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Harvard professor turns to private equity to counter Trump research cuts
Under the deal announced Monday, İş Private Equity, a Turkish firm, has committed $39 million to a laboratory run by Gökhan Hotamışlıgil, a professor of genetics and metabolism at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The firm, which is a branch of Turkey's İşbank Group, also plans to invest an undisclosed amount of money in any drug candidates that come out of Hotamışlıgil's laboratory and are moved into a new biotech called Enlila.
It's a relatively modest deal, in the scope of investment banking. But the collaboration provides much-needed capital at a time when the model for funding scientific research has been thrown into chaos.
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In the first six months of the Trump administration, government officials terminated at least
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In all,
Plans for the İş Private Equity collaboration pre-date the Trump administration's science grant retrenchment. Talks began last year, when Hotamışlıgil traveled to Turkey — where he was born and attended university — for a symposium celebrating İşbank Group's centennial. The event was filled with Nobel laureates, entrepreneurs, and others discussing the future of Turkey.
Hotamışlıgil gave a presentation at the event detailing his experience as a scientist and his decades-long work exploring fatty acid binding proteins, or FABPs. This hormone is produced in fat cells and secreted into the blood, where it interacts with proteins to form a substance called fabkin. Elevated levels of fabkin are linked to obesity,
The presentation caught the attention of İşbank's chief executive.
Financing scientific research has always been a challenge, as Hotamışlıgil detailed to the İşbank Group event crowd. It's not easy to explore scientific unknowns while scrounging up grants and other capital.
'In the past, we were complaining about the principles of funding, which overwhelmingly tilted toward more conservative, more guaranteed outcomes… Then, suddenly, there was no funding,' Hotamışlıgil told STAT. Even now, Hotamışlıgil said he is shocked that a country like the U.S. would pull back its scientific financing so drastically, given how much success it's lent to large corporations and research institutions that elicit international envy.
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The federal cuts have plunged many Chan School staff and faculty into cycles of grief and anger, said Amanda Spickard, the associate dean for research strategy and external affairs. They're now emerging from the daze to brainstorm new ways of replacing lost research dollars.
In a letter sent out last week, the school's dean of faculty, Andrea Baccarelli, laid out an initial slate of strategies for replacing lost funding, including asking corporate partners to make $100,000 gifts to support Ph.D. students and post-doctorate fellows. The idea has been well-received by executives in need of highly trained employees, said Sarah Branstrator, managing director of academic strategy and research partnerships at the Chan School.
School officials are also hopeful that the İşbank collaboration could be the first of multiple privately financed labs.
There have been isolated examples in which investment firms have financed specific university centers or research projects, often for preferential access to any new scientific innovations that come out of the laboratories.
Just across the Charles River from the Chan School, Harvard's Wyss Institute has spent the last five years working with an affiliate of the science-focused VC firm Northpond Ventures. Northpond initially committed $12 million to the alliance in 2020, and has made
New York investment firm Deerfield Management has been much more aggressive in funding early-stage research. It has committed around $390 million to collaborations with
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Hotamışlıgil's lab may be a unique case, as metabolism has become a hot area of drug development, thanks to the success of Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk's GLP-1 weight loss medications. Obesity-focused startups are still raking in
Meanwhile, other areas of public health research, like infectious diseases and vaccines, are a
'It is probably too optimistic to say that government funding could completely be replaced. Government funding is really crucial to keep science as its engine. Having said that, for the school faculty, there are incredible opportunities, in my view,' Hotamışlıgil said. '[This] gives some hope that there's also some alternative ways that we can support science.'
