Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare
Technologies have a powerful ability to accelerate biomedical research. Recent examples include DNA-encoded libraries that enable researchers to simultaneously screen hundreds of thousands of small molecules to identify drug leads; diverse methods to precisely alter DNA and RNA sequences in living cells; and software platforms that aggregate and share the genomic data that drives discoveries.
However, technology development is often hard to support through traditional grants. The Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, established in 2017 by Dr. Richard Merkin, President and CEO of Heritage Provider Network, fills this void by funding early-stage projects that aim, through novel technologies, to improve how we understand and treat disease. The Merkin Institute is led by Broad core institute member David R. Liu, who is a Harvard University professor of chemistry and chemical biology, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and the Richard Merkin Professor and director of the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare.