Boston | July 2, 2026

 

As federal support for scientific research has grown less predictable, academic institutions are searching for new models to keep discoveries moving from the lab toward real-world impact. A growing partnership at Harvard University offers a promising template.

Earlier this year, Harvard announced the expansion of a research alliance with Northpond Labs, the R&D affiliate of Northpond Ventures. The program, which supports scientists across Harvard Medical School, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, will help fund the translation of fundamental research into healthcare solutions with clinical applications. The university-wide alliance builds on a successful partnership launched in 2020 between Northpond Ventures and Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Founded in 2009 with the support of Swiss philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss, the institute is dedicated to addressing global challenges with solutions that take inspiration from nature.

We sat down with Samuel Inverso, Director of Business Development for Partnerships at the Wyss Institute, to talk about the growth of the research alliance, what makes it work, and the future of academia-industry collaboration.

Could you give a brief introduction to the Wyss Institute and the research alliance with Northpond Labs? What were the origins of this collaboration, and how has it developed over the last five years?

The Wyss Institute is Harvard’s nonprofit research and development engine for biologically inspired engineering. Since 2009 we’ve focused on translating groundbreaking discoveries out of the lab and into real-world solutions for human and planetary health, and a big part of that is finding new ways to fund the messy middle between a discovery and a company.

The Northpond alliance is a great example. In 2020 the Wyss formed its very first research and innovation alliance, with Northpond Labs, the R&D affiliate of Northpond Ventures. Northpond committed $12 million over five years to create the Laboratory for Bioengineering Research and Innovation here at the Wyss, with a separate contribution to a director’s innovation fund for earlier-stage work. The vision came directly from our Founding Director Don Ingber and Northpond’s founder and CEO Mike Rubin, and Harvard’s Office of Technology Development built the framework that made it work.

Over five years it has steadily delivered. The first funded project was our Controlled Enzymatic RNA Synthesis technology, which became the startup EnPlusOne Biosciences in 2022. From there the Lab supported SomaCode out of George Church’s lab in 2022, Lab-on-a-Molecule with Wesley Wong in 2023, and AminoX from the Church and Jim Collins labs in 2024, spanning cell therapy, drug discovery, and protein engineering. A second company launched out of the alliance in stealth in 2025, and several other supported projects are still in development.

Then this May, Harvard expanded the alliance well beyond the Wyss, extending it across Harvard Medical School, SEAS, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, with HMS receiving direct funding to de-risk promising therapeutic candidates. So in five years it has gone from one lab and one project to a university-wide translation engine.

The Wyss-Northpond research alliance has been described as the first of its kind. What sets it apart from other academia-industry collaborations, both from the perspective of the investors and that of the researchers?

For Northpond Labs, the alliance creates a meaningful way to engage with promising science early — not as an outside investor evaluating opportunities after the fact, but as a mission-aligned partner helping researchers think through what it will take for their discoveries to become real-world solutions. That collaborative approach is reinforced by the involvement of Mike Rubin, who holds a Visiting Scholar appointment and helps guide the Lab alongside Wyss Translation Director Angelika Fretzen. Together, they bring venture experience, translational perspective, and flexible support to technologies while they are still being shaped and strengthened.

For the researchers, it solves the problem that kills most great academic technology: the gap between a promising result and something a venture investor will actually fund. Our teams get milestone-based support to validate and de-risk their technology toward commercialization and venture creation, without having to contort the work to fit a traditional grant cycle. They keep doing rigorous science, they get a real path to the clinic or the market, and they get guidance through the venture process they wouldn’t otherwise see inside academia. The investor side and the researcher side are aligned around the same thing, which is moving the technology forward.

 

In addition to the recent expansion of the alliance at Harvard, Northpond has established similar programs at other universities, while Wyss entered into another climate-focused research alliance with another VC firm. What aspects of this program have made it such a replicable model?

A few things make it portable. The mission is unusually clear, which is translation with a real commercial pathway. The partner is embedded rather than at arm’s length. Project selection is milestone-driven, so funding follows progress.

Part of what makes it work at the Wyss specifically is that we already have an internal pipeline feeding it. Our Validation Project program takes technologies that have made it through significant concept refinement and meet defined technical, product development, and intellectual property criteria, then de-risks them further while folding in business development expertise, all against a rigorous timeline with specific milestones. That’s not a coincidence alongside the alliance, it’s the engine behind it. Every project Northpond has backed, from eRNA to SomaCode to Lab-on-a-Molecule to AminoX, came up through that Validation Project pipeline, so there’s always a strong pool of de-risked, investment-ready candidates for the next step.

That combination has proven it travels. Northpond took the same model to MIT in 2022 with the MIT-Northpond Program, and to Stanford Medicine in 2023 with the Northpond Laboratories program. And it travels across domains, not just institutions. In 2023, the Wyss used the same architecture with Collaborative Fund, a $15 million alliance that created our Laboratory for Sustainable Materials Research and Innovation, aimed at sustainable materials and climate. Same playbook, with Sophie Bakalar from Collab Fund working alongside Angelika Fretzen, just pointed at a different set of problems. When the core structure works, you can swap the partner and the problem and it holds.

This partnership launched in 2020, before the recent turbulence around federal research grants. How do you see the funding landscape evolving over the next decade? What role do you think partnerships like this will end up playing?

Federal funding has been the foundation of basic science for generations, and I don’t see that changing in terms of importance. What has changed is the level of volatility, and that has made diversified funding less of a nice-to-have and more of a necessity for any institution that wants to keep moving discoveries forward reliably.

Where alliances like ours fit is the translational gap specifically. Federal grants are built to fund fundamental discovery, and they rarely cover the validation and de-risking work that turns a discovery into something investable. That’s the exact stretch this model is designed for. Over the next decade I expect to see a lot more of these blended structures, where industry, venture, and philanthropic partners come together with universities to bridge that gap and accelerate translation. The way I’d put it is that partnerships like this don’t replace federal funding of basic research; they complement it, and they give breakthrough technologies a much more dependable route out of the lab.