Faculty Feature: Dr. Daniel Heller

For this newsletter’s Faculty Feature, Michael Retchin (SVG Communications Director) and I had the opportunity recently to sit down with Dr. Daniel Heller in the Molecular Pharmacology program at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Dr. Heller was a postdoc in the Bob Langer lab at MIT before starting his own bioengineering lab here in the Tri-I. The Heller lab is developing new nanotechnologies, specifically nanomedicines for the early detection and treatment of disease. Dr. Heller is also an active member in the entrepreneurship community, recently bringing the various biotechnology arms of the Cornell community together to create a strong presence here in New York. 

SVG: How did you decide on this route, beyond a “standard” academic model, choosing to pursue entrepreneurship? Did working with Bob Langer influence that decision?

Heller: Definitely. That was a big part of it. I hadn’t really thought about entrepreneurship until I was a postdoc at MIT. I joined Bob Langer’s Lab, which is a very rigorous environment and very much a place where people think about taking technologies out of the lab and into the market. There are people who are looking to go into venture capital, join companies, or start their own. So the environment was very inspiring. Bob recognized early on in his career that a lot of the engineering technologies coming out of his lab aren’t conducive to licensing out to a pharma company. They’re really conducive for a new startup. For my own research coming out of my PhD and postdoc work, I realized that it would be a good idea to think about starting companies. I joined the MIT 100K venture competition just to learn what this was about. I believe it’s important to learn that side of things, even if you aren’t planning to start a company.

SVG: Research from your lab has led to the creation of several startups (Goldilocks, Nirova BioSense, Lime, and more). When you get the sense that a technology might lend itself toward a startup, does that influence the way that you do science and how you prepare a project for commercialization?

Heller: When we think about starting a new project, a major consideration is how the project will end. When we think about a new technology, perhaps a research tool. If we’re making a new assay for drug development, for example, then how do we do that? Would we use it for drug development in our own lab, in collaboration with others, or would we need significantly more infrastructure to use that tool? One example would be a technology to treat kidney disease, a nanoparticle that can deliver drugs to the kidneys and change pharmacokinetics of drugs with respect to the kidneys. At first, we didn’t know if drug delivery to the kidneys was useful. Once you realize that actually there are many problems to go after in this area, we decided to pursue it. At first, we were just looking at fluorescent dyes, but then we moved to test drug efficacy. The startup route began to make sense when we considered the manufacturing risks and other risks associated with our new drug modality. The key inflection point for us was working with the Bioventure eLab at Weill Cornell, who helped us find a CEO and get it started with Goldilocks Therapeutics.

SVG: You’ve recently been working to bring together all the biomedical innovation groups around campus. What motivated this unifying effort?

Heller: This city has really grown since I’ve gotten here nine years ago. When I started, there was a perception that academic-entrepreneurs -- people who are interested in starting companies -- should go to Boston. But recently, there has been significantly more VC interest in New York and a big growth in lab space. So what’s lagged behind? The culture of entrepreneurship and the management talent pool. This is why I have sought to bring together the innovation groups like Weill Cornell Startup Venture Group and Bioventure eLab, to build that management talent in business and medical innovation across Cornell and across New York City.