NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya visits Broad to engage with scientists about the impact of federally-funded research

Bhattacharya next met with David Liu, Broad core institute member, the Richard Merkin Professor, and Director of the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare at Broad. Liu described his team’s efforts to scale up life-saving gene-editing treatments and make them more accessible to the hundreds of millions of people living with genetic diseases.

“NIH support over the past 15 years made possible the development of programmable base editing and prime editing medicines,” Liu said. “Our efforts to organize and scale these medicines are energized by recent signs that the federal government appreciates the tremendous opportunity to help rare disease patients that these developments now offer.” 

Stacey Gabriel, Broad’s executive vice president of platforms and scientific execution, and Niall Lennon, chair and chief scientific officer of Broad Clinical Labs (BCL) briefed Bhattacharya and Auchincloss on BCL, which is moving high-speed, low-cost genomics into the clinic and is based in a new facility in Burlington, Mass.

Finally, the group heard from Ben Neale, co-director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad, and core institute member Evan Macosko about our ongoing efforts to use genetics and other biological data to understand the biology of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and other brain disorders. This work involves assembling and analyzing massive datasets and studying single cells from human tissues to discover new biological pathways driving these conditions and create a faster and more efficient path toward effective treatments.

“NIH must deliver results that matter to the public, and I appreciate the opportunity to visit with scientists who are translating NIH-funded research into real-world discoveries and breakthroughs that will transform patient care,” Bhattacharya said.

“Broad is taking on challenges that are too big for any single lab to address alone,” Auchincloss said. “We are proud that Massachusetts is home to one of the nation’s flagship independent nonprofit research organizations, bringing together researchers from academia, government, industry, and clinical care throughout the country to address the most important challenges in biomedicine.”