Biology is Never Simple
ReviveMed: Unlocking the Power of Metabolites
Biology is never simple. As researchers make strides in reading and editing genes to treat disease, a growing body of evidence suggests that the proteins and metabolites surrounding those genes can’t be ignored.
A New Approach to Measuring Metabolites
The MIT spinout ReviveMed has created a platform for measuring metabolites – products of metabolism like lipids, cholesterol, sugar, and carbs – at scale. The company is using those measurements to uncover why some patients respond to treatments when others don’t and to better understand the drivers of disease.
A Glimpse into the Complex World of Metabolites
"Historically, we’ve been able to measure a few hundred metabolites with high accuracy, but that’s a fraction of the metabolites that exist in our bodies," says ReviveMed CEO Leila Pirhaji PhD ’16, who founded the company with Professor Ernest Fraenkel. "There’s a massive gap between what we’re accurately measuring and what exists in our body, and that’s what we want to tackle. We want to tap into the powerful insights from underutilized metabolite data."
ReviveMed’s Progress
ReviveMed’s progress comes as the broader medical community is increasingly linking dysregulated metabolites to diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and cardiovascular disease. ReviveMed is using its platform to help some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world find patients that stand to benefit from their treatments. It’s also offering software to academic researchers for free to help gain insights from untapped metabolite data.
Finding a Challenge
Pirhaji was born and raised in Iran before coming to MIT in 2010 to pursue her PhD in biological engineering. She had previously read Fraenkel’s research papers and was excited to contribute to the network models he was building, which integrated data from sources like genomes, proteomes, and other molecules.
The Birth of ReviveMed
About halfway through her PhD, Pirhaji sent some samples to a collaborator at Harvard University to collect data on the metabolome – the small molecules that are the products of metabolic processes. The collaborator sent Pirhaji back a huge excel sheet with thousands of lines of data – but they told her she’s better off ignoring everything beyond the top 100 rows because they had no idea what the other data meant. She took that as a challenge.
Growing a Company
Pirhaji developed a huge knowledge graph that included millions of interactions between proteins and metabolites. The data was rich but messy – Pirhaji called it a "hair ball" that couldn’t tell researchers anything about disease. To make it more useful, she created a new way to characterize metabolic pathways and features. In a 2016 paper in Nature Methods, she described the system and used it to analyze metabolic changes in a model of Huntington’s disease.
Conclusion
ReviveMed’s work is part of a growing body of evidence that metabolites play a crucial role in disease. By unlocking the power of metabolites, ReviveMed is helping to uncover the hidden patterns and relationships that underlie human health and disease.
FAQs
Q: What is ReviveMed?
A: ReviveMed is a platform for measuring metabolites at scale, created by Leila Pirhaji PhD ’16 and Professor Ernest Fraenkel.
Q: What is the goal of ReviveMed?
A: The goal of ReviveMed is to tap into the powerful insights from underutilized metabolite data to uncover why some patients respond to treatments when others don’t and to better understand the drivers of disease.
Q: How does ReviveMed work?
A: ReviveMed uses a platform to measure metabolites and create digital twins of patients to help pharmaceutical companies find patients that stand to benefit from their treatments.
Q: What are the potential applications of ReviveMed?
A: ReviveMed has the potential to help pharmaceutical companies identify the patients that stand to benefit from their treatments, reducing the complexity and time associated with clinical trials. It could also accelerate our understanding of how metabolites influence a range of diseases.
