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Wednesday, November 4, 2009
MHT All-Star Omid Farokhzad: Thinking small
By Jim Schakenbach, Special to Mass High Tech
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Who he is: Farokhzad has made a large impact on medical science by thinking small. He works on an unimaginably tiny scale, developing nanoparticles that enable more targeted and effective treatments for delivering drugs directly to diseased tissues. An associate professor at the Harvard Medical School, he is a co-founder and director of Bind Biosciences Inc. and a co-founder and vice chairman of Selecta Biosciences Inc.
Education: Master’s degree, Boston University; M.D., BU School of Medicine. Fellowship at Harvard University. Post-doctoral training at MIT.
His approach: “I’ve been able to pick challenging problems that are impactful and then assemble the right team to solve them. (At Bind) we constantly try to solve problems and constantly try to do better than before. We consider ourselves our most serious competitor.”
His other team: “My wife and my kids are just amazing. With that kind of support system in place, I can concentrate on other things, like developing nanotechnologies that can apply to medical applications.”
The mentor: “I’ve had outstanding mentors who have had great success. I interned in Bob Langer’s lab. He’s been absolutely persistent in solving difficult problems, creating solutions that have had an impact on many, many lives.”
Thinking back: “I never thought I’d be doing what I’m doing today. I thought I was going to be a doctor and see patients. But then I spent a bunch of years working at Mass. General Hospital with Dr. M. Armin Arnaout. And seeing how he worked, mostly as a scientist, really shifted my mind-set. Then I trained with Bob Langer, and I shifted again. It wasn’t so much that he was doing science as he was doing science with real, near-term applications. You could see impact.”
Looking ahead: “Developing nanoparticles that could deliver drugs was the first generation. My work developing nanoparticles that could deliver drugs in a selective way to diseased tissue contributed to the second generation. Now we’re developing nanotechnologies that can deliver multiple drugs or do multiple things at the same time — for example, deliver drugs and an image or deliver drugs and report back that a cell has received the drug. These are the kinds of technologies that are going to be developed over the next 10 or 20 years.”
On Omid Farokhzad, from Robert Langer:
MIT professor Robert Langer is founder of 20 life sciences companies. He is on the board at Bind Biosciences.
Three attributes of Omid:
“He’s brilliant, charismatic, incredibly driven and highly motivated. Sorry, that’s four things.”
Something no one else knows:
“Well, besides being both an outstanding clinician and a good businessman, he also happens to be very good with his children.”
What makes him a good scientist:
“He’s very smart. He’s got vision, he understands what’s important and he asks good questions.”
What do people need to know about him:
“He’s a terrific example of someone who combines clinical excellence and academic excellence with the ability to commercialize his discoveries.”
What gets him up in the morning:
“Tremendous drive. He wants to figure out new treatments for patients and get them out there.”
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