aramadourian_flagshippioneering
18 July 2018

LSIPR 50 2018: The entrepreneurial bug

Since its founding in 2000, Flagship Pioneering has set up and fostered the development of more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in $20 billion in aggregate value, more than 500 issued patents, and more than 50 clinical trials for novel therapeutic agents.

It’s a business that creates and manages life sciences ventures. Every year, it spins out six to eight new companies from its VentureLabs core (its innovation foundry), all of which have unique needs.

Among its impressive portfolio sits Denali Therapeutics, a biotechnology company focused on neurodegenerative diseases, and genome-editing company Editas Medicine.

Aram Adourian, partner, knowledge management at Flagship Pioneering, explains: “In short, there are many ideas and interesting projects to pursue—which is a good problem to have!”

Adourian’s job is to lead a functional area that coordinates, supervises, and resources activities related to Flagship Pioneering’s internal scientific information requirements.

The aim is to leverage internal and external knowledge and informatics across the breadth of the company’s pioneering activities.

This ranges from bioinformatics and statistical and data analysis, to management and organisation of internally-generated knowledge, to mining external scientific and clinical information.

He’s constantly partnering across the organisation and ecosystem to work on the most pressing and mission-critical projects.

Multi-strand research

At 70 people and growing, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Flagship Pioneering is an organisation “full of incredibly intelligent, motivated, and highly visionary people”, he says. And because of the unique process for innovation that the firm has honed over nearly two decades, it’s simultaneously exploring many interesting areas of science.

Flagship Pioneering builds first-in-category companies that create science-based innovations in health, nutrition, and sustainability. The primary focus is on the patients and populations for whom the investment company can improve life and health.

“Advancing a discovery from the lab to the bedside is immensely rewarding."

“At Flagship Pioneering, we target unprecedented innovations far outside the bounds of current thinking,” adds Adourian.

This requires the ability to look at problems from diverse perspectives and to borrow insights from fields that may, at first, seem to be very disparate.

He encourages young scientists to think outside their comfort zones, and to proactively engage those in fields outside their own.

“Innovation and fresh, creative thought arises, often unexpectedly, from being at the interface of different industries, disciplines, and cultures,” he says.

Flagship has a unique approach—its team intentionally distances itself from current thinking to seek out unrealised opportunities for innovation. Adourian explains that this involves applying a highly iterative process to “evolve” hypotheses into viable starting points for new companies.

He adds: “Our work is fundamentally about harnessing novel biology toward these ends, and as such we never lose sight of the translation of our innovations from the laboratory into products that address human problems.”

The entrepreneurial bug

The translational nature of his work at Flagship is a continuation of a common thread throughout Adourian’s career.

Before joining the investment company, he served as chief scientific officer of BG Medicine, a company created in VentureLabs. It develops diagnostic solutions to aid in the clinical management of chronic diseases.

Adourian focused his efforts leveraging innovative systems, biology data analysis and acquisition approaches toward unravelling the clinical, genetic, and pathological aspects of complex chronic diseases.

“Advancing a discovery from the lab to the bedside is immensely rewarding, and I’m particularly proud of my interdisciplinary group’s achievements in translational science,” he adds.

His team successfully progressed a set of basic scientific findings from the bench through to the clinic, and launched one of the few Food and Drug Administration-cleared clinical diagnostic tests for cardiovascular disease.

This assay is now aiding clinicians to treat patients with chronic heart failure and other cardiac conditions across the globe.

In the late 1990s, he developed novel systems and approaches for biomolecular sequencing, analysis and modelling at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, where he “caught the entrepreneurial bug”.

According to the partner, his work at MIT was “part and parcel of the revolution that was underway in the biological sciences at the time”.

The revolution had been ushered in by innovations in large-scale measurement and data analysis technologies.

“For the first time, we were able perform experiments that measured genome-wide gene and protein expression, high-throughput measurements of thousands of products of metabolism, and interactions among these biomolecular analytes,” Adourian explains.

The mathematical and scientific challenges involved in analysing and making sense of the flood of data drew him to MIT.

In collaboration with colleagues, Adourian helped to devise approaches that borrowed from fields including physics and statistical mechanics to address challenges in DNA sequencing and gene expression, mass spectrometry, and data integration and interpretation.

His work led to numerous patents and a startup company focused on innovations in DNA sequencing, he says.

Adourian credits his academic mentors at Harvard and MIT, Robert Westervelt and Paul Matsudaira, respectively, who fundamentally shaped the way he thinks about science and technology.

Another individual who’s had a great influence is Noubar Afeyan, the founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, who has been an “inspirational leader” both at the cutting edge of science and in entrepreneurship.

“He’s created a fundamentally unique process for pioneering and ‘entrepreneuring’ at Flagship and has created some of the most ground-breaking companies in science and tech,” says Adourian.

The clue is in the name—Flagship Pioneering is all about asking “what if?” and “if only …” to deliver solutions that transform lives and change the world.


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