Stanley King II, PhD, is senior director of business development at Emulate, a life sciences start-up that has created "Organs-on-Chips" technology. It's a clear, plastic chip the size of an AA battery that can recreate the biochemistry and movements of tissue in organs such as the lung, liver, intestine and skin. The plastic vessels on the Organ-Chips are lined with living cells that are cultured under continuous blood flow and mechanical forces. The cells on the chip and the chip itself work together to perform biological functions that mimic the human body. The Monitor asked King about his job and how he got it.
What do you do at Emulate?
My job is to work with researchers in academia and industry who want to partner with us. The technology is attractive to researchers because it is designed to predict human response more accurately than animal testing or cell cultures in a petri dish. This can improve the testing of new drugs or understanding of diseases.
Once we partner with an organization, my job is to outline the scope of the project. I also determine who is responsible for which tasks, and the rights involved in new discoveries. For example, if we work with a drug company, new findings about the drug are owned by the drug company, while Emulate owns discoveries related to new uses or innovations of the Organ-Chips.
What are some of the businesses you're partnering with?
Johnson & Johnson is using our Organ-Chips to study drug side effects, such as thrombosis. Merck is using them to better develop new medicines for respiratory diseases of the lung, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma. We're also partnering with organizations like the Michael J. Fox Foundation to research methods of reducing the side effects of promising new drugs for Parkinson's disease.
How do you use your psychology training?
My graduate training in neuroscience and behavior taught me how to use rigor and the scientific method in my critical thinking, and I rely on these skills when I'm facing a particular challenge, such as determining who Emulate should collaborate with. I form a hypothesis about who may be a good partner, then test my hypothesis by asking good questions and gathering information. I research the potential partner's past drug research, their relationships with experts in a disease area and their track record with other business collaborations. I use this information to guide Emulate's decision-making.
Where did you get the training and experience needed for this job?
During graduate school at the University of Virginia, I knew I didn't want to become a professor, but I was interested in staying close to science. I started working as an intern in the university's technology transfer office to help translate research discoveries into businesses that could create products to benefit society.
For example, I identified potential licensing partners for medical device and life science inventions. In 2010, I took a job at MIT in the technology licensing office, where I did similar work. Then in 2013, I started working at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard in business development and licensing. My role involved identifying academic research inventions that could be patented, along with commercial partners who would have interest in translating this research into products.
The research that was coming out of the Wyss Institute was truly groundbreaking, and I enjoyed working with the researchers on strategies to give their ideas therapeutic value as commercial products. They would come to me with an idea or research finding and we'd talk about whether it was patentable, potential applications for the idea, what problem or societal need it addressed, and next steps for commercializing the idea.
I also spent some time in Rwanda through an international nonprofit doing economic development and entrepreneurship training to increase employment for youth in Rwanda.
How did you find out about the job?
Emulate was spun out of the Wyss Institute to commercialize the Organs-on-Chips technology. While I was working at Wyss, I interacted regularly with the researchers who were interested in forming a company based on this technology. They founded Emulate in 2014, and two years later, they were ready to expand their business development team. I had been in Rwanda, and when I returned, the timing was right and Emulate invited me to join the team.
What do you find challenging or difficult about your job?
Whenever you are working on innovative technology, it can be difficult to introduce new ideas that challenge the status quo. We are creating a system that will allow us to refine or replace traditional use of animal models and cell cultures, and it's challenging to find partners who are committed to long-term funding for what we are trying to do.
The majority of people I talk to are receptive and definitely intrigued by the idea. They would like to see more data that prove the specific applications for the Organs-on-Chips technology. We're working with collaborators who share our vision in order to build additional data.
What do you enjoy about your job?
I like the dynamism of it. Every day we get closer to making a significant impact on human health by developing technology that better recapitulates human biology. I hope our technology will lead to new discoveries, like more effective drugs, safer chemicals and foods for people, and reductions in the number of animals being used in biomedical research.
