Venture Partner Perspectives: Dr. Scott Weiss (Director of the Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine)

Welcome back to FundRx Venture Partner Perspectives, where a FundRx team member interviews a FundRx Venture Partner or portfolio company executive, with the aim being to share the knowledge and opinions of a diverse array of healthcare clinical and industry experts. We hope these interviews spur further thought and potential innovation.

Today we’re featuring Dr. Scott Weiss, Director of the Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine. He is responsible for 12 faculty and approximately 100 staff that work in the Centers Core Laboratories, the CLIA-approved Laboratory for Molecular Medicine, as well as IT and Education programs. He is also the co-leader of the Systems Genetics and Genomics Unit in the Channing Division of Network Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

He has authored or co-authored over 700 papers and co-written and co-edited four books. He has been continuously funded by NHLBI for 38 years and was recently identified as being in the top 1% of biomedical researchers in terms of scientific impact.

Dr. Chris Duff: What does your current day to day look like, and what’s most exciting to you and your team right now?

Dr. Scott Weiss: I have two jobs. In one job, I’m responsible for a laboratory. I [lead] about 30 faculty and 100 staff, and we’re focused on multiomics approaches to asthma treatments. The other half of my job is personalized medicine, which includes about 20 faculty and 150 staff. We’re focused on genetics and genomics, and moving those into clinical practice at Partner’s Healthcare, which is a 13 hospital healthcare system.

At Partners, the thing that we’re really excited about is how genetics is advancing into clinical practice. I think that there is going to be some cost savings associated, and that’s going to help push genetics forward. This is going to be a trend over the next five years.

In terms of what we’re doing in the lab, there are two areas that are exciting. One is nutraceuticals that can potentially be given to pregnant women, influencing asthma and autoimmune disease [burden of their offspring], and then the other is determining how to predict the best medicines for severe asthma.

Chris: You mentioned previously that one of the greatest unmet needs in your space is new treatments for severe asthma.

Dr. Weiss The issue with severe asthma right now is that there are a variety of new biologic treatments. So if we take a step back, probably one third to half of all of the $80 billion dollars in healthcare costs related to asthma are because of recurrent hospitalizations.

There are a variety of novel biologics that have been developed. The problem with these biologics is that they’re expensive. They don’t seem to work for everybody, so the question is, can you use pharmacogenomics to predict who’s going to respond to one medicine or another? I think there’s this huge opportunity to develop multi-omic predictors of who is going to respond.

Chris: Can asthma be prevented by nutritional interventions in pregnant women, and can we predict who will get asthma based on a biomarker in cord blood? What have been ways people are trying to fix those issues, from your team or otherwise? What are the bottlenecks?

Dr. Weiss: With nutraceuticals, there is clear evidence that Vitamin D can potentially influence asthma occurrence and ease symptoms, based on clinical trials. Which dosage and when should they be given [are questions that] have the potential for new research and also the potential for intervention.

Now how these nutraceuticals interact with the gut microbiome, in terms of disease development, is another area — how can you use metabolomics to potentially guide nutraceuticals?

In prediction planning, I think that the issue here is that 80–90% of all asthma cases are diagnosed by the age of six. But probably 30% of kids are wheezing in the first three years of life on average. That drops to around 15% by age six. We don’t have a good way of predicting those wheezing kids who are likely to have the wheezing go away.

[This is an] ideal situation for biomarkers. If you could get a biomarker that would predict which kids would keep wheezing, you could start treatment earlier, pay more attention to treatment, and not worry about treating the other 15% that are going to get better properly on their own. I think that a biomarker would be a way of differentiating who is going to wheeze and who is not.

Additionally, I think nutraceuticals potentially could have an impact on the overall prevalence of wheezing. So nutraceuticals are something that could potentially take that 30 percent average prevalence and make it 15 percent. That’s the potential there.

Chris: Where have novel technologies had the highest impact in your field, not just specific to those scientific breakthroughs?

Dr. Weiss: I’m going to talk about three things that are critical to both personalized medicine and research.

The first is the decreased cost related to “omics” technology. The fact that sequencing prices have decreased has had a huge impact. Sequencing DNA, RNA, and micro-RNA has totally revolutionized medicine. Completion of the human genome project quintupled the GDP related to the sciences and biotech. So that’s one big scientific breakthrough.

The second, I would say, is the impact AI is having in clinical care. We’re just starting to see this now, but it’s going to have a huge impact. It’s really going to change clinical practice in a big way.

The third thing is moving into the cloud, which is going to be critical for the masses of data that are going to be accumulated on patients in the future. There is going to be a lot more data and information available, and the need for a certain higher computational processing relating to old genomics data.

Chris: What else are you most excited about in terms of the pipeline of innovation in your field or adjacent ones?

Dr. Weiss: Given the complexity of the human genome, building systems biology and network medicine approaches to integrating multiomics data is going to be the key to the future.

There are famous people, both entrepreneurs and scientists, like Dr. Leroy Hood, founder of systems biology and who founded over 10 biotech companies. He was touting the potential of systems biology even as he was building the sequencer to sequence the human genome. So, I think there are some people that have been on this earlier than others.

The challenge here is that there haven’t been numerous adoptions of such systems and network approaches yet. Not a lot of people know how to do them. There are people like Dr. Erik Schadt who are pushing on this, but we cannot point to huge breakthroughs using this approach yet.

The NHLBI, at the National Institutes of Health, has probably committed the most to systems biology. I really do think it’s going to have a huge effect in terms of how we integrate multiomic-type data in complex traits.

Chris: What are your go-to resources that you use to stay up to date about your field and healthcare in general?

Dr. Weiss: For me, I stick with the gold standards. I read Nature and Science every week, and NEJM. I read all the news in those journals, particularly focusing on news related to privacy issues or human subjects. And then for the actual articles, I focus on immunology, microbiomes, anything related to novel methods of network science

I read the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and the American Journal of Respiratory Clinical Care and Medicine every week or every other week. I get articles from GenomeWeb and STAT every day in my inbox. I keep an eye on those for information about the pharma and biotech industry, genetics and genomics, and personalized medicine.

Chris: What is the most rewarding aspect of your current role, and what advice might you give young people interested in science, or even mid-career scientists, to gain a leg up and contribute in a meaningful way?

Dr. Weiss: The critical thing is, you’ve got to do what you love. What I love about my job is that it’s got this entrepreneurial piece, with NIH grants, where I delve into what we’re trying to do at Partner’s HealthCare, and being able to help young people who want to succeed.

I’m a little later on in my career, so it’s really about mentoring and helping young people. I just had a woman in my lab get a great score on a K grant, which is an entry-level grant for young investigators. That kind of stuff — helping young people and being around young people in the lab every day — is great if you’re an old guy like me [*laughs*].

I like the idea that the stuff I’m doing can potentially help people. It’s going to have an impact on clinical care in terms of preventing diseases. It’s rare that you get that kind of opportunity on a day-to-day job, so it’s a huge privilege to be able to do that.