Growing a business, from the lab
In the early 1990s, MIT researcher Shuguang Zhang, then an MIT postdoc, stumbled upon peptides that could self-assemble into nanostructures, creating three-dimensional environments for cell culturing. It was, at the time, a breakthrough discovery. But it wouldn’t be until a decade later, in a last-ditch effort to bring this discovery to the public, that these peptides would find commercial application through 3-D Matrix, a startup co-founded by Zhang and other MIT scientists. Today, despite several business setbacks, 3-D Matrix has a market value of roughly $1 billion. It’s also a top biotech firm in Japan, where its new headquarters are located, and has the most-traded stock on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The company’s commercial product, PuraMatrix, launched in 2002, is a hydrogel made of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) that self-assemble into nanofiber scaffolds in the presence of salt. Using the scaffolds generated by the hydrogel, scientists can...