MDI Bioscience Expertise & Tools
MDI Bioscience taps into the research expertise of MDI Biological Laboratory’s world-class innovators in fields like aging, regenerative medicine and toxicology. They are experts in the development and use of transgenic zebrafish, organoids and organs-on-a-chip, computational systems and other platforms for drug research and evaluation.
The team enjoys access to MDI Bio Lab’s state-of-the-art facilities for microscopy, computational systems and animal services. The effort is aided by the insights of an experienced biomedical entrepreneur.
Hermann Haller, M.D.
Professor and President, MDI Biological Laboratory
Hermann Haller is an accomplished researcher and physician who specializes in kidney function and disease. He has published more than 700 peer-reviewed articles, holds six world-wide patents and has founded four biotech companies. He has received many honors and awards and serves on numerous advisory boards, including at Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Genzyme and Novo Nordisk. In addition to his leadership and research at the MDI Biological Laboratory, he is a full professor of medicine and former chairman of the Division of Nephrology at the Hannover Medical School in Germany. For MDI Bioscience he has created several new lines of transgenic fish for screening compounds to address inflammation, diabetes, vascular decline and other health challenges.
Jim Strickland
Entrepreneur in Residence
Jim Strickland brings two decades of founding and leading highly innovative and collaborative entrepreneurial organizations in the life science and healthcare industries. His experience includes in and out licensing of technologies, pharmaceutical discovery and development, medical devices, diagnostics, and health information technology, and AI/ML. He is an inventor on five patents including novel compositions of matter, methods and algorithms, and AI/ML. He is also senior director of research partnerships and translation at the Roux Institute.
Romain Madelaine, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, MDI Biological Laboratory
Romain Madelaine specializes in the use of transgenic zebrafish to discover pathways of disease and regeneration. His research group is discovering novel features of regeneration and other phenomena in the fish that could lead to new applications for human health, addressing disorders such as macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetes. While researching the mechanics of age-related muscle degeneration (sarcopenia) Madelaine discovered and then patented the use of a compound called ML233 to regulate skin pigmentation. MDI Bioscience is developing the compound as a potential product for human use.
Jim Coffman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, MDI Biological Laboratory; Director, Maine IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE)
Jim Coffman studies how chronic stress, traumatic experiences and toxic environmental exposures in early life can have persistent developmental effects that impact how the body responds to stressors later in life, and which can be passed on to subsequent generations. Such “developmental programming” in DNA has been linked to increased risk of an array of physical diseases, behavioral problems, and mental illness driven by dysregulated inflammation. Expert in developing zebrafish as a model organism, the Coffman Lab has identified a stress-responsive genetic circuit that appears to be critical for the optimal regulation of inflammation. Elucidating how early life stressors interact with this circuit to compromise its function will provide information that can be used to design therapies for a variety of stress-related inflammatory diseases.
Iain Drummond, Ph.D.
Professor and Scientific Director, Kathryn W. Davis Center for Regenerative Biology and Aging at MDI Biological Laboratory
Iain Drummond is a leader in the development of the zebrafish as a powerful tool for studying kidney disease and regeneration, with functional relevance to human biology. A former director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute Kidney program, he is also a leader in the National Institutes of Health’s (Re)Building a Kidney Consortium. For MDI Bioscience, Drummond is developing a line of zebrafish to measure inflammatory gene expression in response to exposure to PFAS “forever chemicals” found in residential well-water, and to test anti-inflammatory algal compounds surfaced in MDI Bioscience’s collaboration with the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the Roux Institute.