But despite the hype around its launch- Time magazine asked, “Can Google Solve Death?”-Calico has remained a riddle, a super-secretive company that three years in hasn’t published anything of note, rebuffs journalists, and asks visiting scientists to sign nondisclosure agreements.
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With equal contributions from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and the drug company AbbVie, it has $1.5 billion in the bank. Calico has hired stars like artificial-intelligence specialist Daphne Koller. So Google’s founders created an academic-biotech hybrid they call an R&D company to follow up on such clues, providing nearly unlimited funding to a group of top researchers. There is something hair-raising about Kenyon’s videos of old, should-be-dead worms wriggling vigorously across a petri dish. Among Calico’s first hires was Cynthia Kenyon, now its vice president of aging research, who 20 years ago showed that altering a single DNA letter in a laboratory roundworm made it live six weeks instead of three. Their enthusiasm about so many different things is contagious.There are reasons to think aging can be slowed in fundamental ways. Now Pirhaji, gesturing with enthusiasm, a large MIT Brass Rat prominent on her hand, could well be describing herself when she talks of the people that set MIT apart: “Everyone is doing these crazy cool things and they are really down-to-earth.
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I would never be able to do any of this without it.” One of my best friends is also starting a company,” Pirhaji says. Her progress was such that her first pitch session is now held up against the final one as a class example: an illustration of the trajectory from unshaped to finely honed.
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Her very first presentation was “super not-clear and super scientific - no one understood me, like they thought it sounds cool but they weren’t sure what it was.” She learned, on many levels, how to focus the idea. The startup itself, said Pirhaji, was made possible by the abundance of support she received at MIT - the i-Teams program, StartMIT, StartIAP, the MIT100K, and the Sandbox Innovation Fund Program. In terms of pioneering work, Pirhaji is among the first to leverage large-scale metabolomic data for this purpose. This tool holds enormous potential value for both the pharmaceutical industry and for patients with neglected and rare diseases. The benefits of repurposing drugs that have proven safe for human use but just never reached a commercial market are vast.
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Already in talks with Pfizer and Teva, Pirhaji will eventually offer pharmaceutical companies subscription access to a software platform that mines biological data to systematically discover new uses for existing drugs. Her recently incorporated startup, ReviveMed, is the result. You see how you can use it to impact the world right now,” Pirhaji says. “I see it as really unique to MIT that you don’t just learn how to develop or invent a technology. When she decided to take a minor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Pirhaji read about the i-Teams course and approached Luis Perez-Breva, the co-director and lead instructor for the program, and told him about her research, ending with: “Now I want to figure out what to do with it.”
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She thinks fast, learns fast, talks fast, and wants to work, as one might guess, in a fast-paced industry. She knows how to make good use of whatever is on offer. Whatever you choose to do, there is support.” “My parents miss seeing me,” she adds, “but they know I have more opportunities here. Her visa restrictions, for example, make travel impossible. It never gets old,” she said.Ī native of Iran, Pirhaji has had to make some sacrifices, too.
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“Sometimes you get somewhere and you’re like, ‘Oh, okay. “Even as I’m graduating, I can’t believe I’m here,” said Pirhaji. Yet time and accomplishments have not lessened her giddiness about one thing: She is at MIT. Since Leila Pirhaji PhD ’16 arrived on campus six years ago, she has earned a doctorate in biological engineering, developed pioneering software, and launched an ambitious startup.