A few years back, Gevorg Grigoryan, PhD ’07, was a professor at Dartmouth College, pondering a groundbreaking idea centered on data-driven protein design aimed at therapeutic applications. Faced with uncertainty about how to transition this innovative concept into a viable business, Grigoryan resurfaced an old syllabus from an entrepreneurship course he had taken during his time at MIT and reached out to the course instructor via email.
After many hours of drafting, revising, and refining, Grigoryan finally sent off his email in the early morning hours, feeling a mixture of excitement and anxiety. Just 15 minutes later, he received a response from Noubar Afeyan, PhD ’87, the CEO and co-founder of Flagship Pioneering, who is also the commencement speaker for the upcoming 2024 OneMIT Ceremony.
This rapid exchange ultimately set the stage for the co-founding of Generate:Biomedicines, where Grigoryan currently holds the position of chief technology officer.
“Success is defined by who is evaluating you,” Grigoryan states. “There is no singularly correct pathway — the best approach for you is the one that resonates with your goals.”
Generalizing Principles to Improve Lives
Generate:Biomedicines embodies decades of progress in machine learning, biological engineering, and medicine. Previously, the process of designing proteins from scratch was both incredibly labor-intensive and time-consuming, oftentimes taking months or even years using computational methods and experimental approaches.
“Today, we can simply push a button and generate a model that produces a new protein, boasting a near-perfect probability of functionality,” explains Grigoryan. “We’ve discovered broad principles for tackling complex systems, and we believe these principles will continue to be effectively applicable.”
Recognizing the potential for drug development, Grigoryan embraced the opportunity to leave academia, at least temporarily, in pursuit of the resources available for this innovative work.
“Our field has a compelling and noble mission,” he emphasizes. “We strive to enhance human lives.”
Blending Disciplines
While interdisciplinary STEM degrees are now more common, Grigoryan recalls a time when such educational frameworks were nearly nonexistent. “There was a budding intersection of physics, biology, and computational sciences,” he reflects. “While this wasn’t yet an established field, I had hopes that I could be part of its emergence.”
He chose to study biochemistry and computer science, much to the bewilderment of his advisors in both disciplines, which led to an unusual situation during graduation when there wasn’t a clear path for him to follow on stage.
Journey to Cambridge
Grigoryan’s choice to attend the prestigious MIT Department of Biology wasn’t based on rigid criteria. “I thought to myself, ‘MIT sounds phenomenal — renowned faculty, a tech-centric environment, a vibrant city. I’ll figure the rest out as I go,’” he admits candidly. “Those years at MIT significantly shaped my identity as a scientist.”
During his time there, he collaborated with Amy Keating, who was then a junior faculty member and is now the head of the Department of Biology. Their work entailed modeling protein-protein interactions and bridged physics, math, chemistry, and biology. The computational and systems biology PhD program was still in its formative stages, yet the field was beginning to gain recognition for its importance.
To this day, Keating is still a trusted advisor and mentor to Grigoryan. He praises her dedication to mentorship amidst the demands of academia — balancing funding acquisition, running a lab, and teaching.
“Making time for genuine mentorship can be particularly challenging, but Amy was very intentional and serious about it,” Grigoryan highlights. “We invested considerable time discussing ideas and advancing our scientific inquiries. The impact of mentorship is truly immeasurable.”
Grigoryan went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania with William “Bill” DeGrado, where he continued to focus on protein design while enhancing his experimental approach. He was captivated by DeGrado’s instinctive understanding of molecules, which often allowed him to predict their functionality — a skill that seemed to outpace the computational modeling techniques of that period.
This led Grigoryan to ponder whether computational models could achieve a similarly predictive capacity based on past observations. He then accepted a faculty position at Dartmouth, with interdisciplinary roles in computer science, biology, and chemistry.
Balancing Industry and Academia
Scientific progress is often born from trial and error, yet Grigoryan demonstrated early on that accurate predictions regarding how proteins interact didn’t always need to start from foundational principles. Instead, models grew increasingly precise through enhanced structural resolutions and binding measurements.
He credits the team at Flagship Pioneering for their unwavering belief in the potential applications of his concept, expressing that their confidence often outweighed his own during the initial phases.
After four years of splitting his time between Dartmouth and Cambridge, Grigoryan made the pivotal decision to leave academia altogether. “It felt inevitable because I was genuinely passionate about what we were building at Generate,” he explains. “Witnessing this idea come to life was exhilarating.”
Choosing Between Stagnation and Growth
According to Grigoryan, the key to a company’s success lies in scaling at the appropriate moment, balancing the urgency of “hitting while the iron is hot” with a careful evaluation of the company’s, technology’s, and market’s readiness.
Yet, even successful growth introduces its own hurdles. When a company’s workforce is small—fewer than 20 employees—strategic alignment is relatively straightforward. Everyone can gather in one room. However, expanding to 200 employees necessitates deliberate communication strategies to maintain the company’s culture and identity.
“Growing can be challenging,” he acknowledges. “It requires intentional effort and resources to foster a transparent culture that enables teams to prosper.”
Gevorg Grigoryan’s academic experiences were invaluable in teaching him that “everything revolves around people.” However, he emphasizes that the mindsets needed for academia and industry diverge significantly.
“As a principal investigator, my role revolved around carving out an independent path for each of my trainees. In contrast, in a corporate environment, shared goals take precedence, and success is defined by the synergy within the team rather than solely individual achievements.”
Photo credit & article inspired by: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
