Can you tell us a bit about yourself, and share with us your career journey and what led you to found Seer in 2017?
I attended Boston University for medical school, followed by clinical training at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. My postdoctoral research training was at MIT under the guidance of Professor Robert Langer, co-founder of Moderna. In 2004, I joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School, and established the Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and about ten years later, I founded the Center for Nanomedicine. I became a Professor and over the years we focused on publishing highly cited papers and filing patents related to our work. Throughout my career, I have filed over 250 patents worldwide and I am a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. In the early 2000s, nanomedicine was a relatively unrecognized field; however, it has grown massively since then, especially with advancements in drug delivery.
The technologies we developed in our academic lab formed the basis to launch a number of biotech companies but throughout my career, I remained in academia, taking advisory roles in the companies. Seer represented a turning point for me, a chance to focus on a fundamental challenge in the field of proteomics that, if solved, could advance our understanding of biology further than ever before. In simple terms, proteins are coded by genes. So there are 20,000 genes in the human genome, and these create over 1 million proteins that comprise the human proteome.
Seer was founded to address the key challenges faced in the field of proteomics, with the aim to elevate our understanding and technological capabilities up to par with those of genomics.
Sequencing the human genome was a monumental task that took 15 years and $2.7bn, but subsequent advancements significantly reduced the cost, and increased the speed, of genomic sequencing. Proteomics, however, did not see comparable advancements, which is why I founded Seer, where we analyze the proteome at scale.
Why has there been such a lag in the technological advancement of proteomics?
The complexity of the proteome, compared to the genome, posed significant challenges. Proteins, with their 20 different building blocks and modifications across various tissues and conditions, represent orders of magnitude greater than that of DNA. This made proteomics a daunting field, theoretically and computationally, to advance. Our approach at Seer is to offer a platform that allows large-scale, unbiased proteomic studies to get done efficiently and robustly.
And what have you managed to do concretely to advance the field of proteomics so far?
Since the introduction of our product, the Seer Proteograph Product Suite, the tools at the ready for scientists to analyze the proteome have significantly advanced. We have moved from being able to analyze a few hundred proteins in a handful of complex samples, such as plasma, to detecting up to 10,000 proteins in plasma and conducting studies with thousands of samples. Plasma and other complex biofluids play a crucial role in enabling liquid biopsies, yet their complexity presents significant challenges for analysis. Our team has pioneered a groundbreaking approach to overcoming these challenges. Achieving this level of depth in biofluids is a significant feat, especially considering that current methods typically yield only around 1,000 proteins, at best. Our Proteograph workflow has automated and standardized many aspects of proteome analysis, making it possible to conduct deep proteome studies with high reproducibility, less hands-on time, and removing the "black art" aspect of protocol variability that previously characterized the field.
Tell us more about the Proteograph and its applications. Is it used beyond academia?
Our collaborations span a broad spectrum, including key partnerships with major players in mass spectrometry like Thermo Fisher Scientific, Bruker, and Sciex, as well as companies focused on offering proteomics services, such as Evotec in Germany and Panome Bio. The Proteograph is used by academic and industry scientists in the United States, Europe and Asia for discovery and translational applications. We care deeply about our collaborations with institutions like the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT who were among the early adopters of our platform.
For instance, PrognomiQ, a spin-out from Seer, is leveraging the Proteograph in a significant study involving 15,000 lung cancer samples. Their work, particularly in the early detection of lung cancer, showcases the Proteograph’s capacity to identify molecular signatures with exceptional sensitivity and specificity.
The Proteograph's applications extend into various areas of health research. Collaborations with institutions like Mass General Hospital have enabled studies that trace the progression of Alzheimer's disease through proteomic signatures, identifying proteins previously unrecognized in the context of the disease. Furthermore, a novel study involving pig heart transplants into humans at New York University highlighted the Proteograph's unique ability to analyze thousands of proteins from the human recipient and the pig-transplanted heart simultaneously, revealing proteomic changes that happen from the time the heart is transplanted until organ rejection and heart failure.
Another groundbreaking application is with SpaceX, where the Proteograph workflow is used to study the effects of spaceflight on astronauts' proteomes, uncovering significant changes that occur pre-flight, during flight, and post-flight.
The launch of the Proteograph XT Assay Kit marks a significant advancement in our offerings, dramatically increasing throughput from 16 to 40 samples over the same eight-hour period, with improvements in depth and precision. This next-generation kit multiplies the scale at which researchers can conduct studies, making the task of analyzing thousands or tens of thousands of samples (previously impossible) both feasible and cost-effective.
Why did you decide to spin out PrognomiQ?
The decision to spin out PrognomiQ aims to ensure that Seer remains focused on its core mission of developing and providing innovative tools without competing with its customers. By establishing PrognomiQ as a separate entity focused on developing diagnostic tests, Seer reinforced its commitment to its customer base, alleviating any potential concerns about competitive overlap. This approach allows Seer to maintain a clear distinction between tool development and application development, ensuring that our customers have unfettered access to our technologies without worrying about direct competition from us in its applications.
Three years from now, what do you want to be able to tell us about Seer?
Three years from now, I envision discussing a substantial body of published work by our customers that reveal previously unknown biological insights, thanks to the Proteograph. These discoveries, I hope, will be similar to the transformative impact of genomics we have seen in the biopharma industry. Proteomics has the potential to address areas that genomics could not, such as providing stronger predictive markers, particularly for diseases like Alzheimer's. Our vision at Seer is to create the tools that empower researchers to explore the proteome and understand our human biology better.
