onto glass. They created plates with Nielsen says, but Merrimack, which Sorger and contractor is permitted to have any financial three or four shallow wells in them, and printed an MacBeath helped found, takes the technology a step positions in companies covered. array of a couple of hundred different proteins in further. Its scientists use the quantitative data they MIT Technology Insider Technology Review, Inc. each well. In experiments they added a different glean about biological pathways to develop a One Main Street, 7th Floor solution containing a dozen or so more proteins to computational model of a whole system. There can Cambridge MA 02142 tel 617-475-8000 fax 617-475-8043 each well and measured how the various proteins be as many as 700 or 800 biological molecules in a www.technologyinsider.com interacted—for instance, how a change in one might model, Mulroy says, all influencing one another in a lead to a change in another, which in turn would send complicated feedback system that’s hard to visualize. out a new signal to alter what was happening. “It was “When we print out maps of our models, they look sparked by a need for dynamic systems data,” says like the nastiest hairball you’ve ever seen,” he says. Ulrik Nielsen, then a postdoc in Sorger’s lab and now But once they have the models, the researchers vice president of research at Merrimack. “The tools can use them to predict how altering a specific just weren’t there at the time.” pathway would produce different results. For CONTINUES ON NEXT PAGE www.technologyreview.com/insider 1 SPINOFF SPOTLIGHT instance, various factors can stimulate the growth of drug, the company used its own technology to under IN BRIEF tumors, including hormones, growth factors, and stand how it works and to figure out which diseases COMPANY interactions among cells. Once they’ve identified the it might treat. Merrimack Pharmaceuticals network of signals that causes cancer cells to grow, It can take hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists can look for drugs that interfere with those bring a drug to market, and so far Merrimack doesn’t CEO Robert Mulroy signals and shut down the network. Unlike more have that kind of money. It is doing fairly well, traditional approaches to drug discovery, which test though, with $140 million in four rounds of financ CONTACT compounds against a single target, Merrimack’s ing, the latest a $65 million round that closed in www.merrimackpharma.com models predict ways to disrupt one or more interac April. It has also received more than $1 million in MAJOR PRODUCTS tions among proteins. Mulroy says that’s a more Small Business Innovation Research grants from the Drug for autoimmune diseases focused, and therefore faster, way to find drugs. National Cancer Institute to develop its technology. Anticancer drugs “Part of what we’re doing is getting a molecular Mulroy thinks Merrimack will probably develop view of what disease is,” he says. “Everything after drugs until they look likely to succeed, and then part that is actually engineering.” ner with a large pharmaceutical company for the The approach is also narrow enough to help target marketing phase. It’s still a bit early to make those FUNDING therapies to specific patients. There are two general decisions, though, he says. $ More than $10 million approaches to personalized medicine, Nielsen says. The company is growing at a good clip, with about One involves actually sequencing a patient’s genome 55 employees and an additional 13 job openings. It PATENT STRENGTH to look for individual variations. The other looks for moved into a new facility in September 2006. / Core protection “biomarkers,” molecules that act as proxies for a par Along with Sorger, MacBeath, and Nielsen, the ticular type of disease—a person with a prostate tumor company’s founders were Anthony Sinskey, an MIT TIME TO MARKET might have an elevated level of prostatespecific anti professor of microbiology and health sciences and More than three years gen (PSA) in his bloodstream, for instance. That technology, who now sits on the company’s board of approach, says Nielsen, is too generic. Rather than directors; associate professor of biology Michael look for proxies, Merrimack’s models allow it to dis Yaffe, who sits on the scientific advisory board; and cover biomarkers directly involved in the disease pro former biology professor Michael Cardone. Douglas 5432194 cess, and not those that may be a mere byproduct. Lauffenburger, the Uncas and Helen Whitaker 5467893 Such biomarkers might be not just indicators of the Professor of Bioengineering and director of MIT’s 3187865 disease but potential targets for therapy. He says the biologicalengineering division, sits on the scientific 6541450 same computational models used to identify disease advisory board, as do Sorger and MacBeath. 3571895 pathways in the first place can also identify biomark Liana Moussatos, an analyst at Pacific Growth 8462318 7526127 ers that reveal which patient has a particular path Equities, calls Merrimack’s approach “insightful, way activated, so that a drug developed for that unique, and cuttingedge.” She says Merrimack is pathway could be given to that patient. ahead of other companies using systems biology to PATENT MAP Of the seven possible anticancer drugs the com search for drugs, having already started clinical trials For a graphical analysis of Merrimack’s patent pany has in its labs, Mulroy hopes to get one into to show that the therapies work. According to position, go to clinical trials each year over the next five years, start Moussatos, “It could be the platform that starts put www.ipvisioninc.com/ ing this year. In general, getting a drug approved can ting personalized medicine into actual practice.” techinsider/01/07. take five to seven years, depending in part on how long it takes to recruit enough patients with the tar geted disease into the trials. Merrimack already has a drug for autoimmune Looking for MIT diseases in clinical trials. Called M093, it is being tested in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, psoria Faculty Research? sis, multiple sclerosis, and uveitis, an inflammatory WE NEED YOUR OPINION disease of the eye. It is a genetically engineered ver We invite you to participate sion of a natural protein called alpha fetoprotein. in a brief online survey that will help us improve the Women produce more of the protein during preg Try the ILP MIT Technology Insider. nancy; many doctors have anecdotally noted a cor responding decrease of symptoms in pregnant KnowledgeBase To participate, please visit: patients with autoimmune diseases such as rheuma http://www.surveymonkey.com/ > Please Click Here s.asp?u=534482837251. toid arthritis and psoriasis. The drug was actually developed by Mulroy’s former company, Atlantic Biopharmaceuticals, which merged with Merrimack in 2002. Although Merrimack didn’t design that www.technologyreview.com/insider 2 LAB NEWS Finding Yourself, Wirelessly NEWS LINKS Researchers in the SENSEable City Laboratory have launched a new socialnetworking application that allows Memory experts show sleeping rats may have users to broadcast their physical location to an approved list of friends. Called iFind, the program computes a visual dreams user’s location based on signals broadcast from a WiFi access point to a wireless networking card in a portable web.mit.edu/newsoffice/ device such as a laptop. The software, which pinpoints a user’s location to within a few meters and displays it as 2006/visual-cortex.html a dot on a map of the MIT campus, uses peertopeer networking to broadcast that information to anyone the user wants.