Two MIT students, every with a powerful 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 guide organizations that may deliver 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 wash 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 by MIT’s innovation ecosystem, together with the Sandbox, the Legatum Middle, 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 completely on testing their enterprise plans and exercising decision-making abilities — vital to startup success — with the steerage of MIT mentors.
“It’s a testomony to the help and route they’ve acquired from the MIT neighborhood that their entrepreneurial aspirations have advanced 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 strong startups, together with low-carbon cement producer Chic Methods and SiTration, which is utilizing a brand new kind of filtration membrane to extract vital supplies similar to lithium.
A safer approach to ship breakthrough medicines
Nucleic acid therapeutics, together with mRNA and CRISPR, are disrupting in the present day’s scientific panorama because of their promise of focusing on illness remedy in keeping with genetic blueprints. However the first strategies of delivering these molecules to the physique used viruses as their transport, elevating affected person security issues.
“People have found out engineer sure viruses present in nature to ship particular cargoes [for disease treatment],” says Knappe. “However as a result of they seem like viruses, the human immune system sees them as a hazard sign and creates an immune response that may be dangerous to sufferers.”
Given the security profile problems with viral supply, researchers turned to non-viral applied sciences that use lipid nanoparticle expertise, a mix 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 seem like viruses there, the immune system typically tolerates them,” provides Knappe.
Current knowledge present lipid nanoparticles can now goal the lung, opening the potential for novel remedies of lethal cancers and different ailments.
Knappe’s work in MIT’s Bathe BioNanoLab centered on constructing such a non-viral supply platform based mostly on a special expertise: nucleic acid nanoparticles, which mix the enticing elements of each viral and non-viral methods. Knappe will spend his Kavanaugh Fellowship yr creating proof-of-concept knowledge for his drug supply technique and constructing the staff and funding wanted to commercialize the expertise.
A PhD candidate within the Division of Chemical Engineering (ChemE), Knappe was initially interested in 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 in his Kavanaugh yr, together with the necessity to pinpoint the suitable story that may persuade enterprise capitalists and different funders to guess on his expertise. Attracting expertise can be prime of thoughts. “How do you persuade actually gifted those that have a number of alternatives to work on what you’re employed on? Constructing the primary staff goes to be vital,” he says. The community Knappe has been constructing in his years at MIT is paying dividends now.
Focusing on “endlessly chemical substances” in water
That community consists of Shah. The 2 fellows met after they labored on the MIT Science Coverage Assessment, a student-run journal involved with the intersection of science, expertise, and coverage. Knappe and Shah didn’t compete immediately academically however used their biweekly espresso walks as a welcome sounding board. Naturally, they had been happy after they came upon they’d each been chosen for the Kavanaugh Fellowship. Thus far, they’ve been too busy to have a good time over a beer.
“We’re good collaborators with analysis, as effectively,” says Shah. “Now we’re happening this entrepreneurial journey collectively. It’s been thrilling.”
Shah is a PhD candidate in ChemE’s Chemical Engineering Apply program. He obtained within the international crucial for cleaner water at a younger age. His hometown of Surat is the center of India’s textile trade. “Rising up, it wasn’t onerous to see the dye-colored water flowing into your rivers and streams,” Shah says. “Taking part in a job in fostering constructive change in water remedy fills me with a profound sense of objective.”
Shah’s work, broadly, is to wash poisonous chemical substances referred to as micropollutants from water in an environment friendly and sustainable method. “It’s humanly unimaginable to show a blind eye to our water issues,” he says, which could be categorized as accessibility, availability, and high quality. Water issues are international and complicated, not simply due to the technological challenges but additionally sociopolitical ones, he provides.
Manufactured chemical substances referred to as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or “endlessly chemical substances,” are within the information today. PFAS, which go into making nonstick cookware and waterproof clothes, are simply considered one of greater than 10,000 such rising contaminants which have leached into water streams. “These are extraordinarily tough to take away utilizing current methods due to their chemical variety 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 modern microparticle expertise, hydroGel, to take away these micropollutants in an efficient, facile, and sustainable method. Hydrogels are a broad class of polymer supplies that may maintain massive 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 have now functionalized these particles with tunable chemistries to focus on totally different micropollutants in a single unit operation.”
Resulting from its outsized environmental affect, industrial water is the primary utility Shah is focusing on. In the present day, wastewater remedy emits greater than 3 p.c of world carbon dioxide emissions, which is greater than the delivery trade’s emissions, for instance. The present cutting-edge for eradicating micropollutants within the trade 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 onerous to reuse. “Our particles are reusable, theoretically infinitely.”
“I’m very excited to have the ability to make the most of the mentorship we have now from the Kavanaugh staff to take this expertise 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 neighborhood
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 staff of seasoned professionals within the water house from the MIT Enterprise Mentoring Service. “They’ve helped us each step of the best way as we take into consideration commercializing the expertise,” he says.
Shah labored with MIT Sandbox, which gives a seed grant to assist discover the suitable product-market match. He’s additionally a fellow with the Legatum Middle for Growth and Entrepreneurship, which focuses on entrepreneurship in international development markets.
“We’re exploring the potential for this expertise and its utility in a number of totally different markets, together with India. As a result of that’s near my coronary heart,” Shah says. “The Legatum neighborhood has been distinctive, the place you possibly can have these extraordinarily onerous conversations, confront your self with these fears, after which discuss it out with the group of fellows.”
The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Meals Methods Lab, or J-WAFS, has been an integral a part of Shah’s journey with analysis and commercialization help by 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 exterior of MIT however with robust on-campus ties similar to Nucleate Activator and Frequency Bio.
It was throughout considered one of 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 little thing that they had been going by and what they had been enthusiastic about and challenged with. I nonetheless discuss to them fairly usually to today,” 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 neighborhood. “MIT has been greater than a dream come true,” he says. He could have the chance to discover a special aspect of the establishment as he enters the MBA program at MIT Sloan Faculty of Administration this fall. Shah expects this program, alongside together with his Kavanaugh coaching, will provide the abilities he must scale the enterprise so it could make a distinction on the planet.
“I at all times hold coming again to the query ‘How does what I do matter to the particular person on the road?’ This guides me to take a look at the larger image, to contextualize my analysis to fixing essential 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 objective. “With the suitable infrastructure, between primary elementary science, carried out in academia, funded by authorities, after which translated by firms, we are able to make merchandise that might enhance everybody’s life internationally,” 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 a good time.
