MDI Biological Laboratory

From Basic Discovery to Real-World Therapies

MDI Bioscience amplifies entrepreneurial research

After two years of groundwork, MDI Biological Laboratory’s entrepreneurial initiative, MDI Bioscience, is taking shape as a bold, innovative way to bridge the gap between basic discovery science and real-world medical solutions.

President Hermann Haller, M.D., explains the goal: to turn laboratory discoveries and expertise into medicines and technologies that improve lives. This applied approach is known as translational research. “Translational and basic research are two sides of the same coin,” Haller says.

At its core, MDI Bioscience builds on existing research and expertise to reimagine disease models and biotech tools as platforms that can accelerate the development of human therapies. Researchers are replicating conditions like inflammation, infection and cancer in a unique array of models that includes zebrafish, roundworms and lab-grown tissues. One exciting advantage of these models: They can be used earlier and more efficiently for drug development than traditional mammals.

Zebrafish, for instance, are easy to raise, mature quickly and produce thousands of offspring—ideal for quickly generating statistically significant data at lower cost. MDI Bioscience’s expanding project list is injecting a strong entrepreneurial spirit into the MDI Bio Lab research enterprise.

The Bigelow Partnership

MDI Bioscience is collaborating with the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the Roux Institute at Northeastern University in an interdisciplinary effort to discover and develop new therapeutic compounds. With donor support and a National Science Foundation grant, the project is exploring Bigelow’s library of 3,000 strains of ocean algae, tapping into this biological diversity to discover disease-fighting compounds.

Bigelow provides the algae extracts, while the Roux Institute contributes powerful computational analysis to identify promising molecules within. MDI Bio Lab, in turn, is engineering lines of zebrafish that mimic human disease—such as acute kidney failure, inflammation, autoimmune disorders and damage from PFAS “forever chemicals”—for real-life testing of how the compounds interact with a vertebrate animal’s physiology. 

Repurposing a Diabetes Drug to Slow Aging

Another project is exploring the anti-aging potential of SGLT2 inhibitors—a class of drugs already approved to treat diabetes. Haller’s research group uses both zebrafish and the African turquoise killifish (ATK) to study aging and its effects. The killifish lives only four to six months, but despite their short lives, these fish have genes, organs and immune systems similar to humans, making them ideal for aging research.

Recent work by postdoctoral researcher Anastasia Paulmann, M.D., suggests that SGLT2 inhibitors can prevent aging-related blood vessel damage. As they aged, treated killifish showed dramatically healthier “microvasculature”—the tiny blood vessels that feed nutrients and oxygen to organs and tissue, and cart away waste and toxins. The results suggest that new SGLT2 therapies to slow or avert vascular decline could leverage wide-ranging health benefits for the entire body.

“No one has ever done this before,” says Haller. MDI Bioscience is helping advance the research to understand how these drugs impact the vascular system and map a road to new uses for human health. Because SGLT2 inhibitors are already approved for human use, the initiative could bypass the enormous research and development costs of bringing an entirely novel drug to market.

The ML233 Project

MDI Bio Lab Assistant Professor Romain Madelaine, Ph.D., recently secured a patent for ML233, a compound that shows promise in treating skin disorders like vitiligo and hyperpigmentation, as well as certain types of melanomas.

Using zebrafish and lab-grown human tumor organoids, his team found ML233 could be effective without producing observable, harmful side effects seen in some current therapies. The ML233 project also highlights another key MDI Bioscience value; supporting innovators as they explore how to maneuver discoveries from lab bench to market, and into the hands of doctors and patients.

Romain Menard, a Ph.D. candidate in the Madelaine lab, received coaching and mentoring that helped him successfully pitch the ML233 project in a competition staged by the Bioscience Association of Maine. One audience member, impressed by his work, nominated Menard for the NSF’s I-Corps, a competitive seven-week program that trains scientists to think like entrepreneurs—turning breakthroughs into business opportunities.

With MDI Bioscience’s support, the next step is testing ML233 on functioning human tissue grown in a state-of-the-art “skin-on-a-chip” platform. The Madelaine lab recently won a new National Institutes of Health InsiteXccelerator award to fund this stage of development, which will focus on both effectiveness and safety.

Cultivating a Translational Ecosystem

MDI Bioscience focuses on the early, high-risk phase of discovery that the pharmaceutical industry rarely backs—where ideas may be unconventional, but full of potential.

Entrepreneur in Residence Jim Strickland, who works with MDI Bioscience and the Roux Institute, offers an apt analogy: “The Wright Brothers built the first plane, but no one wanted to fly in it until it was refined and proven. That’s our role. We’re building and testing the prototypes.”

At its heart, MDI Bioscience is as much about changing culture as it is about advancing science. It creates space for researchers to think not just about discovery, but about impact, aligning individual projects more closely with the broader mission of improving health and spurring economic growth.

Translational research doesn’t replace curiosity-driven science; it expands its reach. “We’re not trying to act like big pharmaceutical companies,” says Haller. “We’re trying to be the part of the pipeline that they can’t reach—the beginning; the creative, risk-taking beginning.”

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