Industry | Pharmaceutical |
---|---|
Founded | 2016 |
Headquarters | 320 Bent Street; Cambridge, Massachusetts |
Parent | Merck & Co. |
The Exploratory Science Center (ESC) is a pharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, MA. [1] The disease agnostic research site was founded in 2016, and was led by Daria Hazuda (Chief Scientific Officer) until 2021. [2] [3] In late 2021 Juan Alvarez took on leadership as the interim head [4] and Marc Levesque took on leadership in 2022. [5] [6] The Exploratory Science Center is a subsidiary of Merck & Co.
The Exploratory Science Center consists of interdisciplinary scientific groups, including biologists, chemists, and data scientists. [7] [8] The site is co-located with a business development and licensing group [2] as well as the venture capital group Merck Ventures Fund. [9] The research focuses primarily on the microbiome and human immunity, although the research focus is intended to be fluid and flexible. [7] The site is kept intentionally small, so as to facilitate close collaborations and a startup-like atmosphere. [10]
The Exploratory Science Center site was originally occupied by a Schering-Plough innovation research site, which opened in 2006 and focused on small molecule drugs. [11] [12] The innovation research site became part of Merck & Co. when it merged with Schering-Plough in 2009. [13] Shortly after the merger, in 2010 Merck & Co. announced the closure of their Cambridge research site, after which it was occupied by Idenix Pharmaceuticals. [14] [15] [16]
Merck & Co. purchased the pharmaceutical company Idenix Pharmaceuticals in 2014 for $3.85 billion. [17] [18] The acquisition included its previously occupied research space in Kendall Square, a neighborhood within the Biotechnology industry in Boston. The 50,000 square foot space was converted to the current Exploratory Science Center space and began new operations in 2016 under the leadership of Daria Hazuda. [19] This transition back to research in Cambridge came as part of Merck's east coast reorganization, in which employees were transitioned out of New Jersey and Pennsylvania sites, and repositioned in Cambridge, as well as some in the San Francisco Bay Area. [20] [21] The Exploratory Science Center sits as a major component to the parent company Merck & Co. strategy of regional innovation hubs located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, San Francisco, and London. [22]
In 2022, Merck announced it would be expanding the Exploratory Science Center by hiring an additional 100 employees and adding 160,000 additional square feet to the Bent Street facility. [23] The site has capacity for 250 total scientists, and the expansion was paired with an extended remit for the site to include additional capability development as well as target identification and validation. [23]
ESC scientists collaborated with researchers at Princeton University to develop visible-light-based techniques to map protein interactions on cell surfaces. [24] [25] In a collaboration between the ESC and Efficiency Aggregators (an energy efficiency company), an energy efficient biophotoreactor was developed to facilitate these light-powered biological studies. [26] This line of research was aimed at identifying drug targets using visible-light-based photocatalytic methods to interrogate cell surface protein microenvironments. [27] Applications included mapping proteins around PDL1, which is relevant to cancer immunotherapy. This is expected to continue as a line of research for the university laboratory, with applications to more cell surface proteins. [24]
The ESC research site has demonstrated an interest in natural product drug discovery using machine learning and genome mining approaches. This work included the development of an open source tool named DeepBGC, which provided a machine learning approach to biosynthetic gene cluster identification. [28] Researchers have tied this approach to the microbiome, as a way of understanding microbiome mechanisms and their interactions with the human immune system [29]
Researchers at the ESC published the development of a 3D tumor spheroid models which allow for the study of Anaerobic bacteria in the tumor microenvironment. [30] This technology has been used to understand the association of Fusobacterium nucleatum with Colorectal cancer.
Scientists at the ESC partnered with the Bunker Hill Community College in 2018 to pair students with mentor researchers. [31] This was a semester-long program aimed at providing students with scientific exposure and development opportunities.
In 2019, the Exploratory Science Center hosted a microbiome conference titled the "Systems Biology of the Microbiome Symposium". [32]
The Merck Group, branded and commonly known as Merck, is a German multinational science and technology company headquartered in Darmstadt, with about 60,000 employees and a presence in 66 countries. The group includes around 250 companies; the main company is Merck KGaA in Germany. The company is divided into three business lines: Healthcare, Life Sciences and Electronics. Merck was founded in 1668 and is the world's oldest operating chemical and pharmaceutical company, as well as one of the largest pharmaceutical companies globally.
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Raymond F. Schinazi is an American organic medicinal chemist at Emory University with expertise in antiviral agents, pharmacology, and biotechnology. His research focuses on developing treatments for infections caused by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B (HBV), hepatitis C (HCV), herpes, dengue fever, zika, chikungunya, and other emerging viruses. These treatment options include antiviral agents as well as synthetic, biochemical, pharmacological and molecular genetic approaches, including molecular modeling and gene therapy.
Daria J Hazuda is a biochemist known for discovering the first HIV Integrase Strand Transfer Inhibitors (InSTIs) and leading the development of the first HIV integrase inhibitor to gain FDA approval, Isentress (raltegravir). Her lab also determined these inhibitors' mechanism of action and ways the virus could develop resistance to them. Hazuda has also performed extensive research and led the development of antivirals for Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) including Elbasvir and Grazoprevir. She currently serves as Vice President for Infectious Diseases Discovery for Merck and Chief Scientific Officer of their MRL Cambridge Exploratory Science Center.
Miram Merad is a French-Algerian professor in Cancer immunology and the Director of the Marc and Jennifer Lipschultz Precision Immunology Institute (PrIISM) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) in New York, NY. She is the corecipient of the 2018 William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic Immunology and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.