LEADERs Sets Industry PhD Student Ryan Murray, PhD’24, on a New Path to Entrepreneurship
He’s now thriving as co-founder of a drug development startup, KiraGen Bio
By Anna Fiorentino
In the wild landscape between industry and academia, Ryan Murray, PhD ’24, cut his own path to developing an emerging gene-edited cell therapy that could one day personalize treatment for disease. But his endgame wasn’t always so clear.
He’d been moving at a good clip a few years into Northeastern’s Industry PhD degree program, working full-time in the pharmaceutical industry while landing patents and publishing key research in the lab of Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Studies Stephen Hatfield on the mechanisms of solid tumors to alleviate immunosuppression through gene editing.
But after proving his concept, Murray began to reconsider his career path, knowing the unpredictable nature of the biotech industry. Suddenly, his future was at a standstill.
That’s when through the PhD Network’s LEADERs program, which helps students become impactful researchers in the workforce, Murray saw a different way forward. He took chances, stayed open, pivoted, and, after a short stint in Northeastern’s Center for Research Innovation, in 2023, came through as co-founder of his startup, KiraGen Bio.
“I never thought I’d be an entrepreneur. I wanted to be in early science discovery, but through the LEADERs program I learned there’s other things you can do with your PhD that are still very scientifically focused in early-stage research,” says Murray. “You don’t have to be the one sitting there pipetting.”
Murray began to develop his management and entrepreneurship skills in LEADERs’ flagship course, Leading Self and Others, which introduced him to an academic community that he’d lacked as a non-traditional student and full-time employee. “Taking a break from the technical know-how helped me understand the business side of things, like how to come up with a budget,” says Murray. “We looked at how to navigate research and juggle courses, and how to transition from being a graduate student to managing a team of scientists.”
He’s now thriving both in business and in scientific exploration, after Jason Sidman, PhD Network director of partnership relations who holds a PhD himself, “encouraged me to figure out what I wanted to do,” explains Murray, who was among 150 selected for Fifty 50 entrepreneurial training to help PhD founders translate their discoveries. “In the beginning I thought, I’m too busy to work with a mentor. By the end, meeting with Jason every week was one of my favorite aspects of the LEADERs program.”
Post-graduation, now in an incubator at Harvard Business School with his former coworker turned cofounder Aaron Edwards, who holds a biotech master’s and MBA from Harvard Business School, KiraGen Bio is carrying on Murray’s Industry PhD research to discover game-changing targeted cancer drugs. They’re building a machine learning pipeline to develop the next wave of gene-edited cell therapies so that CAR-T cells (an immune cell that protects the body by fighting infection and cancer) can do their job. Their clinical starting point? One of the most deadly cancers out there, after a new study in Nature showed CAR-T cell therapy effectively shrinks glioblastoma in the brain and spinal cord.
Shutting down one or two genes with CRISPR/Cas9 hasn’t fully protected CAR-T cells in the harsh microenvironment of solid tumors. And while new engineered cell therapy has seen success in blood cancers like leukemia, now KiraGen Bio aims to pioneer the higher-order treatment in cancerous masses. The startup is targeting multiple (multiplex) DNA edits at once, known as “base edits,” to knock out barriers that prevent CAR-T cells from killing cancer. That means using algorithms to narrow down 2 million immunosuppressive gene combinations to shut down most effective groupings so the body can attack solid tumors.
And it was the Industry PhD program and LEADERs that helped Murray navigate the corporate world and find the academic freedom to propel his research forward.
“Without LEADERs I probably would have gone right back into industry,” he says. “Instead, I’m focused on higher order-engineering strategies. The hope is that one day others will come to KiraGen Bio looking to develop next-generation cell therapies with specific gene-editing combinations to treat X,Y, or Z disease so our algorithm can predict each optimal combination.”
Northeastern’s Industry PhD program is designed for full-time employees with master’s degrees to advance their career while continuing to work full time, conducting research at their place of employment. This game-changing experiential doctoral program allows partner organizations to invest in their company’s future leaders, while gaining access to new research and products, and advancing knowledge and their research agendas. To learn more here.
To learn more about earning the LEADERs certificate or partnering with the PhD Network to host a LEADERs fellow at your organization, contact Wendy Eaton, director of LEADERs partnership relations.
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