University of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, Leah Byrne, and Associate Professor of Immunology, Greg M. Delgoffe, have been elected as Senior Members of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Both are pioneering research and commercialization of cell and gene therapies to restore vision and treat cancer, respectively.
NAI Senior Members are active faculty, scientists, and administrators from NAI Member Institutions who have demonstrated remarkable innovation producing technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society. They also have growing success in patents, licensing, and commercialization, while educating and mentoring the next generation of inventors.
“Drs. Byrne and Delgoffe exemplify the ingenuity and the determination of Pitt innovators who are pushing the boundaries of science and are relentless in translating their discoveries into new clinical interventions with the potential to make a difference in people’s lives,” said Evan Facher, Pitt’s vice chancellor for innovation and entrepreneurship and associate dean for commercial translation at the Pitt School of Medicine.
This year’s class of NAI Senior Members hails from 60 NAI member institutions across the nation. Collectively, they are named inventors on more than 1,000 U.S. patents with 344 of those being licensed technologies. More than 50 percent of this year’s class is comprised of women and/or underrepresented academic inventors.
Byrne’s lab is doing groundbreaking work in gene therapy for rare inherited retinal degenerative diseases that result in blindness. Her lab develops viral vectors with new abilities and improved capabilities to deliver therapeutic genes to the retina that allow for increased precision of gene delivery and protein expression. Additionally, the lab creates gene therapies including genome editing approaches used to directly rewrite the genome, and optogenetics, which uses light sensitive proteins to create artificial photoreceptors and restore vision.
Working under the tutelage of the world-renowned José-Alain Sahel, Distinguished Professor of the Department of Ophthalmology at the School of Medicine, and recently elected Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, Dr. Byrne has been prolific in her development of new intellectual property. Already, in a career only spanning just over a decade, she has been issued 12 patents for her work with many more in prosecution and new invention disclosures flowing from her lab to the Innovation Institute, a division of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, regularly throughout the year.
Together with Dr. Sahel and Dr. Paul Sieving of UC Davis, the former director of the National Eye Institute, Dr. Byrne co-founded Avista Therapeutics, where she is the chief scientific officer. In July 2022, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche AG partnered with Avista to accelerate the clinical development of these therapies. If the clinical milestones are met, the deal could end up valued at more than $1 billion, making a significant impact on the Pittsburgh economy and the continued progress of the region’s burgeoning life science ecosystem.
She has received several prestigious awards in her young career, including the Emerging Vision Scientist from the National Alliance for Eye and Vision Research, a Research to Prevent Blindness Career Development Award, and a Foundation Fighting Blindness Individual Investigator Award. Earlier in 2023, she was selected for the Emerging Innovator Award from the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Since arriving at Pitt in 2014, Delgoffe has risen rapidly to a tenured position in Pitt’s renowned Department of Immunology and directs his own lab. In 2022, he was appointed as director of the Tumor Microenvironment Center at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center.
Delgoffe’s lab studies the intersection of metabolism and immunity in cancer. Specifically, they examine how tumor cells deplete their local microenvironment of nutrients, starving tumor-infiltrating T cells and preventing their function. His research leverages both repurposed metabolic drugs and novel synthetic biology approaches to tip this metabolic balance in favor of the tumor-killing immune response.
Delgoffe has been recognized as one of four Pitt Health Sciences faculty to receive the inaugural Ascending Stars Award honoring highly productive and creative mid-career faculty members. He has been honored with the NIH Director’ New Innovator Award, a Stand Up To Cancer Innovative Research Grant, the Cancer Research Institute’s Lloyd Old STAR award, and was recognized in 2019 as AACR NextGen Star.
As an assistant professor, he co-founded a startup company, Novasenta, with his postdoctoral mentor, Dario A.A. Vignali, Chair and Distinguished Professor of the Department of Immunology, and Robert Ferris, Director of the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. Novasenta has raised $60 million since its founding in 2018 and is working towards moving at least one of its therapeutic programs into the clinic in 2024.
It is rare of someone of Delgoffe’s relative youth to be an integral founding member of not just one, but two startups that raise significant capital, but he has done just that. In 2022 he co-founded Remplir Bio, which has raised a $7 million seed round as it continues its preclinical work on its immunotherapy platform translating immunometabolism into novel cancer therapeutics. In addition to founding companies, he has also licensed much of the technology that he has generated in his laboratory, especially viral based therapies for cancer, one of which is entering the clinic in partnership with Kalivir Immunotherapeutics and Astellas Inc.
“This year’s class of Senior Members is truly a testament to the outstanding innovation happening at NAI Member Institutions and what happens when the academic space encourages and celebrates invention and commercialization,” said Paul R. Sanberg, President of NAI.