Trista Northand WolframGoessling, nowprincipal faculty at HSCIandassistantprofessorsatBethIsraelDeaconessMedicalCenterandBWH, respectively, were first authors on theCellpaper.
He was a chief science officer for a company called Ontogeny, founded by current HSCI co-director Douglas Melton, where he helped develop a drug in partnership with Genentech.
This has indeed turned out to be the case, as now several different pharmaceutical companies are working on SMA, although they were not at the time Rubin came to HSCI.
For an academic scientist, Lee Rubin at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) has a great deal of biotech industry experience, and this has inspired some ingenious experiments with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) for disease modeling and drug discovery.