The 1,015th Meeting of the Northeastern Section of the

American Chemical Society

Featured Presentation

Translational Drug Discovery Platforms Merging Human Tissue Chips and Computational Biology

By Murat Cirit, CEO & Co-Founder, Javelin Biotech

Thursday, October 13, 2022

Register for the virtual October meeting via Zoom link at:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIpd-2vqDguG93Mk6SCoCtqY5psCh8AUg55

Meeting Program:

6:30 – 7:00 pm   Virtual Networking – Meet and Greet with Awardees

7:00 pm

• Presentation of 50, 60, and 70-Year Member Awards by Carol Mulrooney, NESACS Chair
• Featured Presentation by Murat Cirit, CEO & Co-Founder, Javelin Biotech
  • Title: Translational Drug Discovery Platforms Merging Human Tissue Chips and      Computational Biology

Abstract:

The translational gap between preclinical drug discovery and clinical development is a major factor driving drug development costs and high clinical attrition rates. Although pharmaceutical companies spend the largest portion of their preclinical budget for lead optimization to address this problem, current workflows, which heavily rely on animal models, deliver poor translational success (~10%). While recent technological advancements, especially in the AI/ML field, promise to improve drug discovery, the underlying data of these algorithms are still from experimental models with limited translatability. Human-relevant data remains one of the main challenges to drastically improve drug discovery.

At Javelin Biotech, we develop predictive drug discovery platforms, which combine human tissue chips with companion translational software, to bridge this gap. We use recent advances in microfluidic and tissue engineering to design application-specific human tissue chips, which generate highly translational results. Quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) and AI/ML-based predictive algorithms are developed for accurate in vitro in vivo translation of Javelin chip results to clinical predictions. Our application development efforts span from pharmacokinetic to disease modeling and toxicology.

Biography:

Murat Cirit, PhD is a bioengineer and the co-founder & CEO of Javelin Biotech. Prior to founding Javelin Biotech, he was the founding PI of the Translational Center of Tissue Chip Technologies (TC²T) at MIT. Before MIT, he was a computational biologist at Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, an oncology focused clinical stage company. He received a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from North Carolina State University and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Middle East Technical University in Turkey. The scope of his research spans development of complex in vitro physiological models for drug discovery (organ- and human on a chip), computational biology (systems biology and quantitative systems pharmacology), and in vitro in vivo translation methodologies. He brings an interdisciplinary approach, combining experimental knowledge and computational modeling, to develop human centric preclinical drug discovery platforms for a deeper understanding of biological, physiological, and pharmacological processes.