Director of RNA Therapeutics, Gene and Cell Therapy Institute
Dr. Wesselhoeft serves as the Director of RNA Therapeutics at the Gene and Cell Therapy Institute (GCTI) of Mass General Brigham, a translational medicine institute affiliated with Mass General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), and is a Fellow in the Harvard Medical School Division of Engineering in Medicine at BWH. At the GCTI, he has built and leads the RNA Therapeutics Core, a manufacturing core specializing in custom circRNA design and synthesis to support the translation of circular RNA medicines to clinics.
He previously led RNA research and development as Director of Molecular Biology at Orna Therapeutics, an RNA therapeutics company he co-founded based on his PhD work on circular RNA, and held a position on the Board of Directors. At Orna he assembled and mentored a team of ~20 scientists to drive technology innovation, process development, basic research, and circular RNA manufacturing scale-up. He raised $21M in funding during a seed financing round with his co-founder, and facilitated the raise of another $470M over the following two years as technology development and application efforts yielded results. The results generated from the infectious disease vaccine study that he led substantiated a licensing and development deal with Merck worth $3.5B. During his PhD, he invented a novel circularization technology that unlocked the ability to efficiently create large synthetic circular RNAs with protein-coding capacity. His early innovations in RNA engineering materialized a new sub-field of RNA therapeutics, generating widespread interest that led to the foundation of a wave of circular RNA therapeutics companies including Orna, Laronde, Orbital, Therorna, NuclixBio, Circode, and several others. His innovations in RNA medicine are represented by 9 patent families and 3 publications. He is a founder of two additional early-stage RNA therapeutics companies focusing on varying aspects of RNA technology and medicine development. Now at his new role at the GCTI, he has established the RNA Therapeutics Core and a research group with the aim of expanding access to cutting-edge RNA technologies, facilitating the clinical translation of novel RNA medicines, and developing new circular RNA medicines for diseases with unmet medical needs.
