The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (pronounced "veese") is a cross-disciplinary research institute at Harvard University focused on bridging the gap between academia and industry (translational medicine) by drawing inspiration from nature's design principles to solve challenges in health care and the environment. It is focused on the field of biologically inspired engineering to be distinct from bioengineering and biomedical engineering. The institute also has a focus on applications, intellectual property generation, and commercialization. The Wyss Institute is located in Boston's Longwood Medical Area and has 375 full-time staff. The Wyss is organized around eight focus areas, each of which integrate faculty, postdocs, fellows, and staff scientists. The focus areas are bioinspired therapeutics & diagnostics, diagnostics accelerator, immuno-materials, living cellular devices, molecular robotics, 3D organ engineering, predictive bioanalytics and synthetic biology.
History
In 2005, Harvard University established a faculty working group to envision the future of bioengineering. The group was called the Harvard Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (HIBIE), with the committee focused on synthetic biology, living materials, and biological control. HIBIE was co-chaired by Harvard professors Donald E. Ingber and David J. Mooney. In January 2009, institute was reformed into the Wyss Institute upon receiving a $125 million gift from Hansjörg Wyss. Ingber became the founding director of the Wyss Institute and David Mooney became a founding Core Faculty member, along with Professors Joanna Aizenberg, David A. Edwards, Kit Parker, George M. Whitesides, George Church, Ary Goldberger, William Shih, Robert Wood, James J. Collins, L. Mahadevan, Radhika Nagpal, and Pamela Silver.
In 2013, Hansjörg Wyss gave another $125 million to Harvard University, doubling his initial gift. The funding was used to further the Institute's interdisciplinary research, which includes DNA engineering, cleaning toxins from blood, vibrating insoles to help older adults maintain balance, and a melanoma cancer vaccine. In 2019, Hansjörg Wyss donated a third gift of $131 million to the Wyss Institute. In 2020, the Wyss Institute and Northpond Ventures, a Maryland-based venture capital firm, created the Laboratory for Bioengineering Research and Innovation at the Wyss Institute. The $12 million funding supports research related to RNA therapies, genome engineering, and new drug delivery methods.
Within its first ten years, the institute also spun out 29 startup companies to commercialize Wyss Institute developments.
Scientific developments
The institute was originally founded with fourteen faculty from Harvard University. The institute had around 40 scientists and engineers as a part of the Advanced Technology Team organized around six technology platforms and two cross-platform initiatives across the fields of adaptive material technologies, bioinspired soft robotics, biomimetic microsystems, immuno-materials, living cellular devices, molecular robotics, synthetic biology, and 3D organ engineering. The Wyss Institute has been responsible for a number of scientific developments and spinoffs.
In 2010, Donald Ingber pioneered the first 3D organ-on-a-chip that mimics a human lung. Following the lung-on-a-chip, the team built a kidney-on-a-chip and an intestine-on-a-chip. In 2014, Emulate spun out to make organ chips commercially available for other scientists to use for disease modeling and drug testing, including those at Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Takeda, Roche, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. In 2013, Conor Walsh developed a soft exosuit that uses textiles and cables to replicate leg muscles, which can help a healthy wearer not fatigue as quickly and help people with physical disabilities restore their muscles and increase mobility. In 2016, ReWalk robotics licensed the exosuit technology for the treatment of stroke, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and mobility limitations. In 2019, ReWalk received clearance from the FDA to sell their ReStore soft exosuit for rehabilitation of stroke survivors.