For a new drug to work in the human body, it must make its way to the exact cell type where it’s needed and then, in many cases, get inside the cells. Hertz Fellow Becca Carlson believes that streamlining future drug development requires more data on this delivery step. Drug developers, she says, often know of intriguing new targets for drugs to bind to, but don’t know exactly how to get drugs into precise cell types.
Now, Carlson has received an award from the Hertz Foundation’s Harold Newman and David Galas Entrepreneurial Initiative, to support her new venture—the Deliverome Project, which publicly launched on May 27. Since 2012, the Entrepreneurial Initiative has provided financial and professional support to Hertz Fellows who propose innovative entrepreneurial projects, offering up to $25,000 in funding along with mentoring and feedback from successful entrepreneurs within the Hertz community.
Deliverome aims to build the first large-scale, open-access atlas of the proteins that sit on the surface of different human cells and which of them can deliver cargo into those cells’ interiors. It will be especially valuable for researchers working on rare diseases, where the biology may be understood but the push to develop effective drugs has fallen short.
“We saw this gap between academia and industry and we wanted to fill it,” says Carlson. “My hope is that this will help people develop drugs that are more diverse and serve more patients and more indications.”
Carlson completed her graduate research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she helped develop new tools for studying how cells respond when individual genes are switched off. After her Ph.D. research, she worked at a spatial biology startup and then spent two years at Flagship Pioneering, a venture creation firm that has launched dozens of biotechnology companies. It was there that she noticed the need for more information on the surface proteins of cells.
“We saw this gap between academia and industry and we wanted to fill it. My hope is that this will help people develop drugs that are more diverse and serve more patients and more indications.”
Drugs often target surface proteins as a way of docking onto a desired cell type, she explains. If a drug needs to reach the kidneys, for instance, it can be designed to recognize and bind to a surface protein that’s unique to kidney cells. It uses that protein like an address label to find the right destination in the body; by attaching to proteins with the right properties, it can also get inside the cells. But finding which surface proteins to design drugs to grab on to often takes trial and error.
“Even though surface proteins make up only around 15 to 20 percent of all the proteins in the body, more than 60 percent of drugs target them,” says Carlson. “These surface proteins are incredibly important for drug development, but they’re hard to study, and there’s no standardized dataset on which ones can actually carry cargo into a cell.”
That’s the gap the Deliverome Project, co-founded by Carlson and biochemist Bobby Hollingsworth, intends to close. Using a combination of mass spectrometry and genomics, the team will measure the abundance of surface proteins across different types of human cells as well as whether each protein can carry molecules from the surface of a cell into its interior. First, they’ll focus on developing the technologies to do that, and then on collecting and sharing large amounts of data.
“No one’s built this dataset because it’s hard,” says Carlson. “The methods don’t exist off the shelf—we have to develop them, combining techniques in ways no one has before”.
The project is designed as a Focused Research Organization (FRO), which means that it has a specific scientific goal, a built-in end date, and a mandate to share what it produces. It’s a model that was formalized by Hertz Fellows Sam Rodriques and Adam Marblestone more than five years ago. Through the Hertz community, Carlson tapped into mentorship and advice from a long list of Hertz Fellow entrepreneurs, including Rodriques and Marblestone.
“It’s been really helpful to have that model to point to, and to talk to people who’ve already done this,” says Carlson. “The FRO community is a small one but a great one—it doesn’t feel like we’re the first people figuring this out.”
As an FRO, Deliverome plans to spend about five years collecting and releasing its data continuously, as “micro-publications,” rather than waiting for the years-long academic publishing process. The team is also designing its datasets to be easily usable by machine-learning systems so that researchers can turn to AI to find patterns in what surface proteins are best to use for drug development.
Already, the project has received $5 million seed funding from the Astera Institute, which Carlson and Hollingsworth will use to expand Deliverome. They are currently working as a team of two, but they plan to open a lab on August 1 and hire four to six more scientists by the end of the year—particularly proteomics and functional genomics researchers, as well as collaborators with machine-learning backgrounds who can help shape the data for computational use.
Carlson says she leaned on the Hertz network well beyond her conversations with Rodriques and Marblestone. Feedback from the Hertz Prize Committee— which includes experienced biotech and venture capital professionals—helped sharpen the project early on. Cheri Ackerman Araromi, a previous Newman-Galas winner and biotech CEO, has offered perspective and connections on building to last. And through a Hertz connection, Carlson was also recently invited to a rare disease patient conference, which she hopes will help Deliverome stay grounded in the needs of the patients its research could eventually help. Carlson hopes to hear from researchers who want to get involved with the Deliverome Project’s mission directly—those interested in collaborating, contributing data, or joining the team can reach out to Carlson at becca@deliverome.org.
About the Hertz Foundation
The Hertz Foundation is the nation’s preeminent nonprofit organization committed to advancing American scientific and technological leadership. For more than 60 years, it has stood as an unwavering pillar of independent support through the renowned Hertz Fellowship, cultivating a multidisciplinary network of innovators whose work has positively impacted millions of lives. Learn more at hertzfoundation.org.
