Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare

Technologies have a powerful ability to accelerate biological research across many different fields. Recent examples include such advances as DNA-encoded libraries that make it possible to screen simultaneously hundreds of thousands of chemicals to identify drug leads; blood biopsies to monitor changes in cancers without the need for surgical biopsies; diverse methods to precisely alter DNA and RNA sequences in living cells and organisms; and data platforms that aggregate large genomic information to drive scientific discovery.

However, technology development is often hard to support through traditional grants. The Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, established by Dr. Richard Merkin, President and CEO of Heritage Provider Network, addresses this opportunity by funding novel, early-stage ideas aimed at advancing powerful technological approaches for improving how we understand and treat disease.

The Merkin Institute will be led by Broad core institute member David R. Liu, who is a Harvard University professor of chemistry and chemical biology, an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Richard Merkin Professor and Director of the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies.

Initial projects will span areas such as genome editing, pathogen detection, cancer diagnostics and monitoring and data sciences for genomic medicine.