Karp Lab: Biomedical Engineering and the Third Revolution in Biotech

In the past decade, several scholars, led by luminaries such as Nobel Prize winner Phillip Sharp, have been talking about how the Cambridge/Boston biotech area has been at the epicenter of a third revolution in biotech. The first revolution we can trace to the beginnings of molecular and cellular biology. The second was a genomics revolution (much of it happening in Cambridge/Boston) with Sharp’s discovery of RNA splicing in 1977 and his founding of Biogen in 1978. Now Sharp and others see a third biotech revolution in a movement which is bringing together disciplines once seemed separate - such as engineering, computer science and the life sciences.

This year MIT put out a report called “Convergence: The Future of Health” which states: “Convergence comes as a result of the sharing of methods and ideas by chemists, physicists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and life scientists across multiple fields and industries. It is the integration of insights and approaches from historically distinct scientific and technological disciplines. Convergence is a broad effort across the sciences that will play a crucial role in many fields of endeavor. As noted above it needs to be applied to help solve many of the world’s grand challenges.”

We at Biotech Week Boston are excited by the possibilities that this new era of convergence can bring to biotech. We’ve asked writer Nick Paul Taylor (Nature, Fierce Biotech, Regulatory Focus) to report on several innovators who are contributing to this convergence of disciplines and ideas here in Boston. Nick begins his analysis of this exciting multidisciplinary movement in Boston with Jeff Karp, founder of Karp Lab. Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, principal faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Affiliate Faculty at MIT and the Broad Institute and board of advisors at TEDMED - MIT's Technology Review listed him as one of the top innovators in the world under the age of 35 in 2014.

We’re proud to feature world renowned innovator Professor Karp in our report “Convergence in Boston: How multidisciplinary R&D is driving bench-to-bedside breakthroughs”. Karp Labs is “innovating at the intersection of medicine and science” with a firm belief that “innovation occurs at the interface of disciplines” and a focus on translational research. Click to download and read about Karp Labs’ contribution to this convergence phenomenon (no email address or registration is required).

We hope you enjoy Nick’s in-depth report. You can catch up with Jeffrey Karp’s newest discoveries and research at Biotech Week Boston's Cell and Gene Therapy Bioprocessing and Commercialization event this October. Jeffrey's talk is entitled "MSCs on steroids".

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