BRI Director’s Transformative Award Recipient – Research, Discovery & Innovation Website

Vikram (Vik) Khurana is on the Neurology faculty at Harvard Medical School. He is currently the Chief of the Movement Disorders Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a principal research investigator in the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases. He is also Principal faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, an Associate Member at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and a Robertson Stem Cell Investigator of the New York Stem Cell Foundation. In 2014, Vik co-founded the biotech company Yumanity Therapeutics, where he currently serves as Senior Advisor.

Vik’s clinical and research interests relate to neurodegenerative movement disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple system atrophy, progressive supranuclear palsy and the cerebellar ataxias. He grew up in Sydney, Australia, and is a medical graduate of the University of Sydney. He came to Boston as a Fulbright Scholar in 2001, obtaining his Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University in 2006. His dissertation adviser was Dr Mel Feany in the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He completed his residency in neurology at Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals, and Fellowship training in movement disorders and ataxia at Massachusetts General Hospital with Drs Jeremy Schmahmann, John Growdon and Lew Sudarsky. During that time, he was awarded grants from the American Brain Foundation, Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, Multiple System Atrophy Coalition and Harvard Neurodiscovery Center.

Vik received postdoctoral scientific training in the laboratories of Drs Susan Lindquist and Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute, where, along with his wife Chee Yeun Chung, he led a study that succeeded in identifying and reversing pathologies in stem cell models of Parkinson’s disease (Chung*, Khurana* et al. Science 2013). As you will see on this website, Vik’s current research efforts continue toward development of therapies for neurodegenerative diseases by using models as simple as Baker’s yeast cells, to much more complex human stem cell- and organoid-based models. He is thrilled to have such a great team to join him on this quest.

Once upon a time Vik enjoyed playing blues guitar, photography and long-distance kayaking. These days, in his spare time he struggles to keep up with his two young daughters. Vik would be quite incapacitated without the constant support of his life and scientific partner, Chee Yeun, and his extended family in Australia.

“We hope that this can help us identify the optimal therapy for patients on a personalized basis”
Oliver Jonas, PhD

Oliver Jonas, PhD, MA, a laboratory director in the Department of Radiology, is taking precision medicine to new levels to fight cancer.

He has developed a tiny device, smaller than a grain of rice that, once implanted into part of a tumor, releases small doses of different kinds of anti-cancer therapies directly into the tumor. The device remains implanted for 24 hours and is then retrieved with the surrounding tissue, which is analyzed to measure the effect of each therapy on the tumor.

“We hope that this can help us identify the optimal therapy for patients on a personalized basis,” said Jonas, who first developed the technology as a postdoc at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

Prior to this year, the device had only been tested in animal models; however, a “first-in-man” study began earlier this year with breast cancer patients. Jonas, whose background is in physics, refers to the technology as “lab-in-a-patient” microdevices since they test the phenotypic response of a large number of different anti-cancer agents within tumor tissue in a rapid, minimally invasive assay. The devices are placed into tumors by biopsy needle and retrieved through biopsy or surgical removal. Multiple devices can be implanted into a single tumor or in different tumors at the same time without risk of harm to healthy tissue since the therapies are targeted locally to tumor cells only.

This past November, the Brigham Research Institute recognized Jonas and his lab of cancer biologists and mechanical and biomedical engineers for their innovative research with a BRI Director’s Transformative Award, a $500K two-year grant. The team’s proposal, which was one of 21 submissions, was selected by a scientific advisory board for its novel approach to improving cancer treatments. The announcement of the prize winner was made at Discover Brigham’s award ceremony.

The BRI award will help advance the technology to incorporate advances in micro-manufacturing and in vivo sensing – testing the tissue response inside of the tumor rather than taking the tissue out of the tumor and then testing it – to measure drug effects in real time. The award will also allow the team to conduct additional clinical studies, beginning with lung and ovarian cancer clinical trials at the Brigham, led by Yolonda Colson, MD, PhD, director of the Women’s Lung Cancer Program, and Neil Horowitz, MD, of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, respectively. Jonas says he hopes these studies will provide the early validation needed to make the technology available to patients more broadly.

“We have assembled amazing teams across the departments of Radiology and Surgery and the Surgical Oncology Division to take this technology to patients.”
Oliver Jonas, PhD

“We have assembled amazing teams across the departments of Radiology and Surgery and the Surgical Oncology Division to take this technology to patients,” said Jonas. “The technology is essentially the same for each indication, and the minimally invasive procedures for implantation and retrieval in tissue are also similar. There are clear synergies across the various clinical applications, and I feel very fortunate to bring all these amazing researchers and physicians together as one team.”

Ultimately, Jonas – who has always been interested in the mechanical differences between tumor cells and regular tissue – hopes the device can be used for many other types of cancer.

“The goal with any of these kinds of projects is to develop something that will be used in patients and make a difference,” he said. “That is always the goal from start, and it remains our goal now.”